Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Human Cargo

A Rube’s Rules for Riding the Rails

~ By Andy Klein ~

In the wee early hours of Monday, August 31, 1970, I hopped on a freight train in Oakland, California, together with two acquaintances,

looking forward to a speedy 48-hour ride to Chicago. Four and a half days later, shabbier but wiser, I found myself wandering through the Galesburg, Illinois, rail yards, trying to figure out how to traverse the remaining 200 or so miles to my destination, so I could catch a flight from O’Hare to Logan and wallow in the bourgeois amenities – bathing, for instance – I had so rashly forsaken.

It was a grand adventure, and, like most grand adventures, not nearly as much fun in real life as in the movies (my basic source of information about everything). Plus – you will be shocked to hear – I am not by nature an adventurer. If somewhere in Switzerland there exists a Standard International Lee-Marvin-to-Woody-Allen Scale, I would fall very, very much closer to the Woodman, in culture, appearance, neuroses, and damned near any other way you could imagine.

Still, back then, I was prone to choosing experiences that I thought might look good on a book flap some day; and I had already gone cross- (or semicross-) country by hitching, driving, flying, and bus, so it seemed mandatory to dip my moronic big toe in the romantic effluvium of the hobo life. The result was a festival of comic humiliations way too long to catalog here, but it might be worthwhile to impart the few precious gems of wisdom this goofball exploit contributed to the hollow, echoing chambers of my Wisdom Vault. Of course, it’s possible that the passage of nearly 38 years has obsoleted all my tips, much as it’s done to such carefully preserved skills as changing typewriter ribbons and centering 45s on a turntable when you don’t have an adapter. (I’m a very versatile fellow.)

1. Bring a jug of water. Food is nice, too, but water is essential. I didn’t fuck that one up, but I did fuck up ...

2. Bring a sleeping bag. In all my hitching days, I fared very nicely, thank you, snuggling in my sheepskin coat and using my knapsack as a pillow. Besides, we’re riding through the desert in August. How cold could it get? Pretty damned cold actually, particularly if it’s the middle of the night, and you’re going 60+ miles an hour, and you failed to ...

(above) Through the mists of memory: Our intrepid itinerant,
flanked by counterculture cohorts, circa 1970. photo by Jake Fratkin.

3. Find an empty boxcar to ride in. Boxcars are the Presidential Suites of freight trains, followed by gondola cars and those piggyback flatbeds that carry truck trailers. Guess which type we ended up with? You might be able to get some shelter between the trucks’ gigantic tires, but basically you’re out in the open, going a mile a minute on a flat surface with nothing between you and the punishing air but your rapidly diminishing pluck. At least it would only last two days ... or so we thought: Our train, we had been assured, was a speed demon that could make it from Oakland to Chicago in two days. Unfortunately, at the end of 24 hours, we realized we had only covered about 35% of the distance. Real hoboes would have known that ... .

4. You shouldn’t trust anything the local railway guys tell you about anything outside of their own yard. “Sure,” a sincerely helpful yard assistant had said, “That’s the one you want. They call it the Ghost! It whizzes by at top speed and makes almost no stops and should be pulling into Chicago in 48 hours, maybe 50 if you run into any problems.”

It felt to us more like Marley’s Ghost, dragged down by chains, lumbering across the California-Nevada line in the blisteringly hot August sun. (Of course, it picked up speed again at night, so I wouldn’t miss another chance to be blast-frozen.) Why would you expect the railroad guys to have a clue what happens after the train leaves the yard? Luckily, we only suffered this sweat/freeze cycle for one day, because we ignored warnings to ...

5. Avoid Ogden, Utah, at all costs. Remember eleventh grade history, when they taught you about the Central Pacific laying track from the West Coast and the Union Pacific from the Midwest, until the twain met near Ogden and joined the tracks with a ceremonial golden spike? Sure you do. As a result of that historic day, the Central Pacific (now morphed into the Southern Pacific) owns the line as far as Ogden, at which point the trains come under the jurisdiction of the Union Pacific.

