Train Hopping Across Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and Oregon

by Aaron Dactyl

  Across the Great Divide Basin, a lifeless prairie of tertiary rock 6,500-feet above sea level, I fought the wind and the painful jarring of my foot as the train lunged and jerked constantly. Hours later I arrived parched in Green River and managed to crawl off the train into the sagebrush desert, dragging my bag across the rocks and powdery earth. I lay awake there writhing in pain, trying to think of a way out of my predicament but quickly losing hope; and but perhaps the worse matter of the moment was not my injury but my being almost entirely out of water.

  Crew-change vans and worker-trucks drove past on the dirt path, back and forth, and I thought that if by sunrise I were still lying there I would concede and flag down a worker to have them transport me to a hospital. It was now 2 A.M. and I tried calling a friend in Salt Lake City to conjure some hope, and I thought to contact a friend of a friend in Ogden—somebody, anybody to bring me a pair of crutches . . . if only I had a pair of crutches. My only other hope was for another westbound to pull in with a DPU close enough that I could at the very least retrieve some water. It was not likely though.

  Trains continued to pull in and out of the busy Green River junction, but every train was either too short, too long, or had no DPU at all; and though I traced several trains and determined them west, I could not think to ride anywhere without water. Then finally, around 5 A.M. a long line of double-stacks pulled in for what seemed liked several miles, finally coming to a halt with the rumble of a DPU about fifty yards back, the faint glow of the dome-light illuminating the ground like a saving grace. I drank my last ounce of water and with everything I had hobbled over to the train, limping painfully on the uneven ballast, bracing each train car as a railing. I was slow on the move; the train could have pulled out at any time or a worker-truck could have rolled up and caught me, counting down each car length with heavier breaths, until finally I gripped the ladder of the DPU and crawled up its steep steps to the cab’s front door, utterly exhausted. Thankfully there was water on board—and it saved me—but only two six-packs, and they were warm. I sat back in the conductor’s chair, elevated my foot on the dash, and breathed heavy with relief as the train departed for California just before dawn.

  6 A.M. Heading back to Utah ahead of the sunrise and this time in near excruciating pain. The train taking Track 1, the higher elevated mainline, winding around sagebrush and hills of red rock, looking down on Track 2, passing through a short tunnel just before Curvo and then crossing over Track 2 and winding screechingly down the side of towering red-rock canyon walls. It’s a double mainline track the entire Evanston sub and about thirty miles from Ogden (God I hope we go through Ogden and not back to SLC) the Wasatch Mountains are becoming green and lush with trees and the land around the base of the hills arable and irrigated—perhaps that’s why the siding is named Strawberry.

  10:22 A.M. The train creeping toward Ogden and has been for the last hour or two, going less than ten miles an hour. I have no idea how it is ever going to make it to Oakland by tomorrow afternoon when it is scheduled to arrive.

  At dawn I looked out across the Green River Basin at Altamont siding in southwest Wyoming, the very place I woke to a couple of days prior, only this time my foot and ankle look like an elephant’s trunk and I am in no condition to explore the landscape. Tanker cars lined the industry spur-tracks surrounding Evanston, where an oil flame burned high into the blue morning sky as the train rolled past, along Track 1, the original and oldest route, a steep descent across the Wasatch Mountains into Utah constructed in 1868-69 in a dramatic series of bridges and tunnels that presents far too much grandeur to appreciate in such a crippled condition.

  My foot was now remarkably swollen, and every time I lower it from an elevated position it felt like a rainstick of pain as the blood rushed to the wound and stung like a thousand barbed knives stabbing my skin. I was in severe pain, and sleep seemed to be the only cure; for with only a bit of food and a fast-diminishing supply of water, I didn’t dare strain myself as to further instigate hunger and thirst. The fact that I was all alone with no treatment for the swelling and pain, about to embark across perhaps the most desolate expanse of land in the country—300 miles of desert and muddy, alkaline streams that disappear poorly into lifeless sinks—with little food and next to no water is unsettling to say the least.

