Centralian Recounts Experience Riding the Rails

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Editor’s note: The following is a story about Centralian Hank Claycamp’s experience riding a freight train. Previous articles about Claycamp’s global travels have been published on the Voices page.

 Hi folks, well all of our stories have been recent but I have one story from the primeval past.

This is a true story of when I was young .

It was cold, very cold, 5 degrees cold. A friend (Mike Fry ) and I were riding freight trains on the West Coast from Eugene to Klamath Falls.

Arriving there, we warmed up in a cafe and decided to have a race to Redding, California, so there the story begins

Mike took off and had good luck while I got stuck in lower Klamath Basin. It was  freezing cold, and I was tired and hungry.

Following the Union Pacific there was a caboose ahead of me. I ran to catch it. The brakeman says, “You can’t stay here.” I said, “I’m gonna die if I can’t.”

So he let me in with a great cup of hot coffee.



We rode around the north side of Mount Shasta bound for Dunsmuir.

On the way I saw incredible sunset landscapes traveling down to Yreka in California.

Now came the S curves, the biggest curves in the U.S.

Traversing them, our train sided off to wait for an upbound train. I was told to go three cars up and hide on a flatcar and wait for the upbound train to pass.

At 11 o’clock at night, hearing the airbrakes, I heard this grumbling and honking and screaming as the big mountain engines were climbing the grade.

Then I saw a light shooting across the canyon when all all of a sudden I had a vision of three woolly mammoths were howling and honking with Union Pacific signs on their furry bodies all chained together as they marched up the mountains singing, “I’ve been working on the railroad, we’re the UP, we can handle it!” spitting steam from their long schnozzolas and singing marching songs

So, that’s how the railroad keeps going in the winter.

Anyhoo,I don’t think this was a case of too much coffee. Nah! After that I heard three blasts from our engine, the brakes let off and we glided quietly into Dunsmuir.