Railroad adventures as a kid...

[Anonymous]

What finally broke me and my buddy Greg (or me at least) from hanging around the train cars and rail yards was, when I was walking along side of some side tracked cars in the summer of 1976, and all of a sudden a large number of wasp flew out from under the car I was walking past and stung me up real bad all over my right hand, arm and the side of my face. I turned and looked back and there was a nest the size of a dinner plate with about fifty wasp waiting for their turn at me. Within seconds my throat started swelling shut and I got real dizzy. Greg ran to the nearest road and flagged a car down, and I ended up having to go to the emergency room for treatment.

Trainluver1

[tpatrick]

Many years ago a trolley line ran up the west side of Chautauqua Lake from Jamestown to Mayville. Traces of the line remain today. When I was kid in the 50s the remains of a bridge crossed Goose Creek, not far from my home. It was nothing more than a pair of steel girders about a foot wide and fifty feet long, about ten feet above the creekbed. Many of my friends liked to ride their bikes across. I tried to walk it once and it was then that I discovered my extreme fear of heights. I finished the crossing on my hands and knees. To my knowledge nobody ever fell off the bridge. Ironically, today I am helicopter pilot. I can be comfortable in the cockpit only when the seat belt and shoulder straps are TIGHT!

[Anonymous]

My Grandfather grew up near Vanceburg Kentucky, mostly on his own. During the summer if he knew the Reds were playing at home in Cincinnati he would hope on a west bound freight and catch a game. He would hitch hike home because the tracks around Cincinnati were to confusing. One time after doing this for several years after consuming a few beers he decided to jump a freight for the ride home. He spent the next 3 years in Iowa, where he finally got off after deciding the train was not going to turn around.

[Anonymous]

Back in the late 70's I had a Jr. High teacher that really introduced me to model railroading and rail fanning. He took us to the Tehachapi Loop, Colton Yard and several other places to take pictures and watch trains. He started a Model Railroad club at school and we built a HO layout. He had a N scale layout in his garage that we worked on with him. I still make 1 or 2 trips to the Tehachapi Loop every year with a buddy of mine. I have picture from the early 80's of SP blood noses and cabooses (what are those?) I ran into that teacher about 2 years ago and spent a while talking to him. I thanked him for encouraging me in railroading (trains are not really popular with the girls you know) and for giving me some great lifetime experiences. He is now out of model railroading, but he loved to talk about it.

Thats my story.

Bob

[PennsyHoosier]

My buddies and I used to jump the slow-moving trains on the C&NW west of Chicago. Totally stupid and dangerous. Thank goodness I'm still alive.

[Anonymous]

Talk about stupid things...
Back in the mid 1970s, my buddy Greg and I would sneak down to the train overpass about a mile from my house where the track went over highway 290, and would dare each other to walk across a support beam that was only about a foot and a half wide that ran about sixteen feet above and over the highway while traffic was going by under us. Or we would crawl up under the overpass and watch the train go over just a few feet above us. It's a wonder we survived to be grown ups. What can I say, it was "prehistoric" extreme sports...

Trainluver1

[Anonymous]

Trainluver, man do your stories bring back memories.
My grandparents used to live next to the BN tracks and I remember making playhouses in boxcars to. We were in one when a long line slammed into it to hook up. We were so scared we froze and didn't move and took a 5 mile ride out of town. We jumped off right nex to a farm pond near a friend's house and begged and pleaded his dad for a ride into town and believed him when he said our parents wouldn't find out. Well, they found out and we got the same punishment you did.

[gvdobler]

We used to ride open box cars back and forth between Lincoln Ne. and Waverly (a few miles east of Lincoln. We went up on the signal catwalk one day thinking it would be cool when a train wentt under us, we didn't get burned, but it was hot and stupid.

Then the was a place directly next to the tracks and under ground level but open on top that we would get in . This was on a main line so the trains were speeding right along. The noise was very loud and scary, not to mention again stupid.

Jon - Las Vegas

[retsignalmtr]

in 1959 i was 10 years old and lived in the bronx, NY at 161 st not far from yankee stadium. directly across the street was the NYC harlem division 4 track mainline running below the street level in an open cut. there was a station on 162nd st (melrose) with the waiting room on the street level with stairways going down to the platforms. we used to play stickball on 162 st and the roof of the station was homerun territory if you hit it. if the ball bounced back on the street it was ok. but if the ball bounced down on the tracks the guy who hit it had to go down on the tracks to get it. well i had a homer and the ball went down to the tracks and i had to get it. i had to cross all 4 tracks with live thirdrails too. i looked both ways for trains and went out to get the ball. when i got it i stood up to see a new haven train of old mu cars about a couple of hundred ft away moving very fast. i just had time to flaten myself against the retaining wall of the cut when the train went by with the engineer blasting the whistle but he didn't stop. i never went back down there again. if i lost a ball i went and bought a new one. eight years later i went to work on the new york city subway and the first time i had my back against the wall with a train passing by i got a flashback of that day.

