January 18, 2023 • 42 mins
Danelle goes where every hobo winds up at some point. Engineers and conductors show her around the train yard, how it works and why it’s so deadly. Danelle learns how railroads shaped our country, giving us times zones, for a start. The world of the train yard is so frightening, Danelle wonders if hopping a freight train means you’re always riding suicide.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Just a heads up. This episode contains aboult language and
discussion of suicide, so take care while listening. When I
first imagined Ruby hopping trains, my idea of it was romantic.
She'd be sitting with her back resting at the edge
of an open box car door, open fields rushing by her,
(00:23):
one leg extended, smoking a cigarette. I knew that trains
were dangerous, but this was the image I clung to.
It helped me get to sleep at night. I also
recognized that if I was going to understand when she
was up against, I had to see a train yard myself.
That's how I ended up in Roseville, one of the
biggest yards on the West Coast, to see what my
daughter would face if she was running through the train
(00:45):
yard trying to hop a train. Sometimes, you know, a
train goes by and it's squealing and you hear all
these sounds of like chuck chuck, the clock, the clock
noises and stuff. But then other times, in the middle
of night, a car just sales by you You didn't
hear anything, not in a whisper. It just comes out
of the fog and just you're like, oh God, but
but the but the kids who traveled don't know this,
and they could be running between long corridors of trains. Absolutely, yeah, yes,
(01:13):
I've seen all kinds of people do that. I'd heard
Ruby might have come through Roosevelt, a railroad hub with
tracks that could take her over the Sierras to the
Midwest or north to Canada. But at first you'd have
to make her way through the train yard, across the
tracks and between the freight cars. You're in the danger zone.
It's basically like running across the tarmac at l a X.
(01:33):
If I were to try to walk across all these
tracks ahead of me, each one of them is easily
able to have, like a fifteen thousand ton train sixties
seventy eight. Although I didn't know much about trains the
day Ruby left, I was learning as much as I could,
as fast as I could. What I could learn on
the web would only take me so far. Like there
was finding out lots of people died in the train
(01:55):
yard every year. But how did that happen? If I'm
running across in front of a plane that's landing, Um,
you know, most people would think that would be crazy.
It would be like something you do like on an
insane daredevil. Bet No, one compares that to running in
front of a train which could be going almost the
same speed. I came to Roosevelt to find out what
(02:16):
Ruby could face in the yard, but it turned out
that this dusty little town had some surprises for me. Sure,
I didn't think much about trains before Ruby left, but
when her friends talked about riding or I imagined Ruby
in that box car, I felt the draw. That was
my naive idea about how romantic a solo journey could be.
But in Roseville I learned the people who ride the
(02:38):
rails and the people who work in the yard experience
something more visceral. Inside the yard, they go up against
rob power every day, and it changes how they see
the world. The train yard is where all of this begins,
the gateway to the city of the rails. For HBO's
(03:25):
the train yard is like the subway platform the bus stop.
They don't plan to spend a ton of time there,
but they do because they usually don't know when their
train is going to leave. So Roseville, one of the
biggest yards in the West, was a good place to
start to understand the situation Ruby face when she tried
to hop a train without the fifty or sixty trains
at a coming through Roosevelt. There was a lot of emotion,
(03:47):
a lot of things could go wrong. I needed someone
to guide me through this world, because while it was big,
noisy and obvious, it was also mysterious to outsiders. Beyond
that chaos, there was more than you could see at
a glance. I wanted to find the person who could
show me that, so I started calling around, trying to
find a yard worker or a train conductor, someone who
worked on the ground who could walk me through life
(04:09):
in the yard. Finally, on my tenth call, a guy
told me he knew someone who could talk my ear
off basically just because they need. That's my kind of guy.
My name is Robert Hudson. I'm a former switchman and
brakeman and conductor for the Pacific Railroad. I told Robert
I wanted to know what my daughter faced in the yard.
(04:29):
So on a Wednesday afternoon, he picked me up to
drive me around Roseville. He had a bunch of spots
he wanted to show me that would give me a
full view of the yard. And Roseville is one of
the weirdest towns that you see around California. Because Robert
is ready faced with thick sandy brown hair and blue
eyes that brighton when he talks about the train yard,
and boy can he talk. It's got five sections, and
(04:53):
if you drive through Roseville it looks like any other
California mountain town except for the fact that you can
see and hear the trains all time. You'd never suspect
it was part of the international economy, a hub where
good shipped from Asia passed through on their way to
places all around the US. On our way around the yard,
Robert showed me how much the country owes two little
towns like this. We're actually right next to the old
(05:15):
telegraphy office, which I don't think a lot of people
realize that. If you ever heard heard of Sprint UM,
Sprint is Southern Pacific Internal Network Telephone YEP. It was
origionally started as the Railroad telephones before we had radios.
In the seventies, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid telegraph lines
(05:36):
along its train tracks. Over the next hundred years, those
lines became fiber optic cables, and in two the Southern
Pacific began to sell its communication network as a service
to private customers, which later became Sprint Mobile Southern Pacific Railroad,
internal network telephony. All these facts about the rails that
came rattling out of Robert made me go, huh, really,
(05:58):
people have no idea how much the railroad effects in
their lives, you know, like it reaches its fingers into
almost everything. We get all these different cities that's sprung up,
just like Roseville, you know, came out of nowhere because
it was just a place for two railroads crossed. With
Robert is my guide. This place was coming alive to me.
There was order in this chaos. It wasn't just a
(06:19):
place where two rail tracks crossed. It was right in
the center of the economy. As we approach the center
of the yard, Robert pulls over and this is um
Right here is like the side of the yard, which
is the receiving yard that normally picks up a whole
bunch of cars from We're looking at the main part
(06:40):
of the yard, about fifty tracks wide, with pieces of
trains scattered around, a few train cars linked together, standing
here or there on different tracks, not going anywhere. Robert
points to a long cut of cars stacked high with
shrink wrapped packages, and then there's a whole bunch of
of cars that have lumber on them from you know,
upen Oregon in Washington, and so those are a lot
(07:02):
of those are actually probably headed down to the Bay
Area to get on ships and to go to China,
because our wood is actually going mostly to China. Right now,
I looked at at the United States is a number
one exporter of wood to China, nearly a billion tons
of wood a year, and each one of those cars
carried two hundred thousand pounds of lumber, enough to build
six houses per car. The memberships out to China through
(07:24):
the Port of Oakland. But the same freight trains can
carry anything chicken feed, meet, even air Jordan's. Some cars
hold finished goods destined for Walmart and Amazon warehouses. And
along the way a lot of those trains passed through Roseville.
It's one of America's main gateways for shipping. Robert told
me what happens when the train enters the yard, so
it comes in is one train shuffles up like into
(07:46):
different pieces, and it goes out the other end, and
it's now like a new train. It's only if it
actually has to get shuffled that it goes in the yard.
In the first place. Otherwise it would just go right
past the yard. But if it's you know, if it
has to get shuffled and it comes in on the
west side, say, and then they put it back together
and give it a new engine and it takes off
to the east side. This is the same basic operation
(08:07):
that's sent goods around America since we started shipping by
rail in the early eight hundreds. Trains enter the yard
carrying one set of cars and leave with another. And
if you're paying attention, they can tell you a lot.
So the fun thing about the railroad is that because
it's behind the scenes, uh, you have the sense of
like every industry, I mean, there's a there's a finger
on the pulse of like the nation that we have
(08:29):
that a lot of people don't. So the railroad is
very much like um driven by the whole economy. So
about a third of all of the goods in the
entire country that are sold in every store go through
the Port of Oakland or Port of l A. So
we move all that stuff. Those are just two ports,
(08:50):
and they receive a third of the goods that are
then shipped across America. And Robert said he knew when
the economy was getting shaky just by watching the traffic
in the yard, because I could tell, Like by in
two thousand, for example, I knew that the economy wasn't
doing well for sure, you know, maybe like you're in advance.
I mean, because there was less and less railroad cars.
I mean I was, I was working over time, and
(09:10):
then all of a sudden, I was barely working seven
hours a day and getting paid for eight. And this
is before the actual crash. Yeah, before the crash, by
at least a good eight months or something. Roseville is
more than it appears. This dusty old yard is an
international crossroads with hundreds of thousands of tons of goods
passing through. Sure didn't look that way, so we ignore
(09:33):
the train yards mostly, and the trains are indifferent to us.
