This afternoon, I went for a walk through Queens' Astoria Park. While there, I noticed an Amtrak cleaning car making its way down the Hell Gate Bridge tracks... and dropping baseball-sized stones onto the street/sidewalk below. Video and pictures inside.

Yes—for reasons unknown, hundreds of giant stones dropped almost 150 feet (and multiple times) as an Amtrak cleaning car moved down the tracks in an irresponsible act of endangerment for every person on the road/sidewalk, as well as those in the park—not to mention boaters who were passing underneath on the East River.

It took more than 30 minutes following 311 and 911 calls from concerned citizens in the park for any sort of public assistance to arrive (a lone ambulance—yes, ambulance—finally began to block the road off as I left), and there's no word yet as to whether or not the cleaning car continued making its stone-hurling rounds on the tracks.

Here's video I was able to take with my phone (sorry that it's vertical and not horizontal) as the cleaning car made the second pass that I witnessed:

[There was a video here]

And here are some photos (also taken by my phone):

Update: A previous version of this post mistakenly named the Hell Gate Bridge track as one used by New York City's MTA, when it's actually owned and maintained by Amtrak.