FAIRFIELD, Conn. — A surly Mexican robot from the year 2996 with a taste for booze caused quite a ruckus this morning in southwestern Connecticut, leading to a call out from the bomb squad and the closure of a section of Metro-North Railroad.

A middle-schooler’s forgotten art project resembling Bender from “Futurama” shut down one of the nation’s busiest commuter railroads for nearly three hours Friday morning.

Town employees sweeping the street found the box –with painted cartoonish eyes and a clock face — on the sidewalk of the Unquowa Road overpass shortly after 5:30 a.m.

Town police called MTA officers with a bomb-sniffing dog and the State Police bomb squad, which took nearly two hours to arrive on the scene. A state police helicopter hovered over the Post Road near the downtown station.

Metro-North and Amtrak service was stopped in both directions from New Haven to Stamford. Regular service continued into New York City from nearby Stamford and commuters worked their phones to arrange rides.

The “package” turned out to be left behind by a student from the nearby Tomlinson Middle School, Deputy Chief Chris Lyddy said shortly before noon. “The child inadvertently left the item in the vicinity of the bridge with the intent of returning to retrieve (it),” the deputy chief said. “There was no malicious intent.”

A state police bomb squad took nearly two hours to respond to the scene, but that is the normal response time in such situations, Lt. J. Paul Vance said. There are several bomb units, but they are not assigned to specific barracks, the spokesman said. Troop G in Bridgeport is less than five miles from the scene.

“It would be foolish to rush in to any bomb call,” Vance said. “The first thing is to clear the area and then there is a very definite procedure that must be followed. The men and women in those units could be killed.”