As His Train Leaves, Guy Jumps On

A man watched as the high-speed train he'd been riding through Austria began to leave a station without him—then decided to grab on. The unnamed 24-year-old Algerian survived Saturday's incident, but it's a wonder, said Austrian Federal Railways rep Herbert Hofer. "This kind of thing usually ends up with someone dying," he said, per CBS News, describing the man's actions as "irresponsible." He'd been having a cigarette on the platform in Sankt Poelten when the train began to depart. He leapt into the space between two carriages and began pounding on the train windows, causing the conductor to activate the emergency brake, per Heute.

It's unclear how fast the train was traveling while the man was hanging on, but it tops out at 143mph, per the Guardian. After the emergency, the man regained his spot on the train headed to Vienna from Zurich. But "the conductor really had a very big go at him," a fellow passenger told Heute, per CBS. And that was just the start. As the train arrived 7 minutes late in Vienna, the man was taken into police custody. This follows a similar incident in Germany in January, in which a Hungarian man grabbed onto a high-speed train after it left while he was smoking a cigarette, per the BBC. He also survived after being carried for 20 miles, per CBS.