# A trip over the hill and back



## macks (Jun 29, 2009)

disclaimer : this is a dream i had. none of the people mentioned are real. i dumbed down the details about yards and such but if ya'll think this has too much info still I'll dumb it down more. 
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.... on Friday my friend B drove A and I back to Eugene "on his way" to Corvallis. That night a bunch of us went to see Blackbird Raum at this tiny little place in an industrial district of Eugene called Apocalypse on Broadway. Cool place, has a small theater vibe to it, and it's only about 1-2 miles from the train yard. After the show two friends and I (C and S) packed up and headed out, I'd been going outside to listen to the scanner to see what was going on and I heard that a M-HKRV was pulling in to do some work. We walked along 99E a few blocks, hoping to find a Dari Mart to get some train food and booze. On the way, a lady stopped and gave us two to-go boxes of leftovers from the restaurant she worked at, juicy ribs, fried shrimp and some waffle fries to keep our spirits high.
We eventually came to a Dari Mart and got all the essentials, hoofed it quickly to the street we were looking for and crossed over the yard. We waited under the bridge with some other kids who were mostly asleep. We didn't see our train so we decided after a little bit to walk down the length of the yard and try to see it. We got down to the S end just in time to see the DPU exit the yard. Fuck.
We went back and found a different spot to wait that had a little better cover. Nothing on the scanner and nothing moving until about 4am as a long SBD pulled in to the N end with an two eyed jack right across from us. At about this same instant it started pouring rain - so we decided to just get on the boxcar and hope it wasn't breaking up. In a few minutes (while the rain was getting even more intense) we pulled into one of the last tracks in the PNWR yard and sat. The rain was really coming down now, and we all hadn't slept much while we were waiting so we rolled out and fell asleep, waking up to clear skies and a bright morning. We waited there all day, watching the workers and the bull drive around, staying put and staying quiet, smoking cigarettes and snacking. At dusk, a Q-PWRV was being built out of our yard and we geared up to get over the two tracks separating our string from the train, but alas there wasn't one damn rideable on the whole train. Fucking heartbreaking after 12+ hours in the box we were in (we called it the Boxico Mexicar cause it was a Ferromex). Once it got a little darker we ran between obstacles where we stopped to look out and eventually made it back across the road on the E side of the yard.
At this point we needed more train food so we started walking back towards the store when I heard another M-HKRV on the scanner. It stuck around for a couple of hours the night before and we were running low on food and water so we hid our packs in some bushes and beat feet to the store as quick as we could. About 1/2 hour we came back to the yard with more wine and food and quickly went back to the S end where our train was still waiting. On the way back we heard kids in the bushes so we threw out a "hail satan!" and got some cheers in response. Then one kid chased us down and bummed a few rolling papers. On the scanner I heard that they were having trouble with the DPU so we hung back. After a while the yard master came out and decided to just run the train without the DPU since it wasn't very heavy or long anyway, and we had about 5 minutes to get on until the yardmaster was going to drive back and detach the DPU, and watch the train roll out. 
So we had to gun it quick but luckily we found a CN grainer really close by, which we later dubbed The Greasy Beach because it had sand-like stuff in the holes. Right after we got all 3 of us in we heard a truck drive by, lucky lucky! After waiting for the Police to arrest people on the tracks at Washington-Jefferson park _two_ seperate times, we were off!
The ride was great, it was S's first and C's first real one so they were really excited. It was my first in a long while so I was pretty pumped too. Once we cleared the city we all sat on the porch, drank some and hooted and hollered and wrote up some stuff on the car. After a bit it started to rain so we holed up and passed out for the night.
When I woke up it was light out and I watched two autorack trains go by, but I fell asleep again soon and woke up quite a ways south of there. It turned out that the next siding we went by was where we were going so I woke up C and S, we packed up and waited for the next stop. We ended up siding just N of Dunsmuir (after only 11 hrs from Eugene!!) so we bailed and went to walk to the highway to hitch back N a bit. We poked our heads up out of the bushes and saw a cop walking towards us across the parking lot so we scurried back into the bushes somehow without being seen. A little looking around and we found out we'd stumbled into the bushes behind the California Highway Patrol office and were most definitely not going to get a ride out of there. After a can of beans each, we found another road on the other side of the tracks and started walking S to find an onramp. After a while we flagged down a guy on a motorcycle who told us we were only 2 miles from Dunsmuir so we decided to just walk into town. We ended up getting a ride in the back of a pickup about half of that. 
Dunsmuir is a really pretty town but we missed Railroad Days by a day, which I heard sucked anyway. No worries, we went to the store and C foodstamped us some goodies to eat while we were hitching and we hit the onramp. After about 3 hours of the 3 of us waiting we decided to split up and I would go first, and if I got to our friends' place try to get someone to go back and pick them up if they didn't show by dark. About 2 1/2 MORE hours later I got a ride the 12 or so miles to where we were headed. About 10 minutes later walking back down from the place to the beer store I ran into C and S who had got a ride about 5 minutes after me....

