Pirate's Cove

I guess they were just trying to raise awareness

Climate change campaigners halted a coal train yesterday outside Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, and shovelled its contents on to the only line into the plant.

More than 20 tonnes of coal blocked the tracks as protesters strung ropes between the train and the girders of a river bridge as police watched from a distance. More than 30 protesters swarmed aboard the 21-wagon freight service. Hidden in banks of cow parsley beside the line to Drax, North Yorkshire they struck at 8am after watching two empty trains arrive to collect ash in the previous two hours.

The train had halted after unwittingly obeying an exact copy of railway emergency procedures. Posing as rail staff in fluorescent jackets, a small group of protesters waved red flags in a precise sequence to stop the EWS freight train on an iron girder bridge over the river Aire.

Most of the group then clambered up the bridge and dropped food, water and bedding for at least 24 hours from its overhead beams on to the flat tops of the trucks. “We’ve enough for at least two days,” said Ben Tennyson, one of the Climate Camp activists, as a mobile lavatory was swung aboard by a woman campaigner dressed as a canary – coal-mining’s traditional warning of danger. A banner was then draped along one of the trucks reading Leave it in the Ground – the slogan of the group’s “total war” on mining and burning coal.

“We’re stopping the train because it’s absolute nonsense to be burning coal when we should be tackling climate change,” another protester told a woman commuter, late for work, who was one of a jam of motorists blocked at nearby Hirst Courtney level crossing.

Got that? Not only did they create a problem for people trying to go about their lives and get to work, they shovel all the coal out onto the train tracks, creating an environmental issue, and put coal dust into the air. And the nutty protestors promise more assininary during the summer.