Maine to Cali last winter

[wokofshame]

I've started forgetting pieces of my travels, so i figure it'll help to get them down.
This story starts Christmas a few years ago. I was living in the boonies in northern new england in a derelict former hippie commune turned end-of-the-road trailer park. I got fired from my full-time gig and got a temp gig working for UPS as a driver helper, knowing I was gonna get laid off Xmas Eve. Thanks to that I was able to draw a sweet unemployment check for the next 6 months, 240 a week. Of course i was gonna go back to riding trains and I could live like a king with that much money coming in for doing nothing.
I made my way over to Maine for a friend's New year's party and got dropped off the next day at Rigby Yard in south portland. It was kinna cold, being January in Maine, so as soon as i got dropped off I got a Nestle crunch bar and a 6-pack of Milwaukee's best and walked down that little access road to a train with a blinking FRED on it's end I'd seen from the bridge. Once i got on i bundled up in my sleeping bag on a nice grainer and cracked a beer and listened to the distant hum of idling locomotives and breathed that cold crisp air through my nostrils.
Sometime in the night we started moving. Pan Am RR is notoriously slow and never makes it to the next crew change, so i was surprised to make it all the way to Lowell, MA that morning. The ride is pretty, you pass through marshes near the ocean and several summer vacation towns (including Kennebunkport, childhood home of George W Bush).
In Lowell I rolled off and got some free hot water from the gas station to make tea. I had some quality-ass loose black tea and a nice thermos. I was sitting in the station parking lot when the cops came up and told me there were no knives, or at least open carry of knives, allowed in Lowell. They were cool about it, though, and told me to just carry my knife in my pack til i left town. If anyone reading this has ever been to Lowell, you know how crappy the place is. It's filled with obnoxious retarded hoodlums who think Boston is the far edge of the world. There are any number of southern new england towns exactly like it, polluted, overcrowded, miserable, ridiculous, and full of people with over-the-top Masshole accents. I was glad to get on the T commuter train and ride to Providence RI (another crappy satellite of Boston), to visit some peoples in RI.
A few nights later I made it up to the P&W yard in Valley Falls. The train comes from Worcester in the dead middle of the night and returns after going down to an industrial park in Davisville. It had been miserable cold, cold rain all day long and the train couldn't come soon enough. I barely made it onto the train. She didn't stop at all and I swung on at a good 15 MPH, headlamp on so i could see the rungs to grab. There was no way I was staying in Providence. We got up to the Mass border and all the rain turned into snow. In worcester they were plowing up giant ass piles of snow in the streets. It had snowed all day long the day before.
The Intermodal doesn't leave worcester til after dark so I had all day to kill. Got an early breakfast at 5 am at the Corner Lunch Diner, then did the homebum thing and read books at the library and drank tea most of the day. Worcester has a bunch of cheap diners, some on Shrewsbury St near the CSX yard, and two on Quinsigamond between the CSX and the P&W yard. On Green St is a Thai market with many different kinds of coconut milk, and a Polish food store with a deli that'll make you dees sandwiches on your EBT. Nearby is the Community AIDS Garden and a DIY skatepark, both good places to drink.
Out came the IM and I rode it to Syracuse, woke up for a sec in Selkirk cold as fuck and wanting to get off but left before I could and had to stay on to DeWitt. Adjacent to the yard is a gym where I've been taking showers for years, the first time I snuck in and ever after I've just asked. I was half frozen to death from the single-digit cold, and stiff as fuck. I got so naked and let the hot water loosen my joints and muscles and all my pores opened up. There's nothing better than a hot shower when you're frozen.
I realized my current setup wasnt gonna work. I went across the street to WalMart and swiped a pair of Walls insulated coveralls. Those things changed my world. Also I got a scarf, a new hat and another sweater from the thrift store nearby. Now my gear was truly winter-worthy. I already had some wool gloves, wool mitts, and nylon shell mitts for my hands, and NEOS overboots I'd picked up from a thrift store for my feet. If you haven't heard of NEOS overshoes, check them out. They go over your sneakers and are waterproof and cinch around your pants to keep snow out and have their own soles. I ended up leaving mine under a bridge in the spring when they were kind of worn out but I'm always on the lookout for another pair. I hate tromping around in pac boots, and thinsulate-lined leather work boots are never warm enough when it's truly cold. NEOS is the shit, seriously.
Anyway, now I was set. I drank some beers and cooked some rice up under the overpass. Caught an open boxcar that night to Collinwood Yd in Cleveland, which is a great spot. Ended up spending 3 days there.
The Original Grill is a one-man restaraunt south of the yard. Everyone that goes there gets white-box take out but you can eat there and bring your own beer. I had a double bacon cheeseburger every day i was at Collinwood. About a mile or two towards town is a great rib joint. One sketchy thing happened when I was there. The first day, i went into downtown Cleveland (the fuck if I know why, Downtown sucks) and had a police K9 unit go crazy on me at the transit station. I happened to have a quarter pound of pot sitting in my pack, which i guess was enough for the dog to smell. Luckily I just played it cool and kept on walking by.
There's a semi truck parking lot near the yard where there are a few abndoned semis, an abando RV, and a box truck where i slept. I had a nice Freightliner to myself and holed up drinking Yuengling and getting stoned and licking bacon grease off my fingers. Every day no westbounds would come except when I was at the grill, and night would fall and I'd get in my sleeping bag and say fuck it. It was a really pleasant 3 days of just doing not much but living. Finally, on the 3rd night, I caught a pig in a bucket at dusk and rolled over to Willard.
I stopped and crew changed with my car right next to the head end of an eastbound. As i got out of my snow-covered sleeping bag and got my overboots on, the engineer came out and watched me. I'm sure he was dumbfounded to see a trainrider in that kind of weather.
It was 4 below zero and the streets of Willard were peaceful and covered by light, soft, dusty snow.
I love the quiet of winter. Sound carries far, but there's not much of it. Things are still, and everything feels special. The stars shine brighter, the air is clearer.
I walked to the south side of town and checked into a cheap hotel, got a 30 rack of Juengling and some greasy food and hardly left the hotel room for the next 36 hours. More smoking and drinking and eating delicious food. And this time, catching up on all the truly stupid shit on television. I had about enough of TV by the time I checked out.
to be continued....

