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Thursday, Jan. 11

When we disembark, I come the closest yet to killing myself.

On the other trains, we'd gotten off on the right side of the cars, which I proceeded to do when we stopped around 3:30 a.m.. A minute or so after I jump down, though, Rapid-T calls my name from the other side. With a combination of sleep and adrelinine battling it out in my head, I toss my bag back on the beast and climb back on -- doing it all as safely but as quickly as I can. Unbeknownst to me, the engineers were "cutting" the train: removing various cars and sending them to the hump yard, an area with a downhill slope where trains are pulled by gravity at 40 mph onto different tracks. The car I had just gotten back on was about to be cut.

The engineer doing the work noticed me just before he hit the release, which would have sent the car -- and me -- on a short, fast ride into the back of another car. Probable result: Tim paste.

The worker, who was as startled to see me as I him, relates the same story of the dead woman we heard in Willard, adding to it the tale of a railroad worker who was just killed. She, he says, was a new employee and had on a backpack like mine, which got snagged on another train while she climbed on the car. One or both of the trains started while the bag was caught, and she was dragged to her death. "We killed two people on two trains this week," the older gent says. "One was a woman.

"Heh," he added reflectively, "they both were woman. 'magine that."

Perhaps because of the tragedy, the yard is the least friendly one we've been in, with workers declining to provide information and indicating a general attitude that we get the hell out. There's no trains to Cincinnati from this yard anyway, they add, although we thought we could catch out in that direction at 11 a.m.

Figuring we'll have to try again after a shift change, we head about half a mile out of the yard, spreading our sleeping bags under a railroad bridge and nodding off. Rapid-T wakes me up at 8:35, explaining that he's heading into town to check the place out and maybe get some maps, but he'll be back soon. He gets back just past noon, right around the time I'm going nuts from boredom. (In his Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell argues that enforced boredom is one of the worst aspects of vagrancy. When you have no money, no job, no friends, no transportation and -- especially -- if you have no education, you're reduced to simply sitting and waiting for stuff to happen.) Having none of the above save education, I page through a History of Protestant Theology and begin reading John Keegan's History of Warfare, brought along for this very purpose. My education was trumped by hunger at one point, though, when I pulled out the can of potted meat we got in Willard. Potted meat, for the uninitiated, is a substance that aspires to be Spam. I'd list the ingredients, but was afraid to look at them after consuming the stuff.

When Rapid-T returns, he brings with him several boxes of cookies, which he founds in a dumpster behind a drug store. (Drug stores, he tells me, have some of the best dumpster hauls, though he's unable to explain why.) With my last real meal a day and a half in the past, I dive into them. Rapid-T also got a hand-drawn map of the rail yard from somewhere, discovering in the process that Columbus boasts almost half-a-dozen yards -- and the one we came in having nothing heading anywhere we want to go. Norfolk Southern trains head out near a bridge half a mile away, though, and might go in the right direction, so we head down there to check it out. There's some freighters around, but none of them are moving anytime soon, so we repair to a doughnut shop a few blocks over and decide we need better maps. Rapid-T's been walking around for hours now, so I leave the stuff with him and head three miles into town to find the nearest library. The branch's offerings in the atlas section turn out to be all but nonexistent; I photocopy what little I can find, print out some Internet guides and head back to the shop (evincing more weirdness when I get back and offer to buy Rapid-T a doughnut. He insists on an apple turnover, badgers the worker 'til she microwaves it ("I can't eat them cold") and gets yet another weird look when he asks for butter for it.)

With the library turning up little, Rapid-T gets a chance to show off his social engineering skills again. From a phone in a crowded doughnut shop, he's somehow able to convince a CSX employee to lay out the schedule for the next few days. Norfolk Southern sounds like a better bet, though, so we head back to the yard around 6 p.m., seeing, from the bridge, a train that looks like a good bet. We hit (or perhaps "create" would be a better verb) some snags heading down three blocks to the actual yard.

