By: Maggie Z
On June 8, 2024, Solomon the Sulcata tortoise escaped from his heated enclosure in a home in Cheatham County, Tennessee. Fortunately, he was found over a month later, on July 18, by a construction worker less than a quarter mile from the tortoise’s home. Sulcata tortoises like Solomon are naturally found in the Sahara Desert, so Solomon’s owner, Lynn Cole, was worried about her tortoise feeling cold at night. What she never expected was that Solomon would be found on railroad tracks!
Solomon is fifteen years old, weighs 150 pounds, and measures roughly 36 inches. According to the Maryland Zoo, Sulcata tortoises are “big, slow, and tough survivalists,” with “adults averaging 18 inches in shell length and 70 to 100 pounds in weight”, but specimens reaching “two to three feet in length and upwards of 150 pounds aren’t uncommon.” It would probably take your average 150-pound human about five minutes to walk a quarter mile, but for a tortoise like Solomon, it would take a month!
On July 18, Lynn received a phone call from a railway station about her tortoise. “He has been retrieved and is now on his way home,” a representative from the South Western Railway (SWR) told her. Lynn was ecstatic and immediately headed over to the station to pick up her tortoise, where she learned that Solomon had gotten a short ride on the train itself. “While we are delighted that this story has a happy ending and can reassure passengers that our ‘everyone home safe, every day’ ambitions extend to pets, we must remind everyone that the railway is dangerous,” said a spokesperson from Network Rail.
While this is a happy story, there were some side effects. Although there was nothing someone who found a tortoise on a railway wouldn’t expect, a total of four trains were delayed, and some services were delayed until 6:00 pm EST on July 18.
The reason Solomon might have escaped is unknown, but it’s always fun to imagine what could have led to it. Imagine this: Solomon the Pioneer leaves his home to scout for new territory for future generations. That’s not too impossible, right? Right?
Image Credit by Jerry Wang