 

[Tony Pro]

Man, please do continue. I lap up road stories with this much detail.

 

[Hillbilly Castro]

Ooh this is damn good. Winter cometh and my days of winter travelin are fast upon me.. gotta get stoked. Good writing.

 

[Deleted member 15688]

Yeah man, that is a long haul. I hitched from Masardis in Aroostook county , Maine to Sierra Vista , Arizona a few summers ago. Took me 16 days, cool part is I made $435.00 from donations folks gave me out of generosity.

 

[wokofshame]

(To be combined with original post)
It was sunny and clear when I left my cozy motel room. As soon as I arrived at the yard a hotshot pulled up and I drank shots of maple syrup and ate cheese and crackers until we sided out by the Indiana line. It started snowing and I said fuck this and snuck on the rear unit. It was cozy with the heater cranked, sipping malt liquor, watching the giant steel mills of Gary flare up the sky. Got into the edge of the giant Bedford Park IM terminal outside Chicago a little before midnight, still snowing. The bull was watching the train come in and I hopped off way too close to him for comfort. Hiked down Harlem Ave and found an alcove out of the weather where I could catnap in that playland place that has bumper cars and mini-golf and shit.
3 AM or so and I was back up catching the bus to Willow Springs. That place is almost like a bus station, BNSF trains leave every 30 minutes just about. Filled my thermos and rolled out. You pass an electric fish barrier on the Chicago River that's supposed to kill all Asian Carp coming up the Mississippi watershed and keep them from invading the great lakes. After that I passed out and woke up in the cornfields, woke up to cross the Big Muddy into Ft Madison Iowa. The river was frozen solid. Hopped off at a good clip and ate shit but it didn't hurt because of my nice padded coveralls.
It was time for some greasy breakfast at the Fort Diner. It's a pretty good cheap diner that's the size of a shipping container by the tracks about a mile or two northeast of the crew change.
Ft Madison is one of those river towns that I feel I could live in, the buildings are decently old and run down like there was a past glory to the place. The library has an excellent collection and I read a Ben Lucien Burien book, Tales of the Mississippi, for most of the day.
When it got dark I headed back to the catchout and sipped a few tallboys until a pig train showed up.
It was a fast and cold ride bundled up tight in my fartsack, the wheels making that high whine on the rail as I whizzed through the night.
Argentine Yard was busy and I had a tough time getting out without being seen. Fortunately the moat you usually have to wade through was frozen. I spent until sunrise walking around half of KCK until I figured out how to get to my friends' place in KCMO.
Ended up spending close to a week at their place making giant breakfasts for everybody, drinking gallons of dank coffee, dumpstering the Grocery Outlet next door, reading books, and playing with the cat.
Eventually it was time to leave the couch and I waited by the UP mains for an empty coal to Denver. After 17 different trains rolled in and they all traced to Wyoming, I said fuck it and rode to North Platte on one of them.
Alco, which is/was this Midwestern variety store chain, was going out of business and I got paid cash to hold a sign for a few hours for them. Of course those giant signs are quite adequate for hiding your beer behind.
It's a long, long walk out to the westbound catchout by the "Sheep Jump". Probably four miles on the road then you have to cross the arrival yard and somehow find a hiding spot in the wasteland near the mainline overpass aka Sheep Jump.
It's on the ride to Cheyenne you start seeing cacti. The west has started, and herds of pronghorn antelope graze all across Windyoming.
I rolled in to town by the Carl's Jr and grabbed coffee and hashbrowns for the schlep to the BNSF yard. It was about 12 hours of waiting for the Denver train to roll in and then another 10 before it actually left, with no great rides and a locked DPU of course. Plenty of time to inspect every single tag.
Heading south took forever because the railroad was using the line to run NBD empty coal trains on, so we had to side out every half hour. Ended up possibly getting seen by a northbound around Longs Peak, and I wasn't eager to get busted in Colorado seeing as I already had a bench warrant there.
The hated thumbing commenced, and after cursing out a million Subaru yuppies and wannabe rednecks in expensive diesel pickups, I finally got a ride to Longmont. The bus took me to Boulder and there was a big snowstorm. I caught the Nederland bus but halfway up the canyon the bus got stuck in the middle of the road. Haha. So I hopped out and got a ride with a firefighter the rest of the way up.
