Video Of Strangers Helping A Stuck Motorist Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

A group of people helped push a car off of snowy train tracks in Portland

The news has been pretty bleak lately, so thank goodness for the occasional story that reminds us that humanity isn’t all bad.

Friday morning in Portland, Oregon, we had just one of those stories, when a car got stuck crossing snowy train tracks and some nearby men rushed to push it through just before the train came roaring through.

The footage, posted on the KMTR News Facebook page, shows a Mustang having trouble crossing Portland’s MAX train lines tracks, eventually getting completely stuck right in the middle of them as a train approached.

As soon as it became clear the car wasn’t going to be able to clear the tracks on its own, four men, each one rushing from a different direction, appeared to help push the car off the tracks, and safely out of the pathway of the train, which can be seen arriving mere seconds later.

NBC16 has a first-person account from a student who watched the scene unfold.

“We saw a red mustang coming down the road. It was fishtailing a little bit. It got to that stop light up there. It went to go across those MAX tracks and got stuck,” Andrew Rasmussen, a physical therapy student at Clarkson College, recounts. “About four or five people rocked the car to get it off the tracks in about 10 to 15 seconds before the MAX came by.”

Rasumussen says it was the second car he saw get stuck that morning, which must have been nervewracking to watch. “You kind of see something like that as being a little more dangerous but then you see the people around who jump into action when they need to help out.”

It’s always nice to have your faith in humanity restored, especially in the wake of most of the grim news stories floating around these days, fake and otherwise.

2016 was a rough year, and 2017 hasn’t exactly been full of promise yet. But despite the big picture stuff that’s bringing many of us down and making us fear for the future, small acts of kindness like these are a helpful reminder that there are still plenty of good people out there, willing to take risks to help others. Even if those others are complete strangers and the risk is being hit by a train.

Local officials downplayed the risk to the Mustang, stating that “trains are rolling slow through intersections and this one had plenty of room to stop,” but we’re not letting that harsh our buzz. We need this.

Almost as badly as that Mustang needs snow tires.