# Rich Tarrant and the OMYA Express



## wokofshame (Nov 22, 2007)

So I've been meaning to write this for a while and now I've got some time. Be aware that all rail-related info talked about here is pretty easy to acquire without my half-assed help.

This whole story starts when me and my homie Fidel were doing some hiking along the Appalachian Trail in the fall. We got to a road crossing in Vermont where we heard there was a diner called the Whistle Stop. Incidentally, right before this road was this place called the Clarendon Gorge which the trail crosses on a sick-ass suspension bridge. You can rock it back and forth and it's like nothing else, 200 ft above the river on this cable construction thang. So we walked over to this place and ate some really good cheap greasy eats, they had the kitchen housed in a refurnished caboose and all kinds of train memorabilia on the walls. 

While we were talking to some random old locals, we decided we'd had enough hiking for a little while and that we should head up to Fidel's family's home in northern Vermont. His grandfather was going to be visiting there soon so he had to be up there soon anyway. I called up Vermont Railways(VTR) and got the NBD schedule from them. Usually they're busy and will tell you they don't have time but it must have been a lull so I learned things I didn't know. Six days a week the NBD man terminates at Middlebury but one day it goes all the way to Burlington. That day was tomorrow. 

After some berry-picking and saying goodbye to another kid we'd met on the trail who had just happened to show up we hitched over to Rutland. We caught a ride with some kid who getting back from Nat'l guard training in Massachusets. When we got into town we went over to the Twelve Tribes, which is sort of like a christian commune with branches all over. Aside from berating you about the water-to-wine thing, they're good folks who let hikers and various travellers stay above their cafe. One of the cool things about them is that they're big into yerba mate, which has twice as much caffeine per cup as coffee and has a really calming effect. They have a commune down in Peru or something that grows the shit for them.

I said hi to a bunch of folks I knew from my last sojourn there and we ate a bunch of free food. I washed some dishes back in the pit and we caught a few hours of sleep before we had to get up to catch the early morning job. I didn't really sleep much, then it was 2 and out the door into the predawn cold, fuck it's really fuckin' cold man!! 

Over to the yard, which we'd already cased out, for a wait that got longer as the mercury dipped and the moon waxed. I gave Fidel a safety lecture for about half-an-hour, then he drifted off to sleep on his pad and I watched the frost crystallize on the weeds.

I was starting to doubt the times I'd been given when a long low whistle blows and finally the train pulled in from Whitehall and proceeded to work the yard (really tiny and I think like 5 tracks total). There was a red and white Clarendon & Pittsford GP-38 leading and a Green Mountain Railway GP-40 in the nice green-and-black sheme (almost identical to the BN scheme), I can't remeber the third but it was all
EMD machines. Refuelling happened at some point on a spur and then a freddie went up on the string and the hogger pulled her a little bit forward on the mainline to do some brake tests.

"Fidel, let's roll". 

Running in a big semi-circle around to the back of the old Himolene plastic bag factory and hiding behind an electrical transformer we checked out the consist again. 80 tankers for OMYA, which is a big Swiss corporation with a few marble quarries producing calcium carbonate slurry in Vermont. They have their processing plant in Florence and are the biggest single customer of VTR.

Obviously we're gonna be switching out and there's gonna be a loaded car consist after we hit the Omya plant, but it's fairly cool since every piece of rolling stock NBD from there is headed for Montreal and CN and there should be some rideables.

Two hoppers, one of them a CP "owls'-eyes" grainer in the front of the consist. Incidentally we'd looked at this car when we got into town the evening before and were like "Damn, this is the car we need".

The crew was obviously near pulling out so it was time to nail the owls' eyes. We couldn't get on from our side without risking being seen by the hoghead (we were on the inside of a curve) so we scurried back and hopped up a tanker ladder, across the running board, down the other ladder, down the runway and up our canadian beauty. We'd just gotten settled in when along comes the conductor checking our brakes. I could hear the radio crackle and actually see the guy's shoulder, so it was a relief when 'all set' came over the radio. Actually we could hear the rear unit radio the whole way too. 

Air up and a sweet, almost no-slack start, had the heads low for quite a ways as it was now dawn on the old Rutland RR line. We made it out of the "city" and went through some placid swamp scenery, complete with migratory birds and shit, dew misting big round hay bales in the fields, an incredible amount of noise and a harmonic back-and-forth rocking for the empty tankers. 

If a car had jumped the track I wouldn't have been surprised, the 10 MPH we were running was sending OMYA's up the yingyang through the tango and the hula too. Then we pulled past a Blue Seal grain elevator and had to duck back down so people in their pickups at the crossing couldn't see us. This grainer was way roomy and we could easily have slept in the hole overnight, the ends curved so my head had like a little cushion under it. 

The 8 cars in back of us were linked with flexible hose couplings allowed fluid to move back and forth between the tankers. The one in back of us said "DO NOT HUMP" in big letters which of course led to some dirty jokes then back to sleep.

Eventually we hear some radio traffic and stop next to a siding. It's daylight and the middle of nowhere now. The conductor comes back and cranks the wheel. IAll i can think is oh fuck, this is why not to ride at the front end of local junk. We pull forward, he pulls the switch for the siding back and hops up on our deck. All I can see is his steel toes and I can tell Fidel's pulse is going through the roof. Steel Toes still hasn't noticed our presence and we ride 3/4 of the way back to a grain elevator for some farm before he turns around and probably would've fallen off out of surprise if he hadn't been holding on tight.