  The roll into Ogden continued slow and painful; I wished the train would make better time but I was nonetheless relieved as I bypassed the Salt Lake subdivision at Riverdale and pulled into crew-change at Ogden. After the CC the train pulled up just enough so that the DPU I was in stopped across from the yard office, where from a worker exited and walked toward the unit to inspect it, a frail, older man who did not look very threatening but in fact more like a hobo himself; I was actually kind of interested in him finding me, so as to have another judge the state of my condition, or at least so I could possibly request a few more six-packs of water. Besides, if he did kick me off the train I could at least seek some medical attention for my foot, which I believe I desperately needed. But alas, the worker did not bother to check the lavatory and off I went across the salt sloughs west of Ogden, the quaternary rock lakebed that forms shoreline of the great Salt Lake.

  The first transcontinental railroad reached completion May 1869 with the last spike being famously driven in fifteen miles northwest of Ogden at Promontory Summit in the rugged Promontory Mountains. Hastily built (at one point with ten miles of track laid in one day) the original transcontinental track became abandoned in 1903 after Southern Pacific constructed a railroad cutting across the middle of the Salt Lake on twenty-plus miles of wooden trestles, which was then replaced in 1953 by the current embankment, a thirty-mile-long island of track consisting of two-billion tons of ballast. Now attributed to Union Pacific after the company subsumed SP in 1996, the Lucin Cutoff, as it is known, saved the railroad over forty miles of track and untold resources by avoiding the steep mountain grades for the even bed of the lake, and is today looked upon as one of the great engineering feats of modern history. I was about to cross it.

  Between the mainland and Promontory Point, a peninsula jutting down from the mountains north, the great lake appears low, receded a hundred yards from the ballast embankment, leaving long-forgotten telephone poles jutting out of a salt encrusted earth that looks frozen over and splintered and cracked on the surface like ice. North of the embankment the lake-water turns a red-clay color and is enclosed by a channel of rocks that are obviously the work of some malign industry. Past the peninsula the tracks cut west clear across the middle of the lake on an island of rock, teal green salt water crashing gently and foaming on the surface, waves breaking in the distance, the salty air smelling more of sulfur than ocean water. On the north side of the tracks the lake water darkens in red to a blood-stained color and I suddenly wonder what the environmental implications are of the water looking like a Japanese dolphin cove after the annual harvest.

  The train crossed the entire lake at a steady 45 mph without stopping and continued on to the great Salt Lake Desert, a landscape completely flat with distant, bland-colored mountains on all horizons. In the far west the sky became increasingly overcast, a matte of grays that cast no shadow on the desert, giving it a dull, cool hue.

  I continued lying on the unit’s floor with my foot elevated slightly above my heart, falling in and out of consciousness; and I slept away most of the time despite my having never before crossed these hundreds of miles of desert.

  After arriving in Elko Nevada, the train sat on the mainline across from the yard and I sat in the conductor’s chair so as not to be caught off guard. Eventually a large fuel-truck pulled beside the DPU and a man stood just below the window opposite me refueling the train. I kept an eye on him from the bottom corner of the window, but he never came onto the unit; nor did anyone else. Departing Elko in the evening I was soon barreling west across a splotchy Nevada desert more rugged than I imagined. In particular was Barth, about thirty-five miles west of E
lko, where the tracks cut through a deep canyon of basalt along the Humboldt River, revealing the dynamism of a once geologically excitable land.

  Overnight the train sided at Rye Patch, cradled between the Trinity and Humboldt Mountains along the dismal Humboldt River, a place so remote that it is the only place other than in a train yard I have known an IM train to be parked overnight. The pitch-black hours passed long and insufferable and I was not able to sleep for more than an hour at a time as I slowly dehydrated into a mental depression. Confined to the dirt and swelter of the engine’s floor, unable to even step out of the cab to piss, I felt increasingly trapped and strangely like being in jail, which is about as ironic a contradiction as I can think of considering hopping trains is the epitome of freedom and perhaps the most anarchic activity one can partake in, not to mention wholly illegal. But as they say freedom never does come cheap.

  The train changed crews again in Sparks, I think, and by early dawn was paralleling I-80 into the Sierra Nevada Mountains along a foggy Truckee River in Tahoe National Forest. By the time the train reached Truckee the fog was so thick that I could not see twenty yards. The train did not move until the fog lifted so I slept more time away on the idling unit’s floor.

