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