"You scared me" he says when he gets his breath. 
"Sorry"
"Are we being cut out?"
"Yep. Where'd you get on? Whitehall or Rutland?" Not unfriendly.
"Rutland".

We back to another grainer already sitting there and a slight bump. "Well, here you are".

All this in a really zen delivery. This guy is way chill just by the way he talks, and as he walks away, I'm cursing myself for not at least asking him if we could've ridden the trailing unit up to B-Town.

By the time our half-asleep forms manage to make it out of the hole, his train is already back together and pulling away in the distance, eating up that jointed rail at 10MPH all the way to our intended destination. 

There's some guy welding in a garage not too far away but I don't think he sees us with the welding hood on.

Fidel had his sleeping bag out so it takes a while but eventually we walk down the tracks to a distant shape I think might be a crossing.

We hit some paved road that turns into dirt and then to a tractor road that turns into nothing at all cutting across a field with acres of buckwheat planted. It's really pretty and neither of us have any clue where we are. After a few miles we get to the Leicester Store.

Fidel realized we were right near a summer camp he'd worked at. He'd been here a bunch of times to buy beer. We had some coffee and he got an air freshener shaped in the form of a big topless black woman which we had a few laughs about. 

We lazed around and imbibed with loads of caffeine, talked to some locals about various shit, and eventually crossed Rte 7 to hitch north. We watched a bunch of trucks hauling OMYA's crushed rock go by and this SUV w/ SD plates pulls up. A Lakota guy and a caucasian woman take us up to middlebury. On the way we listen to this Lakota go into a hilarious diatribe against cops at every opportunity. 
"One cop T-boned another last week across the line. Only bad thing is he didn't die"

This woman is getting a ride to where she directs traffic control for some roadwork project. The construction co has hired a bunch of temps to flag traffic and she regales us with their exploits. 

" One skinny little girl stopped flagging traffic to go pick blackberries. Little crackhead hadn't eaten anything all week!"
"Another guy brought his fishing pole and just dropped a line over the bridge. Went fishing and abandoned traffic."
I was impressed by the ingenuity the latter example represented and made a mental note to bring my fishing pole the next time I did traffic control. 

A few more rides, one from this nice slacker who traveled around New England staying in motels to look at plumbing parts in stores. After he cataloged shiznit for his plumbing distribution company he'd kayak on the side.

We made it to B-Town and played some free foozball at Climb High, which is a swanky outdoor gear shop just happening to have a game table. Then we stopped at Klinger's bakery stand, where I remembered a friend of my brother's worked sometimes. She was there and it was her last day so we got some free Nantucket Nectar's and foccacia, chatted and munched out on the curb. 

A unmarked van pulled up and who steps out the back but Rich Tarrant! This guy was the Republican candidate for senator and he was pretty busy trying to convince the state he was their man. He looked out of it so I was like "hey, what's up?" and he immediately brightens and says hello which is funny seeing we're as filthy as can be and he's in his tidy campaign suit.

We hitched out of town and the final ride was from Fidel's aunt which was cool. 

Fidel ended up spending most of the winter in a cabin up on the hill adjacent to another that my friend Austin lived in. Just before the election we got wind of a free dinner that Rich Tarrant was holding up at Bolton Valley Ski Area. Of course we had to hit it, especially as it wasn't turning out to be an easy winter for any of us. As we headed up the access road, Austin told us how he'd crashed an IDX(the software company that Tarrant had founded) party on the lake. He was just starting to enjoy the free beer and hit on some programmer when a manager came up to him and was like 
"Uh, what department are you in?"
Which was the key for him to exit.

The dinner was great with this killer ravioli and the banquet director girls or whatever you call them were really hot. Rich Tarrant came to greet every table and when he said hi to us I'm sure he knew we were there just for the free eats, as he was like "Nice choice of seating. You can jump out of the window if you need to".
I shit you not.

We saw the Starline Rhythm Boys play but I was disappointed as there wasn't even room to dance. The last time I had seen them play I had danced with this tiny woman named Trish who had to be 15 years older than me so I had fond memories. I called out Freebird! for posterity's sake. 

After dinner there was a Q%A with the candidate so Austin asked him what he was going to do about the military-industrial complex. 
"Which military-industrial complex?"
"You know, the military-industrial complex."
It was a classic moment.

I asked him about ending appearance-based discrimination against people with facial tattoos but he didn't really have any answer for that one. "Talk to me after". 

After it all we went over to the cash bar but whiskey was like 3 or 5 dollars a shot so we passed on splitting one. An older guy came up to us by the coat check and was like "Nice performance, guys". It turns out he's a undercover operative for the opposition candidate, Bernie Sanders. He had us marked after overhearing a Dick Cheney crack from me on the shuttle bus.

All in all a great night. Bernie ended up winning the election a week later. Only last week he inserted a amendment in a Amtrak bill that passed providing funding for fuel-efficient rail technology. A few weeks ago there was a derailment on the VTR line in Middlebury. The rear end of the B-Town man hopped the rails and as many as 7 gasoline cars ruptured, one actually catching fire before the response team got to it. :|


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## Yonder (Jul 16, 2013)

Good read


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## Unslap (Aug 2, 2013)

thank you


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## kokomojoe (Aug 3, 2013)

Sounds like a good trip. I really want to go out west but at the same time being up northeast would be beautiful. I think I've seen those owl eye grainers you're talking about, not too many of them but if it's what I'm thinking of it's really roomy looking.


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