They're too big, too busy to react to a little
human or two who might be standing in the way.
And taking advantage of that are thousands of hoboes looking
in the empty cars, hoping that and all of this
slamming together and breaking apart, they could slip between the shadows, quickly,
leap over the gaps quietly to get where they're going unscathed.
(09:56):
From my vantage point, at the end of the yard.
The odds of them make king It didn't look good.
Robert was taking me to an even scarier place, the
place where all the noise falls away. The hop is
probably the most dangerous place in the yard. Before I
(10:27):
met up with Robert and Roseville, I went online trying
to figure out where I should go next. To find Ruby.
I found maps of train routes and imagine the view
from a train headed over the rockies or alongside the
Hudson in the fall. But I also wanted some basic facts.
There's seven railroads with big freight yards like Roseville stashed
around the country. These places where the trains come together
(10:48):
and break apart are where hoboes switched from one train
to another, heading to where they want to go. Leaping
between trains is a dangerous move. About five people a
year die on railroad property, more than one a day.
To help me understand how these people died, Robert took
me across the yard to see the hump. So we
see if there's some spot, so way exactly are we yes?
(11:13):
I was gonna say, this is a spot where we're
on the quieter side of like the rail yard. Robert
points to the spot he wanted to show me, maybe
a hundred feet from where we're standing. It's like trains
would be coming from the left of me and going
to the right of me, and the right after you
know you as the hump. Then it goes into the
bowl to the to the right of me. It's definitely
(11:34):
like a substantial hill. I think the mountain is probably
twenty feet, but then below that there's a bowl that
actually goes down into the ground and is lower than
the ground level, so it might drop twenty five ft.
I watched as one by one, huge freight cars glide
across the tracks played out on the other side of
the hump, going maybe five miles. They appear to operate
(11:54):
on their own power, the engines pushing it up that hill,
and then they're just rolling off into that to that
bowl by gravity. It's eerie. The train cars moved silently, swiftly.
Unless you knew to look for them, you'd never see
them coming. Would we see them coming? And writers weren't
(12:17):
the only ones who are at risk on the hump.
The people who worked there were two. JP Right started
his life in the yard working on top of the hump,
and he knew how dangerous that work could be. How
big is the yard that you started at? Which one
was that? Oh gosh, it was Osborne Yards in Louisville, Kentucky.
I can't remember how many acres it was. The hump
is still hand operated. As cars come over the hill,
(12:40):
there's a human being there separating the cars by hand.
JP right used to be one of those people working
the hump, pulling the pins to separate the cars at
the knuckle before they rolled onto the tracks. As simple
as it sounds, the job can be grueling. So you
reach in maybe like half of arm lights and you
pull this thing that lift the pin up in between
(13:00):
the two knuckles. So you're lifting ten to twelve pounds
with one armed all night, over and over and over
and over again. The kind of the train is coming
over the hump and you're reaching your hand in there
to pull this lever. Yet that allows the car to
separate back gravity when it goes over the hump. As
(13:21):
the train keeps rolling new cars up to the hump,
a pin pullar has to be there at the ready,
and some trains are miles long. The plan was to
get six cards a night on a shift, so there's
two people doing it. How many nights I would walk ten, twelve,
fifteen miles a night on top the hill. I lost
(13:42):
forty pounds the first year I did it. It took strength,
quick reflexes, an excellent hand eye coordination, and if you
made a mistake, it was one you'd never forget. Robert
Hudson told me pin pullers had a reputation, you know,
the pin pullers, by the fact that they would lose
fingers almost inevitably. So they're like two or three fingers
on these guys, and they grabuly like pin out and
(14:03):
they'd separate the cars that way. But as you can imagine,
like that was very dangerous. JP told me about one
close call he had. I was reading the cars on
the track next to me, and I accidentally moved over
a little bit too far to the next track, and
UH car comes flying by, and I felt the wind
of it on my shoulder and on my head, So
(14:24):
I was that close and then there it went, and
I was like, fuck, I never heard coming. But JP
knew the hazards and being a pin pully was just
an entry point to something greater. He had his sight
set on the best job in the yard, being an
engineer who can pull down a hundred thousand dollars a
year with just a high school education. Besides the money,
driving the train was a huge part of the appeal.
(14:46):
As dangerous as they are, trains show you hidden places
in the world. As four testosterone purposes, there was nothing
better than getting up on the train on a really
nice night. You got to really good locomotives. So you're
gonna go sixty and you crack open the windows. It's
(15:08):
nice outside. You cracked that throttle and off you go
through the back roads of Kentucky all the way through
to Tennessee. I mean, there's an absolute allure to the
whole thing. Of course, it's almost like you're in the
wild wild West riding your big you know, four thousand horses.
When you are participating in how you feel that you
(15:31):
are really building the country. You're you're out there doing
something that has a long tradition. You're in one of
the oldest unions in the United States. There's all this
brotherhood's talk, and it's easily to get wrapped up into
this whole fucking cowboy movie that you're a part of
every night. It isn't just a thrill that attracts rail
(15:54):
workers is knowing that you're part of something bigger. Pretty
Much anything that anybody has on their body or in
their home or anything is delivered somehow on a train.
So it's a very important part of our economy. And
we're told that, you know, as part of the company jargon,
but we also know that, hey, we're proud. It's a tradition.
(16:15):
You're proud is a great tradition in this country. Their tradition,
JP is so proud of still uses technology that hasn't
been improved upon from more than a century. But these
simple technologies, like the hump or the high tech of
their time, they changed the world, just like the Internet
or smartphones have shaped our world today. These trains connected America,
(16:39):
tying individual cities together into a country. They created a network.
Historian Richard White told me how the railroads really were
the Internet of their day. Places that have been isolated
from each other. They might be thirty miles apart, but
nobody would ever see each other because it was too
hard to go down muddy roads to do it. With
the rails, those people would become neighbors. And it's not
(16:59):
just thirty mile So we've been hundreds of miles away,
places that would have been utterly strange would now become familiar.
That's essentially the same thing the Silicon Valley promised in
the late early twenty first century. The The argument was simply,
information could travel so quickly people would be able to
see each other, talk to each other, here each other
(17:19):
without filters in between them. Then, in fact, this kind
of neighborly listening community would arise from the technology itself.
The railroads brought people together, just like the Internet did,
connecting people in ways that were previously impossible, And just
like with the Internet, there was a lot of commentary
and criticism about the railroads. Phil Sexton, a local railroad
(17:41):
historian in Roseville, told me that when trains began to
spread in the early eighteen hundreds, they had their own
version of the y two K panic. There were actually
scientists in Europe who postulated that by moving as fast
as thirty miles an hour, you would be irrevocably damaged
due to the g forces. But damn the warnings. Americans
(18:02):
wanted to be on the move. Being able to travel
quickly and freely change the US from a farming country
to an industrial one. Starting with the big growth of
the cities. The people who took to the rails of
the eighties had something in common with those who are
on the rails today. They just had to go. Some
people just have itchy feet. If you remember the end
of Huck Finn, he talks about lighting out for the
(18:24):
territory ahead of the rest because it's just too civilized
where he is, And a lot of people felt that way,
And a lot of people wanted farm land, or they
just wanted what they felt was more freedom and kind
of breathing space. With trains, remote places whose journeys were
once too treacherous or too far, we're now within reach.
That meant that people who wanted to go could go
(18:45):
further and much more easily. All those dreamers and scoundrels
who wanted a new life could board a train to California,
which had a geography much different from the East. Who
could imagine seven thousand foot tall amount and being in
snow in June or July for you know, the strange
(19:05):
rocks that you would see of verdant, vibrant colors in
different mining areas. It's very unlike any in the eastern
United States, but it wasn't just California, it was all
the stops along the way, the three thousand mile breadth
of the country, with the tracks late east to west
along the route. Noon was different in New York than
it was in Sacramento. Trains had to stay on schedule,
(19:27):
schedules had to stay in sync. Robert Husson described the
railroad solution when we all used to this day time zones.
Time zones comes from the railroad, you know, we we
uh we get time zones because they had to be
on the same time when they got to the next town.