In 1970, at least, Southern P. had a nonchalant attitude toward hoboes; you could get onto the train more or less out in the open. Union P., on the other hand, was a tad stricter, maybe more than a tad, well – let’s face it, those guys were Nazis. We had been warned by a few hoboes we met during one of the many stops the “Ghost” (yeah, right) wasn’t supposed to have made that day. “Don’t go into the Ogden yard,” they said. “You’ve got to get off right before the yard, then figure out a way to get to the other side and get back on the train,” they said. “You really don’t want to get busted there,” they said.

“Sure,” we replied, each of us thinking to himself, “I’ll just hide real real good ... on this 817 open air flatbed ... totally invisible between the giant truck tires. No one will see me, because I won’t move a hair. And I’ll be as quiet as a little church mouse. I will be ... Mr. Invisible!” In Ogden that night, our faith wasn’t shaken a bit, despite the flashlights shining right in our eyes ... despite the voices saying, “Hey, look what we got! Three hippie hoboes!” ... despite the yard bulls banging on the truck axles and yelling, “Hey! Come on out of there!” They can’t see me. They’re bluffing. Because I am ... Mr. Invisible!

Our faith did take quite a substantial hit, however, when they said, “Okay, if you don’t come out, we’ll just fire a few shots in there and let ’em ricochet around a little.” Hello! I tossed off my apparently faulty Cloak of Invisibility and basically teleported off the train. “Jeez, Earl, that li’l hippie sure moves fast, don’t he?” “He?” Earl said, pointing at my hair. “Heck, I thought that was a hippie girl, but you’re right: It’s another hippie boy.” “No, maybe you’re right. All that nice hair, sure looks like a hippie girl to me. Well, except for the moustache. Maybe hippie girls have moustaches.” Oh, shit, I thought, if they think hippies are so damned funny, what happens if they figure out we’re all Jewish?

Earl and Jesse checked our IDs, packed us into a Jeep, and started arguing, sotto voce, what to do with us. “It’s a slow night,” Earl said. “I think we should take ’em out in the desert and have some fun with them.” “Come on, Earl,” Jesse whispered. “I thought we weren’t gonna do that stuff any more. Remember how messy it got last time? Let’s just take ’em downtown and turn them over to the police.” “Ohpleasepleaseplease, Lord!” we were all thinking. “Please let us be arrested and booked and thrown in jail!”

For a brief moment it looked like the fun-hungry Earl was going to insist, but he relented. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou, Lord,” we thought. “Hot dog! We’re goin’ to JAIL!” The Jeep eased into Ogden. Earl pulled the car up to the curb of a downtown street and told us to get out. We looked around, baffled: There was no police station in sight. What were these guys pulling now?

“See that building halfway down the block?” Jesse told us wearily. “That’s the passenger rail station. You go in there, and you stay in there until the next train comes in, and you buy a ticket, and you get on that train. But” – voice getting scary again – “don’t even think about sneaking back to the yard and hopping another freight. We catch you again and you really will be doing 30 days in the county jail.”

I sure wasn’t going to argue.

Oops. Time’s up, and Unca Andy’s only made it through one day and five rules. I really wish I could tell you about our adventures in Ogden. About how we were treated to breakfast at an all-night diner by a guy who claimed (rather convincingly) to be the nephew of America’s most prominent racist, Gov. George Wallace. About sitting in the terminal at 4 a.m., when an unannounced train stopped, and a guy in makeup and paisley bell-bottoms got off to walk his chihuahua, while a dwarf and the buffest woman I had ever seen shared a cigarette. (Only when the train was pulling away did we see the legend “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus” on its flank.) And about finally getting up the nerve to take a bus to Salt Lake City, where Union Pacific held no sway, and boarding another freight for three more days of Semi-Thrilling Adventures.