The Yard — E2

It helped me get to sleep at night. I also recognized that if I was going to understand when she was up against, I had to see a train yard myself. That's how I ended up in Roseville, one of the biggest yards on the West Coast, to see what my daughter would face if she was running through the train yard trying to hop a train. Sometimes, you know, a train goes by and it's squealing and you hear all these sounds of like chuck chuck, the clock, the clock

noises and stuff. But then other times, in the middle of night, a car just sales by you You didn't hear anything, not in a whisper. It just comes out of the fog and just you're like, oh God, but but the but the kids who traveled don't know this, and they could be running between long corridors of trains. Absolutely, yeah, yes, I've seen all kinds of people do that. I'd heard Ruby might have come through Roosevelt, a railroad hub with tracks that could take her over the Sierras to the

Midwest or north to Canada. But at first you'd have to make her way through the train yard, across the tracks and between the freight cars. You're in the danger zone. It's basically like running across the tarmac at l a X. If I were to try to walk across all these tracks ahead of me, each one of them is easily able to have, like a fifteen thousand ton train sixties seventy eight. Although I didn't know much about trains the day Ruby left, I was learning as much as I could,

as fast as I could. What I could learn on the web would only take me so far. Like there was finding out lots of people died in the train yard every year. But how did that happen? If I'm running across in front of a plane that's landing, Um, you know, most people would think that would be crazy. It would be like something you do like on an insane daredevil. Bet No, one compares that to running in front of a train which could be going almost the

same speed. I came to Roosevelt to find out what Ruby could face in the yard, but it turned out that this dusty little town had some surprises for me. Sure, I didn't think much about trains before Ruby left, but when her friends talked about riding or I imagined Ruby in that box car, I felt the draw. That was my naive idea about how romantic a solo journey could be. But in Roseville I learned the people who ride the rails and the people who work in the yard experience

something more visceral. Inside the yard, they go up against rob power every day, and it changes how they see the world. The train yard is where all of this begins, the gateway to the city of the rails. For HBO's the train yard is like the subway platform the bus stop. They don't plan to spend a ton of time there, but they do because they usually don't know when their

train is going to leave. So Roseville, one of the biggest yards in the West, was a good place to start to understand the situation Ruby face when she tried to hop a train without the fifty or sixty trains at a coming through Roosevelt. There was a lot of emotion, a lot of things could go wrong. I needed someone to guide me through this world, because while it was big, noisy and obvious, it was also mysterious to outsiders. Beyond that chaos, there was more than you could see at

a glance. I wanted to find the person who could show me that, so I started calling around, trying to find a yard worker or a train conductor, someone who worked on the ground who could walk me through life in the yard. Finally, on my tenth call, a guy told me he knew someone who could talk my ear off basically just because they need. That's my kind of guy. My name is Robert Hudson. I'm a former switchman and

brakeman and conductor for the Pacific Railroad. I told Robert I wanted to know what my daughter faced in the yard. So on a Wednesday afternoon, he picked me up to drive me around Roseville. He had a bunch of spots he wanted to show me that would give me a full view of the yard. And Roseville is one of the weirdest towns that you see around California. Because Robert is ready faced with thick sandy brown hair and blue eyes that brighton when he talks about the train yard,

and boy can he talk. It's got five sections, and if you drive through Roseville it looks like any other California mountain town except for the fact that you can see and hear the trains all time. You'd never suspect it was part of the international economy, a hub where good shipped from Asia passed through on their way to places all around the US. On our way around the yard, Robert showed me how much the country owes two little

towns like this. We're actually right next to the old telegraphy office, which I don't think a lot of people realize that. If you ever heard heard of Sprint UM, Sprint is Southern Pacific Internal Network Telephone YEP. It was origionally started as the Railroad telephones before we had radios. In the seventies, the Southern Pacific Railroad laid telegraph lines

along its train tracks. Over the next hundred years, those lines became fiber optic cables, and in two the Southern Pacific began to sell its communication network as a service to private customers, which later became Sprint Mobile Southern Pacific Railroad, internal network telephony. All these facts about the rails that came rattling out of Robert made me go, huh, really, people have no idea how much the railroad effects in their lives, you know, like it reaches its fingers into

almost everything. We get all these different cities that's sprung up, just like Roseville, you know, came out of nowhere because it was just a place for two railroads crossed. With Robert is my guide. This place was coming alive to me. There was order in this chaos. It wasn't just a place where two rail tracks crossed. It was right in

the center of the economy. As we approach the center of the yard, Robert pulls over and this is um Right here is like the side of the yard, which is the receiving yard that normally picks up a whole bunch of cars from We're looking at the main part of the yard, about fifty tracks wide, with pieces of trains scattered around, a few train cars linked together, standing