They couldn't, you know, say like, oh yeah, sorry, noon
(19:48):
is different here, fifteen minutes different. Something that didn't work
for them. So they had to find a way to
like have every begin on the same time zone. I
mean time zones. There's such a given in life. I
never thought that someone or some busy this invented them.
You know, it's hard to believe that there was a
time when people would just look up and be like, well,
the suns in the middle of the skuy, so it's new.
It had to be right, otherwise there was no way
(20:09):
to communicate. If the train was five minutes behind, then
they'd be crashing into another train. The railroads accomplished a
huge feed synchronizing the world's measurement of time from one
zone to the next. So if you're ever curious why
New York is three hours ahead of California, the answer
is railroads. Some historians say the railroads invented modern life,
and that modernity begins after a country builds his first railroad.
(20:33):
So many things developed by railroads hundreds of years ago
are still part of our everyday lives. Railroads gave us
cruise control and air brakes, even QR codes. The way
they synchronized time even had a role in Einstein's theory
of relativity. But really was off the clock, out in
the world, unconcerned by schedules. If I was right that
she was train hopping somewhere, it was funny to me
(20:55):
that young travel was rejecting modern life by hopping on
a train, the thing that created the world. They were
rejecting something primal, drew people to the rails. Otherwise they'd
take one look at the train yard and come straight home.
Had weby been through Roseville? Where had she gone? What
had she seen? I still didn't know, but I knew
(21:17):
it didn't really matter where she hopped out from. It
was obvious that any train yard could kill you. Did
Ruby know this when she left? Was that even a
factor in her decision? Then again, maybe all of the
reasons I was coming up with didn't matter to her.
They were a mom's reasons, and the fact that I
wanted to find a reason seemed like a very mom
(21:38):
thing too. That explanation could be a lot simpler than that,
if I was willing to let my mind go to
the part of the past I didn't want to revisit.
Ruby had been having a hard time before I moved
us to Oakland, and we'd almost lost her. Then I
was running off to the rails. Ruby's second attempt at
suicide m hm hm, who I I'm gonna tell the
(22:19):
truth about We came before she went to hop trains.
When she was fourteen years old, she tried to commit
suicide and I have a journal of that time. Oh God,
(22:40):
they're heavy, um, it says Ruby. Trouble here it comes.
So January, sitting in the St. John's emergency room looking
at Ruby hooked up to I V's oxygen. She's taken
a drug overdose. A number of different drugs, the names
(23:02):
of which are unfamiliar to people at the emergency room.
This happened four years before Ruby ran away from graduation,
and rereading it was almost more than I could bear.
After Roosevelle, I recognized the despair in those pages when
passage struck me hard. I consulted a psychiatrist while Ruby
was in the hospital. We spoke about moving forward from
(23:23):
this tragedy. What would be the next steps for her.
He told me she couldn't go back to high school
every day. Min's really pulled the rug out from under
me with this. He said that if I placed her
back in Malibu, she would do this again, and reminded
me that some years the goal was just to keep
her alive. That's it, just keep her breathing. That was
(23:46):
as much as we could hope for, not dream of
her using her gifts and art, her talent in music
to make a life that had meaning to her and
brought something to the world. Considering the hopes I had
for my daughter, this seems so meager, so base. Reading this,
I still feel the anguish that this was the goal
again some mother I turned out to be sitting on
(24:11):
the floor of my office with my journal scattered around me.
The person I wanted to talk to is JP. Right
since that first phone call, we talked a lot about
how much the rails could take from you physically and emotionally.
JP was a railroad engineer with the soul of a hobo.
I first found him through his songs that spoke to
modern day hobo life but not no hope been traveling
(24:35):
and not going to help Ball. Something about JP's music
made me think he would understand, so I called him
it's because it's so dangerous. When we were talking about
how the yard comes together, you know in the silent
hors that are sliding off the hump. A question that
(24:55):
was in my mind then, which I sort of suppressed,
was was this jumping to the rails that attempt to
commit suicide again? Second attempt? Oh? I mean, do you
think that is an overreaction on my part? Most of
the people that I've met that has an hardcore travelers,
(25:17):
they know that they're going to this place. It's almost
like the shadows within the shadow. So you know, it's
like I'm I'm so desperate uh to be gone, that
I'm going to go somewhere where I know that I
will be almost invisible to all of society. Nobody is
going to care that I'm out here. It is the darkness.
(25:39):
You're going head first into the darkness, and you're kind
of just leaving the whole thing up to faith. If
you really just want to kill yourself, then that's a
good place to go, if you don't want to actually
do it. I mean, in the context of the miss
(26:00):
a cool idea of the hero's journey, that's you're standing
at the edge of the cliff. I'm taking the risk.
I'm throwing all my cards on the table and I'm
leaving and I'm gone. Fuck it. So I mean I
could see that. Yeah, maybe leaven nothing. That's my trade.
(26:23):
Lonely sorrows. The story I'm gone, Lord, I'm gone. Lord,
I'm gone, Lord, I'm gone. Was shp right that walking
(26:50):
into the rail yard was walking head first into the darkness.
I've been on the edge of the darkness, but I
wanted to find someone to take me in. I knew
that wasn't going to be easy. The railroads will arrest
you for trespassing if they catch you, and if you
get someone to bring you inside, that person will get fired.
They could get fired for even talking to me. The
(27:11):
only reason j P and Robert Husson were willing to
go on the record is because they don't work for
the railroad anymore. But how I'll call anybody, And the
person I wanted to talk to was a conductor. Freight
conductors are not like the ones you see on a
passenger train, the guys who take your ticket. In the
world of freight trains, the engineer drives the train and
the conductor manages it, meaning he walks the length of
(27:34):
the train to check that it's in order and guides
it through the yard when it arrives. He knows the yard,
knows how it moves and it's rhythm, and he interacts
with hoboes all the time. If I could find a
conductor willing to take me into the yard, I'd know
a lot. In just a few hours, I hunted down
a copy of the conductor's union roster and called our
(27:56):
emailed everyone on it, and then just sort of waited
and waited, did and waited. I was amazed when conductor
Jonathan Esposito called me back and just curious, so you
you just found my name? I called. I called several people.
You're the only persons that have called has called you back. Okay,
(28:18):
all right. Jonathan was weary at first, of course, because
he could lose his job for talking to the media.
And I wanted something even worse than that. I wanted
him to take me trespassing to learn about life inside
the yard. So I asked it. To my surprise, he
said yes. So what I will do is I'll take
you to Roseville and then I will take you out
(28:40):
to either Westgate or Polk I don't I don't want
to make it. I don't want to get you in trouble.
But the other hand, I really want to do this. No,
I've already I've already said I'm gonna I don't have
a problem doing it. I was so astonished by this.
I called one of my railroad buddies, who also thought
Jonathan was nuts. Oh, I don't care how many tours
(29:02):
of duty he had into rack, and I don't care
how big his balls are. They will fire his ass
for behavior onbecoming an employee. It'll be very hard for
him to beat it. Even so, Jonathan kept his word.
I met up with him in front of his house
near Sacramento on a Sunday afternoon. I thought it would
(29:24):
be just him and me, But he had a woman
with him in his driveway. Hey, Amy, hy She was
part of the plan too. The reason he was bringing
his girlfriend Amy along was for our cover story. I'd
sit in the front and Amy be in the bath.
If anyone stopped us, he'd say it was his girlfriend's mom.
(29:46):
He was showing around. Thanks, Jonathan. So when we get
into the yard, do we go through a security gate?
We just go through some kind of a gate where
you have a gate. I will show you how easy
it is to to get into the yard. We set
off in Jonathan's SUV out of the subdivision where he
(30:08):
and Amy lived and down a big country road. We
driven half an hour when Jonathan pulled into what appeared
to be just another vacant lot. No signs announcing an
entrance are warnings to stay away from railroad property. But
all of a sudden we were inside the yard. Oh wow,
here we are Pacific Railroad rose Ville Yard. Part of
(30:32):
Jonathan's plan included bringing his railroad radio. He was talking
to me, but he had one ear open to hear
if the railroad was on to us. Actual. As he
drove along, Jonathan pointed out the tracks that extend from
the hump, each name for its destination. This is the
(30:54):
east end of the yard. Up that way is too
uh cake Falls, Dunsmere. Going that way is Sparks, and
the east. The east means the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.
