Now back to my story on train hopping. That night in the boxcar we settled in away from the door and the draft so that my friend K. was able to stay warm with just his blanket. This leg of the journey took us up through steep mountain passes.
At one point in the night we came to a stop as we waited for a train coming from the other direction. Apparently they have extra engines that help pull the trains through the mountains.
I remember hearing the train approaching thinking I had never heard anything so loud before. But still it got louder until it reached a deafening thundering roar as it passed by our boxcar.
Later that night we found ourselves stopped in the middle of a long dark tunnel. Putting your hand in front of your face revealed that we were in total darkness. We wondered why were stopped. We did have a flashlight so we could move around and look outside.
Soon we heard footsteps walking through the tunnel. Looking out the door we saw the conductor walking down the train with a lantern. We thought he was mighty brave, especially since he had no way of knowing who might be in the empty cars.
We eventually moved on and daylight appeared. The mountainous region caused the tracks to curve in many places offering us a view of the rest of the train. It was amazing to see how long the train was. We also noticed fellow travelers in other cars.
The most beautiful site was when we went over a tall curving train trussel over Lake Shasta. The trussels have no railings and it is a wide open view from the boxcar door.
The final stop for the train was Roseville. We stopped a few miles outside the freight yard in the hot early afternoon sun. We were out of water and dying of thirst. We could see a gas station not far away and I volunteered to run over and buy some drinks from the soda machine.
It was a bold move as we had no idea when the train would start moving again. Of course back in those days you wouldn’t find bottled water for sale so I had to settle for 4 bottles of ice cold Pepsi. Not my drink of choice, but it helped stave off our thirst.
Once we made it to the freight yard in Roseville we had to hike through it to find a train to Oakland. At the train yard building there was a sign about not talking to the workers and under it was a bench. There we saw other travelers waiting for a train to Reno. None of the people we saw on our journey were young kids like ourselves; they all looked like your typical hobo’s. We never talked with them much; everyone seemed to keep to themselves.
We found an open flat car for our trip into Oakland and spent the time standing up and enjoying the view. It was comparatively short trip with no incidences. In Oakland we disembarked and completed the trip to my Uncle’s house in Redwood city by hitchhiking.
When we arrived we were quiet a mess. We hadn’t been out of our clothes for almost 3 days and I developed my first case of athlete’s foot because of it. Our faces had a dark gray pall to them from all the train soot, and though we had gloves we didn’t always wear them and our hands were black.
No comments:
Post a Comment