Life Goal Accomplished: Train Hopping

Ok, so i've always wanted to jump on a moving train. To be honest, i've always wanted to ride a boxcar to another city. However, being a girl (and being an easily intimidated girl at that), i've always known it would be SERIOUSLY not smart to do so.



I told my dad a while back that i wish i could be a boy just for a little while so that i could ride a boxcar with the transients around the country. I said "i totally would if i were a guy", and he said "that thought HAD crossed my mind." it was the biggest compliment i've gotten in a long time :)



Anyway, yesterday evening i'd taken Emily to Target for back-to-work pants. She has no car at the moment, and I just can't refuse a trip to the Big Bullseye. So we went there, made a quick stop back at my house to pick up pepperjack cheese, a knife, napkin and wheat thins before heading to my reading spot under a big American Elm tree in the park. (Emily bought the pepperjack cheese the night before at the glorious Sunflower market and left it my house. Never a good idea to leave cheese at Sam's house, but it was only a day so it survived.) So we go there, read for about 45 minutes or so, when i see a parked train across the street at the train tracks. I said "i want to climb on that" and she said "ooh, let's DO it."



So off we go. This train has obviously been parked for a while. It had weeds growing under it, so we knew it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. There was another train parked on the other side of it. This train was operable. We could hear it still making noise, but it was stationary and had been for at least 30 minutes or so. So we climb up the first, weed growing train to explore. First of all, those ladders on the sides of trains are higher up than i'd thought! i mean, you have to really hike your leg up to reach them! there were just rocks in that train. We kept wanting to walk on top of the train, but the open tops prevented it. Boo.



So we get down and decide to explore the other train, the operable but stopped one. that one has big open top cars that used to have coal in them. we could tell because of the last little traces in the bottoms of the cars. we walked between those parked trains for a while and found little artifacts (railroad spikes and HUGE metal screws) before deciding to go the other side of the coal train and walk along the last set of unoccupied tracks. we walked along there for a while until we got to an overpass.



This road passes over Uintah Street, which i drive on everyday. Emily decided (she's wearing a sundress and is already pretty sufficiently covered in soot) she'd like to do the unthinkable: moon the traffic underneath the overpass! i told her "if you do that, i'm going to run". She did it. I ran.



::sigh::
classic

We walked a bit longer on the empty track and decided to turn back. We crawled under the stationary train, and i swear, not even 10 seconds later the track that we'd JUST been walking on had a train on it, ZOOMing by! it was crazy! i mean, there was a huge place we could've walked down to or even jumped down to that was safe if we'd been on that track when the train came. so we wouldn't have died or been hurt or anything. but STILL! we flipped out! so we climbed the ladders of the middle train to the side where it was closest to the moving, flying, crazy fast train. we hung off the ladders and let our hair and arms be blown in the wind the train was causing. Emily and i, once on the ground between the trains, held hands and inched out into the middle but then jumped back against the still train when one of the train cars was REALLY loud and scary! When jumping down off the ladder of the non moving train, i cut my foot on a rock, and it bled and looked really horrific. It's really friggin cool that i got a war wound from train climbing! (hurts today, but it was WAY worth it)

After the train finally passed we jumped out onto the newly empty train tracks and yelled at the train, telling it who's boss, and high fived like the awesome fearless women we are!

Then, as the shock wore off, we climbed under the still stationary train on the middle tracks and started walking back to where the car was (and also where we left the blanket, books, cheese and crackers, sunglasses & phone just sitting in the grass). And again, not even 30 seconds after we climbed under the train i started hearing odd sounds. Emily thought i was crazy and just hearing things, but then it happened. The train we'd JUST been crawling on/under started going! of course it was going really slowly at first, but we decided we needed to try and jump on it while it was running! so as it creaked by we decided which one we were going to jump on and just did it! we hung on the ladders for maybe 3 seconds and jumped off before it got going too fast. We tried to do it again, but it was going way too fast at that point.

After all the trains had past and we were left with our stopped old weedy train filled with rocks we were resigned to simply walking back. but then i found an electrical control box on the side of the train. i thought surely it wouldn't work, seeing as the train had been stopped and still for quite some time. but i pushed the power button, and a green light came on! i pushed a bunch of buttons, and rocks started pouring out the bottom of the train! i kept trying to stop them, but they just kept on a'coming! Emily tried it on the next train to the same effect. we both grabbed rocks from those piles under the train and walked back to the car with our railroad spikes, pieces of coal, huge metal screws, and under-the-train rocks, and that was that.

So we did it. I DID IT.
It was really one of my life goals, to hop a moving train. And even though i didn't get to ride with the railwaytramps to some other city and ride my way back, it was wonderful!

I don't think i've had such a wonderful, invigorating, semi dangerous but awesome experience since bridge jumping in Florida. i could actually FEEL my heart beating, so fast and strong, as that train rushed by!

oh man. best friend+Target+reading in the park+crackers and cheese+trains= second coolest thing i've ever done (first being hiking up a volcano and getting to spit on moving streams of lava).