These trains claim up through remote wilderness, their own private
slices of America. It's a view almost no one in
(31:15):
America gets. But it comes with a cost. From what
Jonathan described, it's far from idyllic. I'm sure he's going
to be upset with me when I say that. You
don't stop now on the mountain deer everywhere here, everywhere.
You just turn the lights out and you ring the
bell and hopefully they get off the track. And nine
times out of tend they get off the track. Jonathan
(31:38):
had a passenger seat in the rail cab to all
the destruction created by the train, the way the train
plows through the world, and no one better get in
his way. He hasn't become hardened to that, even after
a decade in this job. I feel sorry for Awesome.
They literally follow the rail and you basically end up
(32:01):
chasing them down. You're like, come on, man, just just
get off, get off. But there you've got to stay
in the rail there half the sense of death is
so present that it's on the mind of everyone who
comes close to the trains. Jonathan even brought up suicide
(32:24):
on topic. I wasn't going to mention. So when you
talk about someone who wants to commit suicide, they just
stand there and they're looking at you, and you can
tell they're trying to time it to jump in front
of you, and most often they are successful. A few
(32:45):
times they're not successful. The hobos and the railroad workers
had something in common. They were outsiders who chose to
live in a world defined by these behemos, these huge
beasts that shaped our country, and up against that power
every day, death was always close at hand. If the
train is going less than ten, I'm gonna hit you
(33:07):
and I'm gonna drag you underneath all those locomotives and
you will You will probably die, but you are going
to feel most of it. So I mean suicide. I
attempted it, not in front of a train, a long
long time ago, over a stupid thing, and I'm glad
it didn't happen. I do understand that part. You get
(33:28):
to that point where you're like, there's nothing left for
me to do. But if they don't understand when they
throw themselves in front of a train, is that crew
has to see that they're going to You're gonna feel it,
you feel it. I was thinking about the possums and
(33:59):
I was about Ruby when I realized I knew where
we were. We were near the railroad offices where Robert
Hudson and I stood overlooking the thickest part of the yard.
Jonathan took us past a little park near the tracks
where he knew hoboes hit out waiting to hop a
train the creek. This is a place where they like
(34:24):
to stay. You know, cameras aren't going to see interne here,
drones aren't going to see interneth here, and you can
quickly jump onto a train. That's the party. The park
had a few trees, an old tanker car covered with graffiti,
and some drainage ditches where it would be easy to hide.
So Ruby would have launched from a place like this.
I didn't see a hole in the fence. Maybe there
was a tunnel from there to the trains. What was it?
(34:46):
A hunter feet It was hard for me to gauge
the distance, but whatever it was, it was too far.
There were trains moving constantly on the tracks, and at
night the yard is dark. That's at nighttime him. There's
no lights in the receding yard, and there's no big
right light on the back end. It's me with a lanner.
(35:07):
Jonathan told me that when the engineer is shoving his
train through the yard going backwards to the hump, he
doesn't have time to look for trespassers like that. I'm
not looking for a for a trespasser because my focus
is on the rail in front of me. Person tries
to crawl through in the twentie car of the train,
I'm not going to see that. The engineer is not
(35:27):
going to see it. And now this person is crossing through,
and who knows what might happen. It's pitch black, and
Jonathan is focused on his job. He's not paying attention
to anyone trying to cross the tracks. Chances are they
wouldn't see the train either until it was too late.
(35:50):
And while Jonathan understood getting to the point where there
is nothing left to do, he didn't want to help
anyone in their lives that way. But they might force
him to. And that's why Jonathan told me he didn't
like hobos. They don't care about us. What I mean
by us is they'll walk in front of our trains
and not think anything of it, and they'll blindly climb
(36:12):
through our train and the next thing you know, they're
hit by somebody. Despite what he says, when he's in
a position to help out travelers, he does. A yard
worker warned Jonathan that there were a bunch of hoboes
on his train, so he went to take a look
and brought them a case of water. I said, look,
I'm not going to get you in trouble. You just
need to be quiet, keep your head down. We're going
(36:34):
to Roseville. I will let you off outside of it.
I'm not gonna let you off in the yard. I
will stop short of the yard at such as heights,
and I will let you off there. I was surprised
at how moved I was by my time with Jonathan,
not just being close up with the train getting the
feel of the yard, but his emotions and his integrity.
(36:56):
Jonathan had seen the determination of the people in the
yard who wanted to end it all, and most of
the time, if you died there, no one would know
if you'd decided to kill yourself or if you'd just
left it all up to fate. The Ruby Ditch says
a graduation. She wanted to live. She wanted a life
that was fully under her control, where she didn't have
to answer to me or to anyone. But there's a
(37:18):
difference between a rebellious act and a reckless one. After
my trip to Roosevelt, I wondered where Ruby was on
that spectrum. I didn't know. I didn't know anything about
her anymore, including where she was. I was in the kitchen,
staring a big pot of soup and not yet adjusted
to cooking for one when the phone rang. When I
(37:41):
heard Ruby's voice, I went straight to the Ruby reporting
station I had made at my desk. She was in
a van with a bunch of musicians, traveling over the
border from California to Oregon. One of her companions in
the van knew of a place they could crash in
the San Juan Islands, and that's where they were headed
to spend a week or more writing songs. On the
porch of this old house overlooking the water, I was
(38:04):
shutting down notes frantically, trying to get as much information
as I could about where she was and who she
was with. I was so busy listening for clues, I
didn't think to ask her why she'd left or what
she'd been thinking. She said she was happy, happier than
she'd ever been, and she had no plans to come back.
I shouldn't worry. She was with awesome people and they
were taking good care of each other. She had to
(38:26):
get off the phone, though. I guess she'd said all
she wanted to say, and she was in charge of
our interactions now. But who was she with and how
could they take care of her and each other? Did
any of them have money? Could these new friends keep
her safe? Could they make her life worth living? And
what was that life like, especially for a young woman? Next,
(38:49):
I find people who tell me how to live life
on the rails. I wanted to come out there and
see you face to faces. I always think it's better
when you see people face to face. Oh you're gonna
see and oh, Bette, you rode freight drain. I've seen
a lot of old bats, but not too many women.
Next episode, I mean train writing legend CC Rider, a
woman who survived decades on the rails, and I tracked
(39:10):
down present day writers who can show me their world
there's places on train tracks that you can't go on
a regular road. You know. I think back, and I'm like,
you can't. I'll never be able to see this again.
High adventure all the time, the grittiness and just living
in the crack. She opened her mouths and I put
(39:33):
my fist dimmer throat, And when I was done with her,
I told her the only reason I whooped your asses
to save your life because you would not shut the
fund up. That's next week and coming up this season
on City of the Rails. And he pulls the trigger
and it just goes click click, and then he cocks
it or gets it right or whatever. And then it
(39:54):
turned to blah blah blah in the crew change, if
you read where you get off in the spot it
talks about. And that's was this little magical thing. New
Orleans in the wintertime is the festival of dirty kids,
the festival of traveler kids. Your daughter probably went back
and forth on this bridge, and I know she didn't
(40:14):
know about all this. There's no way other places that
you come from, so diversion of of what you considered
to be utopian life that you would rather exists of
friends of society, squad. I'm doing stuff like this. It's
kind of like walking into another dimension, another world. Every
(40:35):
day was different and never knowing what that day was
going to bring that taste, that feelings as well to
(41:04):
drinking Castle Mal sit on the beach and just turning
the blue came out with the brand new drug and
that sadded to pull up plug, look what You're done.
(41:28):
City of the Rails is hosted by Medal Morton and
developed in partnership between Flip Turn Studios and I Heart Podcasts.
At I Heart, our team is executive producer and showrunner
Julian Weller, senior producer abu Za far and producers Emily Maronoff,
Shina Ozaki, and Zoey Denkla, with production support from Marci
to Pina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman. Thanks
(41:51):
to Scott Mishod at Flail Records for our theme music,
Wayfaring Stranger performed by his old hobo band Profane Sass,
and thanks JP Right for the use of his song
Hobo Life. Our executive producer at Flip Turn is Mark
Healey and I Heart thanks to Nikki e Tor and
Bethan Machalooso. We'll be back next week with lots of hoboes,
(42:13):
young and legendary on City of the Rails because and
made a lo
Just a heads up. This episode contains aboult language and
discussion of suicide, so take care while listening. When I
first imagined Ruby hopping trains, my idea of it was romantic.