  By late morning the fog thinned and burned off into the sky and the train departed Truckee on the steep Roseville subdivision, the final stretch of track to my survival, and interestingly, though not in a cheery way, the most periling and difficult section of the old emigrant trail, that which utterly devastated entire parties, like the Donner-Reeds, who in 1846 attempted to cross this pass in early fall and became snowbound until spring, losing their cattle, half their people, and eventually driven to cannibalism in order to survive. Yes, these mountains are rugged, and were my train to break down or have any similar problems, with my current condition I might share the same fate as the ill-fated Donners.

  Ten miles west of Truckee, at Donner Pass, I looked over Donner Lake from roughly 7,080 feet of elevation. Conifers in all different stages of growth, except old, sprouted from the mountains, glimmering with dew droplets left from the morning fog. The train screeched around strong curves above the placid Tahoe like Lake named after the forsaken party who suffered unspeakably on its shores. Onward, the train arrived at Norden Tunnel, #41, AKA the Big Hole, a 10,025-foot-long plunge through towering Mt. Judah (named for Central Pacific’s Chief Engineer Theodore Judah). Almost two miles in length, Norden Tunnel is one of UP’s longest. The entire train is easily swallowed for close to ten minutes. That’s ten minutes of utterly asphyxiating blackness were I not safely aboard the unit with all windows shut. Still, I should have had a wet rag covering my face.

  Track grades do not get much steeper than on the west side of the Sierra Nevadas, where 2.2% grades are overly common. Here the Roseville sub requires a freight train to descend over a mile in elevation—7,000 feet—in a mere hundred miles to UP’s Davis yard in Roseville, a mere 165 feet above sea-level. Twenty-seven tunnels in all are required to achieve this feat and many have had height added in just the last year so that doubles-stacks, like the train I’m on, can bypass the more-demanding Feather River Route and save time and mileage by accessing Donner Pass. Descending the mountains to Roseville I could literally see the climate warming as grasses appeared at Colfax siding—elevation 2,800 ft.—and larger trees began frequenting the landscape.

  As grades did lessen the train picked up the speed necessary to make its estimated time of arrival, just after noon; it pulled into the Roseville yard and before entering the departure tracks stopped directly across from an engine shop. I could risk going no further and be shipped off to Oakland in a depressed, injured, and dehydrated state so I climbed out the front of the unit right there and hobbled over toward the nearest cluster of trains. However, I was in worse shape than thought and I collapsed to the ground almost immediately. I managed to crawl about twenty more yards to a nearby ditch, where I laid in sweat, catching my breath.

  Tone, my good friend I had been in touch with, was nowhere near at the time though and I left my bag in the ditch and got out of the yard on my own. I eventually did make it to the road—Vernon Ave.—where I again nearly collapsed. Fortunately though I located a spigot in some front yard and I laid there under a giant palm tree until Tone arrived with a pair of crutches. He then had to go into the yard mid-afternoon and retrieve my pack. But he was sort of expecting to have to and so did so laughing. “Nelly!”

  Eugene, Oregon- The Jungle’s a fucking mess. No one minds a little trash good for kindling, or cans that others can cash in—we expect that, but the jungle by the pond along the Northwest Hwy is just heaps of HIVy shit: ketchup and taco sauce packets, cigarette butts and wrappers, old boots and soiled clothing, shit rags and condoms and broken bottles shattered in the grass. I filled two trash bags with junk in an hour but eventually stopped because some bums don’t know how to cover their shit and don’t care where they go. No wonder so many jungles in CC towns are disappearing, paved over by the RR and monitored by local law enforcement.

  Across the Hwy and the tracks, a stone’s throw from Maxwell Bridge, another pond lies bordered on the backside by a junkyard, its water dark and milky with flotsam and jetsam floating on the motionless surface in scum. The surrounding woods look like someone literally came through with a lawn mower and just shredded everything in the path. But one area has been built up cleverly with rotting railroad ties stacked five-feet-high like Lincoln Logs around a makeshift fire pit, open facing the pond. Behind this, under a thin, spindly tree, a tarp has been hung nicely to shield from the rain. The ground around this particular camp is clean: cans are collected in paper bags and trash is not strewn carelessly about—how it should be.

