Restore your faith in Dubliners with this lovely story

Do you know three teenage girls who found a camera on the DART?

Now here’s a great little story that will restore your faith in good Irish people – especially Dublin northsiders.

Alexander Jansen is a US Army officer stationed in Germany, who spent three amazing weeks in Europe with his teenage sisters - and then lost his camera, with all the photos from the once-in-a-lifetime trip, on the DART.

We've all been there - you're chatting away and only realise you're at your stop when the door opens, and have to leg it out. Only in Jansen's case, he suddenly felt a bit light as the doors click closed behind him.

*Click*. 'Oh, sh**!'

He'd left his camera bag on the train. For the photography nerds, he had:

• A Pentax K-5 IIs

• Pentax DA* 60-250mm, DA* 16-50mm, DA 18-135mm WR, FA 77mm Limited lenses

• A Sigma 8-16mm and Rokinon 8mm Fisheye lens

• Metz 50 AF-1 P-TTL Flash

• Plus a tripod, remote, and accessories.

All of which is worth several thousand euro – not counting the hundreds of euro in cash stuffed in the passport.

Oh, that’s right, he also lost his passport and those of his teenage sisters, alongside his military orders. So everything important.

This is the K-5's little brother, the Pentax K-7, but it's similar- if not quite as pricey. Pic: nubobo

Running after the train shouting at the driver for the entire length of the platform didn't work out, so, as he wrote on PetaPixel.com, he approached the customer service desk, and has this conversation:

"He hangs up the phone and says, “There’s no one on the train other than the driver, and he can’t stop the train. You will have to wait for it to reach the end of the line and then have my guy at Howth (the final stop) check to see if it’s still there. I’m going to be completely honest with you: I don’t think it will be there. That train is passing through some really bad areas.”"

So he waited while the train makes its journey through the Dublin northside.

"The phone rings, and I can’t hear what he is saying, nor can I read the emotions and expressions on his face through the glass.

"He puts the phone on his shoulder and asks me to describe everything in the bag, which I do in a level of detail that would befit the most meticulously planned of military operations. I give the names and dates of birth on the three passports. And then it comes — the smile."

It turns out that three teenage girls on the DART saw him running after the train, took the bag, and handed it in. They were only 14 years old or so, heading out to a party on the beach with a large group - but took care of his bag the whole way.

"I open it, go through every pocket, and not a single thing is missing," he wrote. "Not the photo gear, not the passports, nor the couple hundred Euros I had stashed in my passport for safe keeping."

Jansen couldn't believe it, and wanted to search the nearby beach to find the girls - who he'd spotted on the train - and thank them, and maybe offer a reward - but couldn't leave his sisters alone back at the first station.

"Had the Irish girls on the train not had such integrity ... I would never have been able to share photos of the first time the three of us ever saw the Eiffel Tower, which coincidentally happened to be on Bastille Day… I would never have taken [a] photo of the Plaza de Toros in Barcelona … I would never have taken off my shirt and instructed my sisters to reenact a bullfight," he said.

Jansen's been in touch with Dublin newspapers, asking them to run the story in the hopes the girls would find it, but he's had no luck so far.

So - do you know these girls? Alex wants to say thanks.

Story first appeared on the Pentax Forums via PetaPixel.