She'd be sitting with her back resting at the edge
of an open box car door, open fields rushing by her,
(00:23):
one leg extended, smoking a cigarette. I knew that trains
were dangerous, but this was the image I clung to.
It helped me get to sleep at night. I also
recognized that if I was going to understand when she
was up against, I had to see a train yard myself.
That's how I ended up in Roseville, one of the
biggest yards on the West Coast, to see what my
daughter would face if she was running through the train
(00:45):
yard trying to hop a train. Sometimes, you know, a
train goes by and it's squealing and you hear all
these sounds of like chuck chuck, the clock, the clock
noises and stuff. But then other times, in the middle
of night, a car just sales by you You didn't
hear anything, not in a whisper. It just comes out
of the fog and just you're like, oh God, but
but the but the kids who traveled don't know this,
and they could be running between long corridors of trains. Absolutely, yeah, yes,
(01:13):
I've seen all kinds of people do that. I'd heard
Ruby might have come through Roosevelt, a railroad hub with
tracks that could take her over the Sierras to the
Midwest or north to Canada. But at first you'd have
to make her way through the train yard, across the
tracks and between the freight cars. You're in the danger zone.
It's basically like running across the tarmac at l a X.
(01:33):
If I were to try to walk across all these
tracks ahead of me, each one of them is easily
able to have, like a fifteen thousand ton train sixties
seventy eight. Although I didn't know much about trains the
day Ruby left, I was learning as much as I could,
as fast as I could. What I could learn on
the web would only take me so far. Like there
was finding out lots of people died in the train
(01:55):
yard every year. But how did that happen? If I'm
running across in front of a plane that's landing, Um,
you know, most people would think that would be crazy.
It would be like something you do like on an
insane daredevil. Bet No, one compares that to running in
front of a train which could be going almost the
same speed. I came to Roosevelt to find out what
(02:16):
Ruby could face in the yard, but it turned out
that this dusty little town had some surprises for me. Sure,
I didn't think much about trains before Ruby left, but
when her friends talked about riding or I imagined Ruby
in that box car, I felt the draw. That was
my naive idea about how romantic a solo journey could be.
But in Roseville I learned the people who ride the
(02:38):
rails and the people who work in the yard experience
something more visceral. Inside the yard, they go up against
rob power every day, and it changes how they see
the world. The train yard is where all of this begins,
the gateway to the city of the rails. For HBO's
(03:25):
the train yard is like the subway platform the bus stop.
They don't plan to spend a ton of time there,
but they do because they usually don't know when their
train is going to leave. So Roseville, one of the
biggest yards in the West, was a good place to
start to understand the situation Ruby face when she tried
to hop a train without the fifty or sixty trains
at a coming through Roosevelt. There was a lot of emotion,
(03:47):
a lot of things could go wrong. I needed someone
to guide me through this world, because while it was big,
noisy and obvious, it was also mysterious to outsiders. Beyond
that chaos, there was more than you could see at
a glance. I wanted to find the person who could
show me that, so I started calling around, trying to
find a yard worker or a train conductor, someone who
worked on the ground who could walk me through life
(04:09):
in the yard. Finally, on my tenth call, a guy
told me he knew someone who could talk my ear
off basically just because they need. That's my kind of guy.
My name is Robert Hudson. I'm a former switchman and
brakeman and conductor for the Pacific Railroad. I told Robert
I wanted to know what my daughter faced in the yard.
(04:29):
So on a Wednesday afternoon, he picked me up to
drive me around Roseville. He had a bunch of spots
he wanted to show me that would give me a
full view of the yard. And Roseville is one of
the weirdest towns that you see around California. Because Robert
is ready faced with thick sandy brown hair and blue
eyes that brighton when he talks about the train yard,
and boy can he talk. It's got five sections, and
(04:53):
if you drive through Roseville it looks like any other
California mountain town except for the fact that you can
see and hear the trains all time. You'd never suspect
it was part of the international economy, a hub where
good shipped from Asia passed through on their way to
places all around the US. On our way around the yard,
Robert showed me how much the country owes two little
towns like this. We're actually right next to the old
(05:15):
telegraphy office, which I don't think a lot of people
realize that. If you ever heard heard of Sprint UM,
Sprint is Southern Pacific Internal Network Telephone YEP. It was
origionally started as the Railroad telephones before we had radios.
In the seventies, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid telegraph lines
(05:36):
along its train tracks. Over the next hundred years, those
lines became fiber optic cables, and in two the Southern
Pacific began to sell its communication network as a service
to private customers, which later became Sprint Mobile Southern Pacific Railroad,
internal network telephony. All these facts about the rails that
came rattling out of Robert made me go, huh, really,
(05:58):
people have no idea how much the railroad effects in
their lives, you know, like it reaches its fingers into
almost everything. We get all these different cities that's sprung up,
just like Roseville, you know, came out of nowhere because
it was just a place for two railroads crossed. With
Robert is my guide. This place was coming alive to me.
There was order in this chaos. It wasn't just a
(06:19):
place where two rail tracks crossed. It was right in
the center of the economy. As we approach the center
of the yard, Robert pulls over and this is um
Right here is like the side of the yard, which
is the receiving yard that normally picks up a whole
bunch of cars from We're looking at the main part
(06:40):
of the yard, about fifty tracks wide, with pieces of
trains scattered around, a few train cars linked together, standing
here or there on different tracks, not going anywhere. Robert
points to a long cut of cars stacked high with
shrink wrapped packages, and then there's a whole bunch of
of cars that have lumber on them from you know,
upen Oregon in Washington, and so those are a lot
(07:02):
of those are actually probably headed down to the Bay
Area to get on ships and to go to China,
because our wood is actually going mostly to China. Right now,
I looked at at the United States is a number
one exporter of wood to China, nearly a billion tons
of wood a year, and each one of those cars
carried two hundred thousand pounds of lumber, enough to build
six houses per car. The memberships out to China through
(07:24):
the Port of Oakland. But the same freight trains can
carry anything chicken feed, meet, even air Jordan's. Some cars
hold finished goods destined for Walmart and Amazon warehouses. And
along the way a lot of those trains passed through Roseville.
It's one of America's main gateways for shipping. Robert told
me what happens when the train enters the yard, so
it comes in is one train shuffles up like into
(07:46):
different pieces, and it goes out the other end, and
it's now like a new train. It's only if it
actually has to get shuffled that it goes in the yard.
In the first place. Otherwise it would just go right
past the yard. But if it's you know, if it
has to get shuffled and it comes in on the
west side, say, and then they put it back together
and give it a new engine and it takes off
to the east side. This is the same basic operation
(08:07):
that's sent goods around America since we started shipping by
rail in the early eight hundreds. Trains enter the yard
carrying one set of cars and leave with another. And
if you're paying attention, they can tell you a lot.
So the fun thing about the railroad is that because
it's behind the scenes, uh, you have the sense of
like every industry, I mean, there's a there's a finger
on the pulse of like the nation that we have
(08:29):
that a lot of people don't. So the railroad is
very much like um driven by the whole economy. So
about a third of all of the goods in the
entire country that are sold in every store go through
the Port of Oakland or Port of l A. So
we move all that stuff. Those are just two ports,
(08:50):
and they receive a third of the goods that are
then shipped across America. And Robert said he knew when
the economy was getting shaky just by watching the traffic
in the yard, because I could tell, Like by in
two thousand, for example, I knew that the economy wasn't
doing well for sure, you know, maybe like you're in advance.
I mean, because there was less and less railroad cars.
I mean I was, I was working over time, and
(09:10):
then all of a sudden, I was barely working seven
hours a day and getting paid for eight. And this
is before the actual crash. Yeah, before the crash, by
at least a good eight months or something. Roseville is
more than it appears. This dusty old yard is an
international crossroads with hundreds of thousands of tons of goods
passing through. Sure didn't look that way, so we ignore
(09:33):
the train yards mostly, and the trains are indifferent to us.