  Wandering under Maxwell Bridge I came upon an army pack on the ground; inside were several books (one by Hunter S. Thompson) and papers. Beside the bag sat a mandolin case. I felt the case and the hard shell of a stringed instrument and immediately realized that someone must be very nearby. I then looked up and saw a man lying on the hard dirt, passed out with one arm draped over his eyes. He awoke at my footsteps and rolled out from overtop a small black puppy to tell me his name was Tyler, from Nampa, and that he was traveling with his girl who is off somewhere. They are both headed south to Oakland. We talked excitedly about literature for a few minutes and he introduced me to Jack Black’s You Can’t Win, a memoir of sorts by a 1920’s hobo who eventually became a librarian in San Francisco. It’s now on my list of books to read.

  It was an overcast and unusually humid morning, but it all burned off around two. T-Box arrived at the jungle by the big pond with a couple of kids he recruited from the other side of the tracks where apparently there are like ten kids all catching south, including Tyler who I spoke to earlier, as well as one Captain Dumbass, who has a Voltron-like tattoo across his forehead and down his cheeks and who everyone seems to be trying to distance themselves from (I ran into him earlier at the corner market). With T-Box were Maggot and Andi from Southern California. Young, straightedge with appropriate reasoning, and vegan, they’re traveling to a farm in Orland for the winter. Maggot wore Filson overalls tattered to hell (lifetime warranty he tells me) and a weathered railroad cap over his natty long black hair; Andi dressed in the usual crusty attire—grime-colored patchwork pants, a Dystopia (or something-Crust) t-shirt, and patched cap—with dreaded hair wrapped in pigtails, thick rimmed glasses, and a radiant smile more piercing that her septum ring.

  We sat around the jungle the entire afternoon sharing stories and doing crossword puzzles until a horn finally sounded through Irving crossing around sunset and a short mixed-freight train crawled onto the departure tracks from the north. I traced a couple of the cars to the Bay Area and the train continued on into the yard to “work.” Meanwhile, Margaret Killjoy, AKA Magpie, apparently some big-name Anarchist writer, climbed off the train with his dog-bitten-faced girlfriend who exuded pretentiousness and did not introduce herself or even as much as acknowle
dge me (I guess since I don’t sport dreads, tattoos, or filthy black clothing, I’m not cool enough). But Maggot and Andi had just met Magpie at an Anarchist book-fair in Portland, so the arrival was something of a coincidence.

  We waited until dark to walk south along the highway, leaving behind Magpie and his diva. Entering the yard we picked up Chuck, who had just caught onto the train back under Maxwell Bridge in order to get away from Captain Dumbass, and rode it down into the yard. I initially tried to get rid of him by telling him the train was only going to Springfield and that he could probably catch a better one on the mainline later. But Chuck, tattered and disheveled and showing signs of reckless abandon like true tramp, had his wits about him.

  “No, it’s going to Roseville,” he told me, keeping up with our pursuit. “I called some of these cars in.”

  We located a filthy gondola toward the back of the line and hoisted our stuff into the car, then loitered in the shadows of the yard while the train remained, hissing and ticking. All the beer later the train departed slowly, passed through town, and crossed the Willamette into Springfield, waiting to pick up significant speed until after clearing the yard there. The rest of the crew remained in the gondola but T-Box and I climbed onto an adjacent porch, where I rolled out my sleeping bag and closed my eyes to the wind and rumble.

  •••

  I woke on the east side of the Cascades with no recollection of any of the twenty tunnels, the train barreling south on a ponderosa studded, high-desert straightaway. With the morning still dark we pulled into Klamath Falls for what seemed like an hour, finally stopping at the south end of the yard. The train cut its air and broke in half while we slept, and another, shorter string of cars was attached. An hour later we departed. But only to stop for another hour at a siding somewhere just inside the California border where anxious cattle grazed an adjacent pasture, groaning with volume and fervor. Despite their keeping me from sleeping I could not help but be amazed at the tonal variation and the diversity in “moo” each cow possessed. Others said the same. Eventually though, in light of the clamor, all cows calmed and we were again able to sleep. Until a great roaring beast, the northbound Coast Starlight, disrupted the placidity and our train jolted forward again, the sun now creeping over the eastern horizon.