Hopping a freight out of L.A.’s Eastyard was always easy. This time traveling with my brother, Doug, we snatched an open doored boxcar late in the afternoon headed East. Our destination was Yuma Arizona, but first we had to negotiate the dreaded Colten Yard. Sometime after dark we offloaded outside of the yard on the Western end and hunkered down to hide in the bushes along the fence separating the Colten Yard from the freeway. While watching the freight we had arrived on being broken up the freeway erupted in screaming tires and crunching metal. We turned in time to see a cloud of smoke and dust. When it cleared we could see a car on its side wrapped up in the torn and shredded fence that separated the East and West lanes. The traffic continued unabated, their headlights illuminating a mans body hanging half out of the drivers side window. Without saying a word we picked up and moved further inside the yard. This was truly weird and a hint of the immediate future.
Just before sunrise the yard began to make up a freight destined for the East. We found a grain hopper and hid in the small portal between the skin of the outer layer and the cone that contained its load. Soon the power backed into the cars, coupled and aired up. Safely out of site we moved through the yard and began our screeching, swaying journey. We both had big grins, the night before put away. Once out of Colten we were traveling through the desert headed for Palm Springs.
It was a clear perfect o-dark thirty morning and as the stars began to disappear we swung out over the couplings onto the steel ladder leading to the scaffolding, a narrow, perforated walkway on top of the hopper, to watch the sun rise. It peeked over the horizon illuminating the desert floor in pinks and reds as the cool wind swept by us with the distant rumbling of the diesel and the smell of exhaust in the morning air. I remember Doug, in his field jacket with his AA all American patch with the airborne scroll, sitting beside me. Suddenly it was as if he and I had done this before and then I remembered the nights he and I sat on the hoppers on the siding in the small South Bay yard drinking beer and talking about his parachute jumps from all the different military aircraft. I was proud of my brother and the courage it took to hook up and stand in the door waiting for the red bulb to turn green and the jump master to yell ‘go’ in the screaming 140 knot wind and the roaring aircraft engines.
Doug and I crawled all over that freight, carefully stepping onto the couplings to get from one car to another and sitting on the flat beds beneath truck trailers watching the scenery roll by like a movie at a drive in theater. Later that afternoon we rolled across the bridge into Yuma and off-loaded right next to the old Yuma Prison. It was just an Adobe wall with small Adobe rooms with iron bar doors in a horse shoe shaped court next to a muddy brown small and shallow river out in the desert in the middle of nowhere. We walked down to the town that was only a few streets of shops and bars. Everyone of the buildings were boarded up and abandoned. The town had packed up and moved when the freeway was built a few miles away by-passing the buisnesses.
That was pretty much all there was to see. Doug and I sat by the river and bridge outside the yard waiting for a freight to take us back to L.A. It wasn’t long when a hotshot* pulled through the yard making its way towards the bridge and us. We hid in the bushes until the consist, a group of engines, passed by and I made my first really big mistake that led to the disaster that followed.
The engineer must have seen us because as soon as we threw our packs onto a flatbed of truck trailers he really leaned on the throttle. You could hear the synchronized engines increase in rhythm and volume and without our desire the rhythm of our hearts. The freight went from 5 to 15 mph in a loud heartbeat. I had to wait until Doug got on a boarding ladder before me. Running up onto the ballast* a hairs whisker from a massive moving freight and timing the hop is a very daunting exercise to say the least, especially at 15 to 20 mph. His feet skidded on the small rock and he wisely backed off. He tried again but the freight was moving now at 25+ mph. It was too fast. The packs were on the flatbed, I had to catch the freight to get the packs. I was thinking Doug could catch a slower moving train and I would wait for him in the yard in L.A. I sprinted up the ballast and threw myself at a ladder moving close to 30 mph, grabbed and held on. With my feet trailing behind me flapping in the wind in front of the fast approaching bridge I looked up. There in front of me, just before the bridge, a set of signal lights came at me like a couple of steel, verticle baseball bats. They were going to brush me off as easily as swatting a nat. I pushed myself away from the train and sailed between the posts like a bird without wings. I landed flat on my back on a sawed off metal pipe that dug into my lower back just above my aft end. I lay, writhing in pain as Doug looked down at me in astonishment and sympathy. I asked him to drag me into the bushes so that the conductor in the crummy**would not see me. I don’t remember how long I layed in those bushes, but eventually the pain deminished and with Doug’s help I got to my feet and hobbled away from the tracks.
I could not sit much less climb aboard a freight. It was even difficult to climb the steps onto the bus back to L.A. With the permission of the driver I rode liing on my back in the isle with the passengers gawking at me.
Doug lost his field jacket because of my stupidity and once again I sincerely apologize.
We, two white guys, walked back to our apartment through Watts and Compton in the dead of night. I could not sit for a week and stood taking notes in my classes. Hey, Bull your the man big guy.
One other thing. I went on, because of your example, to get my blood wings***, Jump Master star an wreath, Pathfinder badge, Ranger tab (black and gold as we say in the Army), Brit Comando patch, Special Forces unit desagnater patch, Air Assault badge, Combat Medics badge, Good Conduct medal and Meritorious Medal. Thanks Doug, your my hero.
*hotshot-fast moving freight that has the right of way over all other trains.
**crummy- caboose where the conductor rides (in the old days when the brakes were manual for each car and were located as wheels on the top of the car that a brakeman operated, the brakeman also rode in the crummy)
***blood wings-instead of pinning on your newly earned parachute wings they were hammered through your blouse into your chest