They're too big, too busy to react to a little
human or two who might be standing in the way.
And taking advantage of that are thousands of hoboes looking
in the empty cars, hoping that and all of this
slamming together and breaking apart, they could slip between the shadows, quickly,
leap over the gaps quietly to get where they're going unscathed.
(09:56):
From my vantage point, at the end of the yard.
The odds of them make king It didn't look good.
Robert was taking me to an even scarier place, the
place where all the noise falls away. The hop is
probably the most dangerous place in the yard. Before I
(10:27):
met up with Robert and Roseville, I went online trying
to figure out where I should go next. To find Ruby.
I found maps of train routes and imagine the view
from a train headed over the rockies or alongside the
Hudson in the fall. But I also wanted some basic facts.
There's seven railroads with big freight yards like Roseville stashed
around the country. These places where the trains come together
(10:48):
and break apart are where hoboes switched from one train
to another, heading to where they want to go. Leaping
between trains is a dangerous move. About five people a
year die on railroad property, more than one a day.
To help me understand how these people died, Robert took
me across the yard to see the hump. So we
see if there's some spot, so way exactly are we yes?
(11:13):
I was gonna say, this is a spot where we're
on the quieter side of like the rail yard. Robert
points to the spot he wanted to show me, maybe
a hundred feet from where we're standing. It's like trains
would be coming from the left of me and going
to the right of me, and the right after you
know you as the hump. Then it goes into the
bowl to the to the right of me. It's definitely
(11:34):
like a substantial hill. I think the mountain is probably
twenty feet, but then below that there's a bowl that
actually goes down into the ground and is lower than
the ground level, so it might drop twenty five ft.
I watched as one by one, huge freight cars glide
across the tracks played out on the other side of
the hump, going maybe five miles. They appear to operate
(11:54):
on their own power, the engines pushing it up that hill,
and then they're just rolling off into that to that
bowl by gravity. It's eerie. The train cars moved silently, swiftly.
Unless you knew to look for them, you'd never see
them coming. Would we see them coming? And writers weren't
(12:17):
the only ones who are at risk on the hump.
The people who worked there were two. JP Right started
his life in the yard working on top of the hump,
and he knew how dangerous that work could be. How
big is the yard that you started at? Which one
was that? Oh gosh, it was Osborne Yards in Louisville, Kentucky.
I can't remember how many acres it was. The hump
is still hand operated. As cars come over the hill,
(12:40):
there's a human being there separating the cars by hand.
JP right used to be one of those people working
the hump, pulling the pins to separate the cars at
the knuckle before they rolled onto the tracks. As simple
as it sounds, the job can be grueling. So you
reach in maybe like half of arm lights and you
pull this thing that lift the pin up in between
(13:00):
the two knuckles. So you're lifting ten to twelve pounds
with one armed all night, over and over and over
and over again. The kind of the train is coming
over the hump and you're reaching your hand in there
to pull this lever. Yet that allows the car to
separate back gravity when it goes over the hump. As
(13:21):
the train keeps rolling new cars up to the hump,
a pin pullar has to be there at the ready,
and some trains are miles long. The plan was to
get six cards a night on a shift, so there's
two people doing it. How many nights I would walk ten, twelve,
fifteen miles a night on top the hill. I lost
(13:42):
forty pounds the first year I did it. It took strength,
quick reflexes, an excellent hand eye coordination, and if you
made a mistake, it was one you'd never forget. Robert
Hudson told me pin pullers had a reputation, you know,
the pin pullers, by the fact that they would lose
fingers almost inevitably. So they're like two or three fingers
on these guys, and they grabuly like pin out and
(14:03):
they'd separate the cars that way. But as you can imagine,
like that was very dangerous. JP told me about one
close call he had. I was reading the cars on
the track next to me, and I accidentally moved over
a little bit too far to the next track, and
UH car comes flying by, and I felt the wind
of it on my shoulder and on my head, So
(14:24):
I was that close and then there it went, and
I was like, fuck, I never heard coming. But JP
knew the hazards and being a pin pully was just
an entry point to something greater. He had his sight
set on the best job in the yard, being an
engineer who can pull down a hundred thousand dollars a
year with just a high school education. Besides the money,
driving the train was a huge part of the appeal.
(14:46):
As dangerous as they are, trains show you hidden places
in the world. As four testosterone purposes, there was nothing
better than getting up on the train on a really
nice night. You got to really good locomotives. So you're
gonna go sixty and you crack open the windows. It's
(15:08):
nice outside. You cracked that throttle and off you go
through the back roads of Kentucky all the way through
to Tennessee. I mean, there's an absolute allure to the
whole thing. Of course, it's almost like you're in the
wild wild West riding your big you know, four thousand horses.
When you are participating in how you feel that you
(15:31):
are really building the country. You're you're out there doing
something that has a long tradition. You're in one of
the oldest unions in the United States. There's all this
brotherhood's talk, and it's easily to get wrapped up into
this whole fucking cowboy movie that you're a part of
every night. It isn't just a thrill that attracts rail
(15:54):
workers is knowing that you're part of something bigger. Pretty
Much anything that anybody has on their body or in
their home or anything is delivered somehow on a train.
So it's a very important part of our economy. And
we're told that, you know, as part of the company jargon,
but we also know that, hey, we're proud. It's a tradition.
(16:15):
You're proud is a great tradition in this country. Their tradition,
JP is so proud of still uses technology that hasn't
been improved upon from more than a century. But these
simple technologies, like the hump or the high tech of
their time, they changed the world, just like the Internet
or smartphones have shaped our world today. These trains connected America,
(16:39):
tying individual cities together into a country. They created a network.
Historian Richard White told me how the railroads really were
the Internet of their day. Places that have been isolated
from each other. They might be thirty miles apart, but
nobody would ever see each other because it was too
hard to go down muddy roads to do it. With
the rails, those people would become neighbors. And it's not
(16:59):
just thirty mile So we've been hundreds of miles away,
places that would have been utterly strange would now become familiar.
That's essentially the same thing the Silicon Valley promised in
the late early twenty first century. The The argument was simply,
information could travel so quickly people would be able to
see each other, talk to each other, here each other
(17:19):
without filters in between them. Then, in fact, this kind
of neighborly listening community would arise from the technology itself.
The railroads brought people together, just like the Internet did,
connecting people in ways that were previously impossible, And just
like with the Internet, there was a lot of commentary
and criticism about the railroads. Phil Sexton, a local railroad
(17:41):
historian in Roseville, told me that when trains began to
spread in the early eighteen hundreds, they had their own
version of the y two K panic. There were actually
scientists in Europe who postulated that by moving as fast
as thirty miles an hour, you would be irrevocably damaged
due to the g forces. But damn the warnings. Americans
(18:02):
wanted to be on the move. Being able to travel
quickly and freely change the US from a farming country
to an industrial one. Starting with the big growth of
the cities. The people who took to the rails of
the eighties had something in common with those who are
on the rails today. They just had to go. Some
people just have itchy feet. If you remember the end
of Huck Finn, he talks about lighting out for the
(18:24):
territory ahead of the rest because it's just too civilized
where he is, And a lot of people felt that way,
And a lot of people wanted farm land, or they
just wanted what they felt was more freedom and kind
of breathing space. With trains, remote places whose journeys were
once too treacherous or too far, we're now within reach.
That meant that people who wanted to go could go
(18:45):
further and much more easily. All those dreamers and scoundrels
who wanted a new life could board a train to California,
which had a geography much different from the East. Who
could imagine seven thousand foot tall amount and being in
snow in June or July for you know, the strange
(19:05):
rocks that you would see of verdant, vibrant colors in
different mining areas. It's very unlike any in the eastern
United States, but it wasn't just California, it was all
the stops along the way, the three thousand mile breadth
of the country, with the tracks late east to west
along the route. Noon was different in New York than
it was in Sacramento. Trains had to stay on schedule,
(19:27):
schedules had to stay in sync. Robert Husson described the
railroad solution when we all used to this day time zones.
Time zones comes from the railroad, you know, we we
uh we get time zones because they had to be
on the same time when they got to the next town.
They couldn't, you know, say like, oh yeah, sorry, noon
(19:48):
is different here, fifteen minutes different. Something that didn't work
for them. So they had to find a way to
like have every begin on the same time zone. I
mean time zones. There's such a given in life. I
never thought that someone or some busy this invented them.