the next few days were fun, camping in the woods, working and drinking with good company!

....on Tuesday it turned out that about 8 people were waiting on a NBD train at this siding to come up. It pulled up and switched over to the siding to work, with the unit RIGHT at the entry to the property. One person decided to come along for the hell of it, so that made the total 9. I decided to walk behind some of the other things on the property to not be seen by the crew out of habit but everyone else was out in the open and most definitely seen by the crew. If they gave a shit we would have been pulled off for sure!
We walked to the back end of the train after someone went ahead and found a two eyed jack that we could all ride in. I don't like riding with that many people but most everyone in the group had ridden a lot so I didn't worry about it. All the rush to get on this train turned into a joke after the next 3 and a half hours it spent knocking us back and forth. At least we got to wave goodbye to our friends a bunch of times. After all of that nonsense and nearly (actually probably) being seen by the workers a bunch of times we finally took off. By this time the sun had gone down completely but even though we couldn't see everything it was still a great ride. 
It was a god damned boxcar party in there. People rode a bike across the car and someone else was skateboarding back and forth. Everyone was drinking and smoking and yelling and singing and shit, drumming on the car to the beat that the wheels were making. A game of hot dice struck up after a while with a 1$ buy in and we had so many people that _someone_ was always on the look out for lights and grade crossings.
Most people went to sleep before K-Falls but a few of us stayed up. We pulled in around 1am but they didn't cut our air so we thought we'd be out of there sort of quick. At about 5:30am it started to get light and everyone was farting in their sleep and rustling and we heard workers walking real close so C and I (after sharing my sleeping bag for about 1 hour of shivering cold naps) decided to switch to a few cars back and come back once the train sided. We had spotted an open box a few cars back but the door was only open on the YD office side so we decided to just hang out in an empty wood chip car instead. 
I guess right after this a NBD came in for a quick CC and the other kids all got on it, but C and I stuck with our car and rolled out and slept hard. We slept until about 11:00 am when we finally started pulling N, putting the brown side of the tarp over us and all of our stuff in the corner in case the bull was watching from the overpass but we had no problems and were soon coasting by the awesome Klamath Lake just north of K-Falls.
The ride was fucking epic, all of the high desert and cascades during the day. I've never been awake for the whole transition between the two in the day, and it was a really bright and clear day. At the first siding we switched to our old boxcar and found it empty, so we figured they had all caught that other train that came in. We pulled into Eugene about 5:00 or 6:00pm and stopped at the river and we detrained and went to go meet up with S who had called us from the house about 3 hours before. 
After dropping of my pack and borrowing a bike I went to go see my ladyfriend A at her friends BBQ all stinky and dirty and with my finger bandaged up with a hair-tie and piece of my bandana from being stupid cutting salami. All of the other kids looked so clean, but they didn't seem care too much because one guy gave me a 40 out of a case of them he bought! What a great way to end a trip!



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