A railroad car spilling corn had forest animals follow the, follow the, follow the “Yellow Brick Road” to food in resurfaced viral photo.
But social media made the photos come back this week, leading to a bunch of Wizard of Oz cracks and dad jokes. This dad included.
Crystal, Minn.-residents said they thought the track was pretty corny after the train dropped several thousand feet of maize, just between those two shiny rails.
train car carrying corn had a massive leak and now the entire forest gets to feast for free pic.twitter.com/ZS80uAsKZ4
— Rob N Roll 🎃™️ (@thegallowboob) October 29, 2021
For just a brief time, someone could have called into the Guinness Book of World Records to see if the town could have broken the record for World’s Longest Feeding Trough.
Twitter user Rob N Roll was on a roll Tuesday too. Two days earlier, he posted an orchard spill but retweeted it again. He said, “Follow me if you want more occasional micro-natural disaster news on Twitter.”
Well, there you go.
A Scene From “The Wizard of Oz?”
Fox News reported that one Twitter user named Mike Parker shared his photos from early January 2020.
It seems a freight train spilled enough corn to get noticed. Snow-covered the ground on both sides of the track in a beautiful contrast of colors.
“Corn spilled on the tracks by my house the ducks and deer haven’t found it yet,” Parker wrote.
After the initial post and a whole lot of shares, many wondered if the photo was real.
“This is the strangest, most aesthetically pleasing thing that I have seen all day,” one Twitter user commented.
Breaking Down The Corn Oopsy
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune looked into the spill and verified the photo. The spill reportedly stretched for more than a third of a mile along the Canadian Pacific Railway line.
The newspaper went further, guessing that if the corn spill was 1.5 inches deep for that length of track, the whole corn lost was about 900 bushels. At the time of the spill, that corn would be worth $3,400 on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Wanna know today’s value? It’s about $4,842. Isn’t inflation just great, folks?
Did the corn cause any derailments or anything? Nope. The newspaper reported that two trains crossed over the tracks.
A Canadian Pacific Railway official told Fox News somebody called them to inform them of the spill that week, and the railroad was cleaning up after itself.
The newspaper caught up with railroad track neighbor Gary Bates. Bates and others had seen big spills there but nothing like this. The man said if temperatures in the area were warmer, that corn would be gone pretty quick.
“There are deer and raccoon in the area, but they’re hunkered down, is my guess,” Bates told the Star Tribune. “They didn’t get the e-mail.”