This was my first time there and it was alright, I drank beers and played pinball at some place in the shopping center as the skies dumped fluffy powder snow, did my laundry and noticed plenty of smelly hippies at the laundromat. It is pretty around there.
Got all the best food, pistachios and orzo and pasta sauce and garlic and onions and coffee and bacon and sausage and fruit and juice on my food stamps at the store. It was easy to get a ride over to nearby Rollins siding on the D&RG line. Rollins is a cool spot and I was hoping my luck would make a WBD stop for me.
Somebody had built a plank deck between the bridge girders and I hauled a discarded mattress over from outside the Rollins Inn and slept like a king, belly full of good pasta with Italian sausage. A bunch of trains rolled by in the night but none stopped and I'd about given up when I got up and made coffee the next morning. Just as I poured my potion into thermos, along comes a WBD junk train and creaks to a halt. The timing was superb.
I cracked a plug-door boxcar and cooked up the bacon as we slowly rolled through the prettiest country in the world. Into the Moffatt Tunnel, dripping with damp and covered with a thick diesel soot grime. Through the middle of the mountain until finally I emerged to blinding sunshine.
My destination was Winter Park, where some friends were ski bums, and I had no intention of passing it. I gauged the speed carefully as we passed a stopped BNSF Provo-Denver manifest running on trackage rights. We were doing just about 25 mph. The snowbanks were high and as we cleared the eastbound I felt the brakes release and the train start to speed up. It was now or never. I tossed my pack and launched myself in the air out the boxcar door, curled into a ball. The freshly plowed snow was soft as a bale of cotton and I rose to my feet and whooped and laughed with the sheer craziness of it all as my train rolled away.
I got to rent some skis for half price with their employee discount and my friends hooked me up with a free ski pass, we were whizzing up a ski lift cracking beers and blazing away within an hour. It was a powder day at the mountain and we tore it up, blasting down the slopes at top speed.
We stopped at a fort in the woods and somebody had a bunch of acid. I'd never eaten acid before and it didn't really do that much for me, although everyone else seemed to think it was good stuff. It had an effect on me somewhat like meth and I ended up staying up half the night after a later dose kicked in, feeling wide awake.
We got a ride to a trailer park down river in Granby where they were living. Granby is where that dude built a custom concrete-armored cab for his bulldozer back in the 90s and went around bulldozing most of the downtown and the town offices plus the houses of his neighbors that he'd always hated. I think it got termed the Killdozer. There was a bunch of kids sitting around doing dabs, I guess dabs are alright but they kind of get me too stoned.
We tooled around in the backyard working on a ski jump the next day and went tubing, Winter Park has way too many jamokes from Denver on the weekends for anyone sane to want to ski.
I rode the Scamtrak back through the tunnel to Denver, stole some books from the Barnes and Noble and hopped on a SBD junk train. It went completely nowhere overnight and I got on another junk rolling by slowly. The line south of Denver has been total bullshit for years, it took all day just to make it to Colorado Springs. I hopped off and snuck on a Gayhound. The wrong one. It took me straight back to Denver. I had had enough of this BS and took a bus straight to the butthole of Albuquerque to see my aunt.
Spent a peaceful few days playing with her cats and reading books. Hiked up the big mountain that overlooks Albuquerque, post-holing thru deep snow some of the way, saw bobcat tracks and a fox. There's a tram that goes down and I hopped on that for free, it was pretty cool being hundreds of feet in the air bobbing around.
That night was another storm, rain in town and snow up high. I rode outta Belen and as soon as we got up to the high desert it was white. I arrived in Winslow soaked and snuck into a shower at the Flying J.
The manager started beating on the door and called the cops. I beat it over to the Best Western next door and drank the lobby coffee and read on the internet until continental breakfast started. I can't say continental breakfasts are the best food in the world but they sure do make it easy to be a bum.

 

[bandini]

I love it. Fartsack lol. I've read all your stories a couple times. Thanks for sharing with your fellow crustfolk

 

[Deleted member 2626]

where did you end up in Cali?

 

[dumpster harpy]

Whoa. The route you took was almost exactly how I was planning to get West last year. I'd never done it before, but that was the route I figured out from looking at maps. I made it to Syracuse and said 'fuck it" and went back to my girlfriend.

 

[FrumpyWatkins]

Nice job mane