You know, it's hard to believe that there was a
time when people would just look up and be like, well,
the suns in the middle of the skuy, so it's new.
It had to be right, otherwise there was no way
(20:09):
to communicate. If the train was five minutes behind, then
they'd be crashing into another train. The railroads accomplished a
huge feed synchronizing the world's measurement of time from one
zone to the next. So if you're ever curious why
New York is three hours ahead of California, the answer
is railroads. Some historians say the railroads invented modern life,
and that modernity begins after a country builds his first railroad.
(20:33):
So many things developed by railroads hundreds of years ago
are still part of our everyday lives. Railroads gave us
cruise control and air brakes, even QR codes. The way
they synchronized time even had a role in Einstein's theory
of relativity. But really was off the clock, out in
the world, unconcerned by schedules. If I was right that
she was train hopping somewhere, it was funny to me
(20:55):
that young travel was rejecting modern life by hopping on
a train, the thing that created the world. They were
rejecting something primal, drew people to the rails. Otherwise they'd
take one look at the train yard and come straight home.
Had weby been through Roseville? Where had she gone? What
had she seen? I still didn't know, but I knew
(21:17):
it didn't really matter where she hopped out from. It
was obvious that any train yard could kill you. Did
Ruby know this when she left? Was that even a
factor in her decision? Then again, maybe all of the
reasons I was coming up with didn't matter to her.
They were a mom's reasons, and the fact that I
wanted to find a reason seemed like a very mom
(21:38):
thing too. That explanation could be a lot simpler than that,
if I was willing to let my mind go to
the part of the past I didn't want to revisit.
Ruby had been having a hard time before I moved
us to Oakland, and we'd almost lost her. Then I
was running off to the rails. Ruby's second attempt at
suicide m hm hm, who I I'm gonna tell the
(22:19):
truth about We came before she went to hop trains.
When she was fourteen years old, she tried to commit
suicide and I have a journal of that time. Oh God,
(22:40):
they're heavy, um, it says Ruby. Trouble here it comes.
So January, sitting in the St. John's emergency room looking
at Ruby hooked up to I V's oxygen. She's taken
a drug overdose. A number of different drugs, the names
(23:02):
of which are unfamiliar to people at the emergency room.
This happened four years before Ruby ran away from graduation,
and rereading it was almost more than I could bear.
After Roosevelle, I recognized the despair in those pages when
passage struck me hard. I consulted a psychiatrist while Ruby
was in the hospital. We spoke about moving forward from
(23:23):
this tragedy. What would be the next steps for her.
He told me she couldn't go back to high school
every day. Min's really pulled the rug out from under
me with this. He said that if I placed her
back in Malibu, she would do this again, and reminded
me that some years the goal was just to keep
her alive. That's it, just keep her breathing. That was
(23:46):
as much as we could hope for, not dream of
her using her gifts and art, her talent in music
to make a life that had meaning to her and
brought something to the world. Considering the hopes I had
for my daughter, this seems so meager, so base. Reading this,
I still feel the anguish that this was the goal
again some mother I turned out to be sitting on
(24:11):
the floor of my office with my journal scattered around me.
The person I wanted to talk to is JP. Right
since that first phone call, we talked a lot about
how much the rails could take from you physically and emotionally.
JP was a railroad engineer with the soul of a hobo.
I first found him through his songs that spoke to
modern day hobo life but not no hope been traveling
(24:35):
and not going to help Ball. Something about JP's music
made me think he would understand, so I called him
it's because it's so dangerous. When we were talking about
how the yard comes together, you know in the silent
hors that are sliding off the hump. A question that
(24:55):
was in my mind then, which I sort of suppressed,
was was this jumping to the rails that attempt to
commit suicide again? Second attempt? Oh? I mean, do you
think that is an overreaction on my part? Most of
the people that I've met that has an hardcore travelers,
(25:17):
they know that they're going to this place. It's almost
like the shadows within the shadow. So you know, it's
like I'm I'm so desperate uh to be gone, that
I'm going to go somewhere where I know that I
will be almost invisible to all of society. Nobody is
going to care that I'm out here. It is the darkness.
(25:39):
You're going head first into the darkness, and you're kind
of just leaving the whole thing up to faith. If
you really just want to kill yourself, then that's a
good place to go, if you don't want to actually
do it. I mean, in the context of the miss
(26:00):
a cool idea of the hero's journey, that's you're standing
at the edge of the cliff. I'm taking the risk.
I'm throwing all my cards on the table and I'm
leaving and I'm gone. Fuck it. So I mean I
could see that. Yeah, maybe leaven nothing. That's my trade.
(26:23):
Lonely sorrows. The story I'm gone, Lord, I'm gone. Lord,
I'm gone, Lord, I'm gone. Was shp right that walking
(26:50):
into the rail yard was walking head first into the darkness.
I've been on the edge of the darkness, but I
wanted to find someone to take me in. I knew
that wasn't going to be easy. The railroads will arrest
you for trespassing if they catch you, and if you
get someone to bring you inside, that person will get fired.
They could get fired for even talking to me. The
(27:11):
only reason j P and Robert Husson were willing to
go on the record is because they don't work for
the railroad anymore. But how I'll call anybody, And the
person I wanted to talk to was a conductor. Freight
conductors are not like the ones you see on a
passenger train, the guys who take your ticket. In the
world of freight trains, the engineer drives the train and
the conductor manages it, meaning he walks the length of
(27:34):
the train to check that it's in order and guides
it through the yard when it arrives. He knows the yard,
knows how it moves and it's rhythm, and he interacts
with hoboes all the time. If I could find a
conductor willing to take me into the yard, I'd know
a lot. In just a few hours, I hunted down
a copy of the conductor's union roster and called our
(27:56):
emailed everyone on it, and then just sort of waited
and waited, did and waited. I was amazed when conductor
Jonathan Esposito called me back and just curious, so you
you just found my name? I called. I called several people.
You're the only persons that have called has called you back. Okay,
(28:18):
all right. Jonathan was weary at first, of course, because
he could lose his job for talking to the media.
And I wanted something even worse than that. I wanted
him to take me trespassing to learn about life inside
the yard. So I asked it. To my surprise, he
said yes. So what I will do is I'll take
you to Roseville and then I will take you out
(28:40):
to either Westgate or Polk I don't I don't want
to make it. I don't want to get you in trouble.
But the other hand, I really want to do this. No,
I've already I've already said I'm gonna I don't have
a problem doing it. I was so astonished by this.
I called one of my railroad buddies, who also thought
Jonathan was nuts. Oh, I don't care how many tours
(29:02):
of duty he had into rack, and I don't care
how big his balls are. They will fire his ass
for behavior onbecoming an employee. It'll be very hard for
him to beat it. Even so, Jonathan kept his word.
I met up with him in front of his house
near Sacramento on a Sunday afternoon. I thought it would
(29:24):
be just him and me, But he had a woman
with him in his driveway. Hey, Amy, hy She was
part of the plan too. The reason he was bringing
his girlfriend Amy along was for our cover story. I'd
sit in the front and Amy be in the bath.
If anyone stopped us, he'd say it was his girlfriend's mom.
(29:46):
He was showing around. Thanks, Jonathan. So when we get
into the yard, do we go through a security gate?
We just go through some kind of a gate where
you have a gate. I will show you how easy
it is to to get into the yard. We set
off in Jonathan's SUV out of the subdivision where he
(30:08):
and Amy lived and down a big country road. We
driven half an hour when Jonathan pulled into what appeared
to be just another vacant lot. No signs announcing an
entrance are warnings to stay away from railroad property. But
all of a sudden we were inside the yard. Oh wow,
here we are Pacific Railroad rose Ville Yard. Part of
(30:32):
Jonathan's plan included bringing his railroad radio. He was talking
to me, but he had one ear open to hear
if the railroad was on to us. Actual. As he
drove along, Jonathan pointed out the tracks that extend from
the hump, each name for its destination. This is the
(30:54):
east end of the yard. Up that way is too
uh cake Falls, Dunsmere. Going that way is Sparks, and
the east. The east means the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.