[Anonymous]

I'm glad you guys are enjoying this topic. I did a little research to see if there was anything like it on the site before I started it. I didn't think Greg and I were the only two kids in the world that hung around the trains and rail yards...

I've got a story for you I heard one time. I don't know how true it is, but here goes;

Back in the late 1950s, some frat brothers at some college took a new pledge, put a pillow slip over his head, tied his hands behind his back and his feet together and threw him in the trunk of a car and drove him way out into the middle of no where and put him on a train track. The guy didn't know it, but he was actually on the side track. Anyway, a few minutes later, here comes a train, and the frat brothers are telling him that they decided they don't want him and are going to kill him by letting the train run over him. The guy takes them seriously and starts screaming and begging for his life, but the frat guys just laugh and give him a moment by moment up date that the train is getting closer and closer. Finally the train passes by, and the frat brothers walk over and un-tie the pledge, but discover that he's lost his mind from fear. This guy supposedly now resides in a mental institution where he's been ever since...
I've also heard the version where the frat brothers go over to un-tie the guy and discover that he died of heart failure.

Trainluver1

[Anonymous]

The cab of WKS 0-6-0 swicther... Man, i was scared!

[Anonymous]

Well I only had nickels and pennies smashed on track other than that I stayed away.
Now my Grandpa started telling stories when he got older.
His dad was a boiler maker for the L&N and he and his buddies would roll old tires down the hill towards moving freight trains so they would get destroyed. They also had a trolley line in town and they would move construction barriers across the tracks so the operator would have to get out and move it off the tracks. they would also rig it so the connection from the catenary wire to the trolley would somehow come loose and the trolley would stop. And one last one
they had these caps filled with explosives and at night they would set a liine of them up on top of the rail and as the trolley would run them over BAM BAM BAM BAM!!! to give everyone on board a scare.

[grayfox1119]

My mem ories go back to about 1943 when I was 4 years old. The Boston & Albany ran past my grandfather's farm in Oxford , Ma, not more than 200 feet from the old farm house on the hill. I was so scared of the big steam engines roaring by that I would hide behind the front door. Later, they moved to the center of town, and the New Haven RR ran through that part of town. I was about 7 then, and my cousin and I would go up onto an old cart road bridge over the tracks and try to drop cans into the smoke stacks as the train roared by. The tracks were on a grade, so the engine was slowing and really puffing black smoke. Trying to drop a can into the stack was extremely difficult, but at times we got lucky. Boy, you should see how far that can flew up in the air !!!
Then of course there was always the coin on tracks routine to see how flat it be after the train passed by. Money was too scarce and we could buy candy with the pennies, so we didn't do that too often. What I really miss is the sound of the whistle on the steam engine on a cold, snowy night, traveling through the meadows and forests.

[darkstar974]

well when i was a kid me and my pa walked down the tracks near our house. We did not see any trains though it was pretty cool. We moved acouple years later up near Slippery Rock there was a limestone plant with a mainline and siding i used to watch the trains carrying limestone to and from the plant. one night this guy landed his ultralight on the powerlines by the tracks the guy lived amazingly but they had to shut the mainline down and cut the power for two hours till they got him down

[Anonymous]

Don't know if this is an "adventure" or not: I used to go to grade school when steam engines were still around ('way last century!), and there was a road bridge over the CN main line. I recall watching a steam engine approaching the bridge, and decided to watch it go under the bridge. Looking down into a steam engine's smoky exhaust is not a good idea I soon found out! Never did that again!

We did as many kids did - placed pennies on the track to have them flattened by the passing trains. Kinda lame but fun!

