The train was bearing down, but Chris Ihle wasn't about to give up--not until he'd moved all 3,500 pounds of the stalled Pontiac Bonneville off the tracks. He planted his cowboy boots and pushed. Through the windshield, he could see the elderly couple inside; they seemed paralyzed with terror. "I could feel the ground rumbling," says Ihle, 38. He smelled something hot and metallic. "Probably the train's brakes," he says. "Or my own fear."
A few minutes earlier, Ihle, a Wells Fargo mortgage consultant in Ames, Iowa, had parked his motorcycle after a lunchtime ride. He spotted the Bonneville stopped with its front end on the railroad tracks about 50 feet away, and as he was walking back to his office, he noticed the crossing gates start to drop. Ihle threw down his sunglasses and sprinted over to the car.
He didn't consider the danger. He didn't pause to think about his three kids, Dylan, Logan, and Elizabeth. He just put his weight into the front grille. When the car didn't budge, he shouted at the couple to put it in neutral. As a man who routinely lifts weights and practices yoga, Ihle knew he could move a car a few feet.
And he did. The car budged ... and cleared the tracks just before the locomotive roared past, missing him by inches. "I thought the train was going to clip my feet," he says.
Ihle checked on the couple--Marion Papich, 84, and his wife, Jean, 78--to make sure they were okay. Stunned, he walked back into the bank. He poured himself a cup of coffee. "It was all I could think to do in that moment," he says.
Now he shrugs at the attention. But there is one depiction of the event that he quibbles with. "One paper compared me to Clark Kent," he says. "Really? Clark Kent? I pushed a car out of the way of a train. Why can't I be Superman? Why do I have to be his nerdy alter ego?"
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