These trains claim up through remote wilderness, their own private
slices of America. It's a view almost no one in
(31:15):
America gets. But it comes with a cost. From what
Jonathan described, it's far from idyllic. I'm sure he's going
to be upset with me when I say that. You
don't stop now on the mountain deer everywhere here, everywhere.
You just turn the lights out and you ring the
bell and hopefully they get off the track. And nine
times out of tend they get off the track. Jonathan
(31:38):
had a passenger seat in the rail cab to all
the destruction created by the train, the way the train
plows through the world, and no one better get in
his way. He hasn't become hardened to that, even after
a decade in this job. I feel sorry for Awesome.
They literally follow the rail and you basically end up
(32:01):
chasing them down. You're like, come on, man, just just
get off, get off. But there you've got to stay
in the rail there half the sense of death is
so present that it's on the mind of everyone who
comes close to the trains. Jonathan even brought up suicide
(32:24):
on topic. I wasn't going to mention. So when you
talk about someone who wants to commit suicide, they just
stand there and they're looking at you, and you can
tell they're trying to time it to jump in front
of you, and most often they are successful. A few
(32:45):
times they're not successful. The hobos and the railroad workers
had something in common. They were outsiders who chose to
live in a world defined by these behemos, these huge
beasts that shaped our country, and up against that power
every day, death was always close at hand. If the
train is going less than ten, I'm gonna hit you
(33:07):
and I'm gonna drag you underneath all those locomotives and
you will You will probably die, but you are going
to feel most of it. So I mean suicide. I
attempted it, not in front of a train, a long
long time ago, over a stupid thing, and I'm glad
it didn't happen. I do understand that part. You get
(33:28):
to that point where you're like, there's nothing left for
me to do. But if they don't understand when they
throw themselves in front of a train, is that crew
has to see that they're going to You're gonna feel it,
you feel it. I was thinking about the possums and
(33:59):
I was about Ruby when I realized I knew where
we were. We were near the railroad offices where Robert
Hudson and I stood overlooking the thickest part of the yard.
Jonathan took us past a little park near the tracks
where he knew hoboes hit out waiting to hop a
train the creek. This is a place where they like
(34:24):
to stay. You know, cameras aren't going to see interne here,
drones aren't going to see interneth here, and you can
quickly jump onto a train. That's the party. The park
had a few trees, an old tanker car covered with graffiti,
and some drainage ditches where it would be easy to hide.
So Ruby would have launched from a place like this.
I didn't see a hole in the fence. Maybe there
was a tunnel from there to the trains. What was it?
(34:46):
A hunter feet It was hard for me to gauge
the distance, but whatever it was, it was too far.
There were trains moving constantly on the tracks, and at
night the yard is dark. That's at nighttime him. There's
no lights in the receding yard, and there's no big
right light on the back end. It's me with a lanner.
(35:07):
Jonathan told me that when the engineer is shoving his
train through the yard going backwards to the hump, he
doesn't have time to look for trespassers like that. I'm
not looking for a for a trespasser because my focus
is on the rail in front of me. Person tries
to crawl through in the twentie car of the train,
I'm not going to see that. The engineer is not
(35:27):
going to see it. And now this person is crossing through,
and who knows what might happen. It's pitch black, and
Jonathan is focused on his job. He's not paying attention
to anyone trying to cross the tracks. Chances are they
wouldn't see the train either until it was too late.
(35:50):
And while Jonathan understood getting to the point where there
is nothing left to do, he didn't want to help
anyone in their lives that way. But they might force
him to. And that's why Jonathan told me he didn't
like hobos. They don't care about us. What I mean
by us is they'll walk in front of our trains
and not think anything of it, and they'll blindly climb
(36:12):
through our train and the next thing you know, they're
hit by somebody. Despite what he says, when he's in
a position to help out travelers, he does. A yard
worker warned Jonathan that there were a bunch of hoboes
on his train, so he went to take a look
and brought them a case of water. I said, look,
I'm not going to get you in trouble. You just
need to be quiet, keep your head down. We're going
(36:34):
to Roseville. I will let you off outside of it.
I'm not gonna let you off in the yard. I
will stop short of the yard at such as heights,
and I will let you off there. I was surprised
at how moved I was by my time with Jonathan,
not just being close up with the train getting the
feel of the yard, but his emotions and his integrity.
(36:56):
Jonathan had seen the determination of the people in the
yard who wanted to end it all, and most of
the time, if you died there, no one would know
if you'd decided to kill yourself or if you'd just
left it all up to fate. The Ruby Ditch says
a graduation. She wanted to live. She wanted a life
that was fully under her control, where she didn't have
to answer to me or to anyone. But there's a
(37:18):
difference between a rebellious act and a reckless one. After
my trip to Roosevelt, I wondered where Ruby was on
that spectrum. I didn't know. I didn't know anything about
her anymore, including where she was. I was in the kitchen,
staring a big pot of soup and not yet adjusted
to cooking for one when the phone rang. When I
(37:41):
heard Ruby's voice, I went straight to the Ruby reporting
station I had made at my desk. She was in
a van with a bunch of musicians, traveling over the
border from California to Oregon. One of her companions in
the van knew of a place they could crash in
the San Juan Islands, and that's where they were headed
to spend a week or more writing songs. On the
porch of this old house overlooking the water, I was
(38:04):
shutting down notes frantically, trying to get as much information
as I could about where she was and who she
was with. I was so busy listening for clues, I
didn't think to ask her why she'd left or what
she'd been thinking. She said she was happy, happier than
she'd ever been, and she had no plans to come back.
I shouldn't worry. She was with awesome people and they
were taking good care of each other. She had to
(38:26):
get off the phone, though. I guess she'd said all
she wanted to say, and she was in charge of
our interactions now. But who was she with and how
could they take care of her and each other? Did
any of them have money? Could these new friends keep
her safe? Could they make her life worth living? And
what was that life like, especially for a young woman? Next,
(38:49):
I find people who tell me how to live life
on the rails. I wanted to come out there and
see you face to faces. I always think it's better
when you see people face to face. Oh you're gonna
see and oh, Bette, you rode freight drain. I've seen
a lot of old bats, but not too many women.
Next episode, I mean train writing legend CC Rider, a
woman who survived decades on the rails, and I tracked
(39:10):
down present day writers who can show me their world
there's places on train tracks that you can't go on
a regular road. You know. I think back, and I'm like,
you can't. I'll never be able to see this again.
High adventure all the time, the grittiness and just living
in the crack. She opened her mouths and I put
(39:33):
my fist dimmer throat, And when I was done with her,
I told her the only reason I whooped your asses
to save your life because you would not shut the
fund up. That's next week and coming up this season
on City of the Rails. And he pulls the trigger
and it just goes click click, and then he cocks
it or gets it right or whatever. And then it
(39:54):
turned to blah blah blah in the crew change, if
you read where you get off in the spot it
talks about. And that's was this little magical thing. New
Orleans in the wintertime is the festival of dirty kids,
the festival of traveler kids. Your daughter probably went back
and forth on this bridge, and I know she didn't
(40:14):
know about all this. There's no way other places that
you come from, so diversion of of what you considered
to be utopian life that you would rather exists of
friends of society, squad. I'm doing stuff like this. It's
kind of like walking into another dimension, another world. Every
(40:35):
day was different and never knowing what that day was
going to bring that taste, that feelings as well to
(41:04):
drinking Castle Mal sit on the beach and just turning
the blue came out with the brand new drug and
that sadded to pull up plug, look what You're done.
(41:28):
City of the Rails is hosted by Medal Morton and
developed in partnership between Flip Turn Studios and I Heart Podcasts.
At I Heart, our team is executive producer and showrunner
Julian Weller, senior producer abu Za far and producers Emily Maronoff,
Shina Ozaki, and Zoey Denkla, with production support from Marci
to Pina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman. Thanks
(41:51):
to Scott Mishod at Flail Records for our theme music,
Wayfaring Stranger performed by his old hobo band Profane Sass,
and thanks JP Right for the use of his song
Hobo Life. Our executive producer at Flip Turn is Mark
Healey and I Heart thanks to Nikki e Tor and
Bethan Machalooso. We'll be back next week with lots of hoboes,
(42:13):
young and legendary on City of the Rails because and
made a lo
Host
Danelle Morton
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