Bob Boudreau

[jhoff310]

Back in the 80's ( my childhood) us neighbor kids had a little fort/ clubhouse on the other side of the tracks. well everybody was down there and there was a train coming, the big thing to do was throw rocks at the passing train cars NOT the Engines I wanted to get down there so I could throw a few rocks. Well the train was closer than I realized so I had to dash across the crossing on my bike in front of a barrelling freight train. I was only about 8 or 10 years old at the time but I recall being close enough to the snowplow on the engine to see more than I wanted to see. I would estimate the train was about 50 feet away when I dashed across the tracks.
Jeff

[tatans]

Back in the late 50's a friend and I (we were about 15 or 16) decided to visit his uncle in a small prairie town so we decided to go to the freight yards and hop a freight westbound, we had a great time in an empty gondola for about 2 hours behind a steam loco when we decided to get off in his uncles village, oh gee, it seems freight trains don't slow down roaring through small villages, luckily the town was on a small hill and the train slowed so we decided to jump off, after all, the only thing to land on is that nice soft sand they use for roadbed eh? well, it's not sand! but the real good part was when we stopped rolling down the roadbed there are things called switches, we stopped rolling not 5 feet from a switch stand leading to a grain elevator, needless to say his uncle drove us back to the city. I now see this as a suicide mission rather than a railroad adventure.

[joseph2]

Back in 1980 my employer had a Plymouth MDT and a GE switcher locomotives.A few workers,myself included, decided since the boss wasn't there to stage a locomotive race.Unfortunatly we did it on one track and not a double track.The Plymouth took off first,had great acceleration and good brakes. The GE took off two seconds afterwards with fair acceleration and BAD brakes.The resulting collision was rather loud,its fortunate no one in supervision heard it.

[Anonymous]

In 1957? when in boy scouts from Detroit we went to the National Jamboree in Colorado, I didn't pay much attion to it then but after getting into railroading my dad had taken pictures of the train a steam (can't make out what it is) also took a train from Detroit in 1960 to San Antonio Tx, fond memoris

[Anonymous]

Hi

I used to know kids that would do completely and utterly mean things like one day a train was coming by and by the way i wasnt there but the kid that i new told me that he would put money on the tracks and when a train came by he threw a rock through the window!!!!!!!!

After that i pretty much stayed away from him!!!!!

Another time was when someone i knew fired on of those rockets that you get for about $100 at a hobby shop at a freight train and when it hit he told me there was a huge bang and the train slowed down so he got scared but he didnt know if ti was just slowing around a turn or becuase he fired the rocket!!! I have only heard these stories though.I dont know if they are true or not.

Pavariangoo

[Anonymous]

We'll call this one of the adventures of me and Greg...
One summer evening back in the mid 1970s, my buddy Greg and I were looking for something to do when we noticed that a short SP freight train had side tracked to let another train coming from the other direction pass. So we decided that it might be cool to hop up in one of the open box cars and catch a free ride since the train was going so slow. After a few minutes, the other train passed by and the train we were on moved back onto the main line. If we had jumped off right then, we would have been okay, but like a couple of idiots we stayed on thinking we could jump off if it started speeding up. Well. It did start speeding up-real fast before we knew it, and we ended up having to ride it over twenty miles before it slowed down enough again so we could get off... Greg's parents grounded him for a month and banned me from coming near him ever again-which lasted about two weeks.

[johncolley]

Way back in '47/'48 my stepdad was a 22 year conductor on SP out of west Oakland. In those days crummies were assigned, and between runs we used to go down so he could stock up. I would get to sit up in the cupola, while he did whatever was needed, and I watched the cab-forwards and black widows on the A/D track and the switchers at work. Gee, maybe that's where I got to love trains?

[Anonymous]

When I was a kid of about 11 years old, we use to hang around on the SP cars that had been side tracked about a block away from my house.
One day, one of the guys climbed up the ladder on a box car and started turning the break wheel-which you might know was the only one keeping the cars from going anywhere. All of a sudden, the ground starts to slowly move by. At first I thought maybe I was just having a dizzy spell, but no, the cars were actually moving, and finally began making the chuckidy chuck sound as they began to build up a pretty good speed rolling down hill toward the end of the tracks about a half mile away. We jumped off and ran like hell, but lucky for us they slowed down and stopped on their own just a few yards from a busy road.
Another incident was when one of my buddies threw a lever on the side of a gondola car I was standing in and it turned up and dumped me out on the ground. As I went to stand up next to the car, it began settling back down and just before the open side slammed closed one of the guys grabbed me and pulled me down, or else my head would have been crushed like a grape...
The last straw came when we had established a club house in an old box car that had sat where it was so long that vines had grown all over it. Back in one corner of the car we had a box where we kept out wine, cigarettes and dirty books that we looked forward to after school in the evenings. One evening we hurried down to the tracks to induldge in our sinful goodies only to find that the railroad had taken our box car and all of our stuff away... Talk about some heart broken kids.
I've got a number of other stories, but I'll turn the floor over to someone else for now.

Trainluver1