When the tri and bi levels were open, at night one would see folks riding in style. The keys are in the vehicles and some gas in the tanks. In the summer the vehicles were running, with the a/c, in the winter, the heaters, along with radios/stereos and dome/interior lights on at night, some folks reading, what I can only assume, to be the Wall Street Journal. Tractors and combines with enclosed cabs were also a good choice.
Once got a call from Thatcher Plastics on the Island in Muscatine, that they had problem with a covered hopper load of plastic pellets. The carman and I went down to do an OS&D. Seems someone decided it would be a smooth dry ride on top of the plastic pellets, with having dug out enough of the pellets to be low enough in the commodity that he/she could close in the inlet cap. This decision also included using that load of pellets as their personal waste basket and bathroom. Needless to say, the load was deemed contaminated and rejected.
Another incident involved the police calling the Depot, stating a rail car had a fire in the rail car. We got the hoghead to whoa that rail car in front of the Depot. Found one of the rail riders had started a fire in a wooden floored gondola and just his luck, the floor caught on fire. The fire was put out and the rail rider then started, left, right, left, right.
Just another day in that wild and wacky world of railroading.
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I saw a couple of kids try to hop on a westbound near the trailer park just west of the Newton yard west switch, but it was going just a bit too fast for them.
James Norman Hall of Colfax, who co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, wrote in the book, My Island Home about he and a friend catching a ride at night on the pilot of a locomotive when a Rock Island train stopped for water in Colfax and riding to Grinnell, and then how they caught a westbound home. Grinnell had a large hobo jungle south of the CRI&P/M&StL Jct near a pond. Hall also reported that when a Rock Island coal train would stall or have to double the hill on the grade up to Mitchellville, the locals would avail themselves to free winter fuel.
Back in the twenties a local reporter, who was trying to be politically correct for the time, wrote that a “negro tourist” described the wreck of a Rock Island freight on which he was riding that was speeding down grade into Kellogg and derailed. There’s a culvert a few hundred yards west of the Newton CRI&P depot known as bum’s tunnel.
Another hangout was under the West 8th Street “overhead rainbow bridge” in Newton and a transient was killed there by the eastbound Rocky Mountain Rocket in the middle of the night. My father said there used to be hobo shorthand there telling the hobos that they could get a free meal at his grandmother’s house just east of Washington School on 1st Ave W in Newton. Dad said she would serve them a sandwich and coffee on a table in the backyard. This was back in the twenties.
-John Nelson, Kellogg, IA
Jim Futrell sent in this shot of a CN hi-rail work truck with the following caption: – McComb Subdivision – Employee Injury – At 0815-27, CN employee had track authority protecting contract workers placing concrete riprap on the lakefront protection levy. The employee was in a hi-rail truck passing a track hoe when the hoe turned and struck the cab of the truck, causing a laceration to his right arm. He had communicated with the workers that he would be passing through the area, but not all employees heard the instructions. EMS transported the employee to North Oaks Medical Center on Ponchatoula, LA, where he underwent surgery and will remain for 7 days.