One the way to the bridge that morning, we had passed a house with three mangy, yapping dogs in the yard. Rapid-T had wanted to feed them the Vienna sausages then, an idea I had talked him out of at the time. Passing them again, the temptation proves irresistible, and he spend a few minutes handing out cookies (it turns out he ate the (non-kosher) sausages) to the mutts. We then stop to fill my water bottles, and by the time we get down to the tracks, the train was gone.

It appears trains ran south from the yard all day, though, so we camp out by the tracks, setting out our sleeping bags on the foundation of a railroad bridge nearby. Rapid-T adds more to my railroad knowledge, showing me how to recognize different types of grainers, how to jump on a moving car and how to guess from a car's content where it's going.

Catching a train on the fly, he tells me, requires a hopper to concentrate on two things: just as when getting on while the train is standing still, the hopper must make sure to be braced at several points, so the rattling and rolling of the car doesn't shake him off mid-climb. The hopper also has to make sure that he's in a position that will throw him free of the car, rather than underneath it, if he does get knocked off. The correct way is to run alongside the train and match its speed and then grab the ladder adorning the side of all jumpable cars (other than boxcars) with an underhanded grip, in which the palm faces out. Instead of trying to lift your feet onto the ladder, you should then pull your body up, tucking your knees in underneath you, until your feet are above the bottom rung. You then put your feet on the ladder and clamber up as quickly as possible, moving only one limb at a time.

We drift off to sleep under the bridge, talking idly about our families and hobbies before sleep takes us. Three trains pass us in the night, all going the wrong direction.

Friday, Jan. 12

We wake up at 8 a.m., immediately heading back to the CSX yard we arrived at to see what's leaving. They confirm that to get to Cincinnati we'd have to catch a train that might be passing a switching point a few miles away. The problems: the train will be going at least 10 mph, and despite the previous night's "on-the-fly" lesson, Rapid-T isn't sure if I'm ready; nobody knows when it's going by; and we don't really know where the switching point is. The best bet, we figure to head to the other CSX yard in town, about four miles away, where a train to Kentucky will be leaving later in the afternoon.

We have about two hours before the train we want leaves, which is a good thing. The yard lies on the other side of a baseball field, and as we're crossing the diamond, weirdness ensues. Rapid-T had gotten a cup of water from a McDonald's we passed and, upon finishing it, tosses the cup to the ground. A few minutes later, a voice from nowhere says, "Hey, could you two guys come up here." Whirling around, we see a cop car parked on the far side of the park, with two officers inside. We trudge back to them. They demand our IDs and ask if we've been train hopping, questions we evade. They explain that they don't care about the trains; they detained us because they don't like litterbugs. "We have no problems with train hopping; that's up to the railroads," one officer says. "We just don't want you to litter."

After running our IDs and extracting a promise that we'll go pick up the cup, they let us go. We head back to the tracks (picking up the litter on the way). Our luck doesn't seem good, though. The train heading to Kentucky is all coal cars, a dirty, nasty ride if empty and a possibly deadly one when full. (Shifting loads have been known to bury unwary hobos, a way that I, hailing from the coal country of Pennsylvania, really don't want to go.) Most of the other trains in the yard are loaded with intermodules (flatbed-like cars carrying tractor trailers), auto racks, tankers and locked box cars -- all utterly unrideable. Things take a definite turn for the better when we ask the coal train engineer if any other trains are going his direction. He says no, but offers to let us camp out in the second unit on the train, where no workers will be. (Additional units, or engines, are attached to give more pulling power.) He warns us that the train might be searched and "If we get stopped, I never saw you." There's more risk in riding in the unit; if we do get caught, penalties might be more severe. But the chance for a warm, comfortable ride -- in an actual train engine! -- is something no self-respecting 'bo could turn down.

