From a Sunday morning Vandalia, Ohio Fire Department Facebook post: “In the early hours of the morning, crews were dispatched to the Metroparks by the train tracks on a cold emergency. Crews were told that the patient was traveling from Kentucky in one of the train cars, and the patient got stuck inside the train car and was suffering from cold exposure. Crews had to work for a period of time to extricate the patient from the train car. Patient was taken to a local hospital. This is one of those calls that goes to show, we have to be prepared for anything. Great job to the crews on working a complex call and providing top-tier service,” which obviously is a little on the vague side.

They almost made it sound like it was a passenger train where the guy had bought a ticket, fell asleep in his seat, and got locked in the car at the overnight rail yard by a careless conductor who didn’t bother to check if anyone was still on board. WHIO reports that was not at all the case as freight train company CSX told the TV station in a statement that they called the fire department after their crew spotted a “trespasser standing on top of a train,” at about 3:20 AM on Sunday.

Put together it all strongly suggests that a freight train hobo was not properly equipped for interstate overnight travel in January during a “Polar vortex” weather event and was shivering too hard to be able to climb up and out of what looks like an open-top “gondola”-type rail car typically used for transporting mineral ore. Sounds like a hobo rookie mistake and a nearly fatal one at that.