We walk inside and lay down on the floor, making sure no prying eyes from outside could catch a glimpse of us. While we wait the requisite hour or so for the train to start moving, we get to listen to the chatter of the crew. The holdup is no different from that of previous rides, but this time I can tell what's going on. (There was a problem with the brake hookup, and workers had to check out various cars to see where it was.) I also learn that it's apparently a requirement that railroad workers have a southern accent.

Riding in a unit added a layer of excitement to this leg of the trip. Besides being warm and having access to an actual bathroom and refrigerator stocked with cold water, the windows of the unit provided an admirable lookout point from which to see the fields of Ohio turn into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, a vista broken only when we ducked away from them at any sign of civilization. Plus, though I've never been a real rail fan, what little boy hasn't dreamed of riding at the controls of a behemoth locomotive?

We sneak out of the engine in Russell, Kentucky, around 8 p.m., heading into the depressed little Appalachian stereotype of a town crowded around the rail yard. The first convenient store we stopped at had no maps, while the second one was presided over by a young woman who couldn't find our location on the atlases they had there. A customer finally pointed out where we were, information that allowed us to get an understanding of how the yard was laid out. We headed back to what appeared to be the departure yard and jumped into the second wide open box car we passed on a southbound train. After half-an-hour, we began to re-think our decision. We hadn't seen any workers around and weren't altogether certain where our train was heading -- or when it left. The best option might be to jump off and find a worker, but that created the chance that the train might head out while we were looking. Finally, we decided information was necessary and ran like demons for the engine house in the middle of the yard. "Ayup, I'll be testing the brakes in 'bout 45 minutes," drawled the brakeman who answered our knock, confirming that our train was heading to West Virginia, where we could switch for Waycross. "What you want to do is head down the train a bit. There's some good box cars there for you."

(The phenomenon of incredibly friendly and helpful raillroad employees surprised me for most of the trip. There's a few reasons I can think of for their behavior. First, they really just want to get us out of their yard: if we're going to get ran over, they'd prefer it to be somewhere else. Also, I think many of them feel more in common with hobos than they do with the office-worker types charged with finding hoppers. Helping us along is their way of sticking it to the man. Many of them are proud of the trains as well, an interest they share, by necessity, with successful hobos. As far as the bulls -- the security agents who kick folks off trains -- avoiding them is generally easy. They drive around the yard is quickly identified SUVs, which can be seen for a distance and hid from. Yards are too big and the trains too difficult to get around for a vehicle-bound persuer to really find one or two people bent on eluding them. We had no real run-ins with bulls on the trip, although three times we had to duck into bushes or hide behind trains when we saw suspicious-looking folks around, and one boxcar we were in was panned with a searchlight while we hid in the shadows in the back.)

We run back to our boxcar and jump back on, with the train pulling out about two hours later. For the first time, I enjoy a night trip; while still cold, the weather is warm enough that I can stand in the doorway at times, watching the hills pass in the distance. We pull into East Charleston just after midnight, we hop off and wander over to a nearby 7-Eleven. After reviewing some maps there, we once again kick around the idea of heading to the Norfolk Southern yard, a plan that looks good until we find out it's six or seven miles away, on the other side of the river.

Instead, we head to hotel row, with Rapid-T hitting up a Ramada at 2 a.m. for its business service room, which has an Internet connection, allowing him to check his Hotmail and print out railroad maps. He spends some three hours there, doing God alone knows what, most of which time I spend loitering outside, watching the world go by. Eventually I stumble inside, with the desk clerk letting me lounge in the lobby. We leave with a stack of printouts and an actual route: The plan now is to go to Jacksonville, Fla., the headquarters of CSX. From there, I can head back to NY and Rapid-T catch out due west to Arizona.

We get back to the yard around 5 a.m. and decide to camp out in an old-time caboose that a worker tells us should be sitting around the yard 'til Monday. (Cabooses are rarely used anymore. Their purpose -- letting people at the front of the train know the back of the train was OK -- has been taken over by an automated Rear End Device system (affectionately called Freddie; you can figure out where the F comes from yourself), marked by the blinking red light attached to trains shortly before they're ready to go.)