here or there on different tracks, not going anywhere. Robert points to a long cut of cars stacked high with shrink wrapped packages, and then there's a whole bunch of of cars that have lumber on them from you know, upen Oregon in Washington, and so those are a lot of those are actually probably headed down to the Bay Area to get on ships and to go to China,

because our wood is actually going mostly to China. Right now, I looked at at the United States is a number one exporter of wood to China, nearly a billion tons of wood a year, and each one of those cars carried two hundred thousand pounds of lumber, enough to build six houses per car. The memberships out to China through the Port of Oakland. But the same freight trains can carry anything chicken feed, meet, even air Jordan's. Some cars

hold finished goods destined for Walmart and Amazon warehouses. And along the way a lot of those trains passed through Roseville. It's one of America's main gateways for shipping. Robert told me what happens when the train enters the yard, so it comes in is one train shuffles up like into different pieces, and it goes out the other end, and it's now like a new train. It's only if it actually has to get shuffled that it goes in the yard. In the first place. Otherwise it would just go right

past the yard. But if it's you know, if it has to get shuffled and it comes in on the west side, say, and then they put it back together and give it a new engine and it takes off to the east side. This is the same basic operation that's sent goods around America since we started shipping by rail in the early eight hundreds. Trains enter the yard carrying one set of cars and leave with another. And if you're paying attention, they can tell you a lot.

So the fun thing about the railroad is that because it's behind the scenes, uh, you have the sense of like every industry, I mean, there's a there's a finger on the pulse of like the nation that we have that a lot of people don't. So the railroad is very much like um driven by the whole economy. So about a third of all of the goods in the entire country that are sold in every store go through the Port of Oakland or Port of l A. So

we move all that stuff. Those are just two ports, and they receive a third of the goods that are then shipped across America. And Robert said he knew when the economy was getting shaky just by watching the traffic in the yard, because I could tell, Like by in two thousand, for example, I knew that the economy wasn't doing well for sure, you know, maybe like you're in advance. I mean, because there was less and less railroad cars.

I mean I was, I was working over time, and then all of a sudden, I was barely working seven hours a day and getting paid for eight. And this is before the actual crash. Yeah, before the crash, by at least a good eight months or something. Roseville is more than it appears. This dusty old yard is an international crossroads with hundreds of thousands of tons of goods passing through. Sure didn't look that way, so we ignore the train yards mostly, and the trains are indifferent to us.

They're too big, too busy to react to a little human or two who might be standing in the way. And taking advantage of that are thousands of hoboes looking in the empty cars, hoping that and all of this slamming together and breaking apart, they could slip between the shadows, quickly, leap over the gaps quietly to get where they're going unscathed. From my vantage point, at the end of the yard. The odds of them make king It didn't look good. Robert was taking me to an even scarier place, the

place where all the noise falls away. The hop is probably the most dangerous place in the yard. Before I met up with Robert and Roseville, I went online trying to figure out where I should go next. To find Ruby. I found maps of train routes and imagine the view from a train headed over the rockies or alongside the Hudson in the fall. But I also wanted some basic facts. There's seven railroads with big freight yards like Roseville stashed

around the country. These places where the trains come together and break apart are where hoboes switched from one train to another, heading to where they want to go. Leaping between trains is a dangerous move. About five people a year die on railroad property, more than one a day. To help me understand how these people died, Robert took me across the yard to see the hump. So we see if there's some spot, so way exactly are we yes? I was gonna say, this is a spot where we're

on the quieter side of like the rail yard. Robert points to the spot he wanted to show me, maybe a hundred feet from where we're standing. It's like trains would be coming from the left of me and going to the right of me, and the right after you know you as the hump. Then it goes into the bowl to the to the right of me. It's definitely

like a substantial hill. I think the mountain is probably twenty feet, but then below that there's a bowl that actually goes down into the ground and is lower than the ground level, so it might drop twenty five ft. I watched as one by one, huge freight cars glide across the tracks played out on the other side of the hump, going maybe five miles. They appear to operate on their own power, the engines pushing it up that hill, and then they're just rolling off into that to that

bowl by gravity. It's eerie. The train cars moved silently, swiftly. Unless you knew to look for them, you'd never see them coming. Would we see them coming? And writers weren't the only ones who are at risk on the hump. The people who worked there were two. JP Right started his life in the yard working on top of the hump, and he knew how dangerous that work could be. How big is the yard that you started at? Which one was that? Oh gosh, it was Osborne Yards in Louisville, Kentucky.

I can't remember how many acres it was. The hump is still hand operated. As cars come over the hill, there's a human being there separating the cars by hand. JP right used to be one of those people working the hump, pulling the pins to separate the cars at the knuckle before they rolled onto the tracks. As simple as it sounds, the job can be grueling. So you reach in maybe like half of arm lights and you pull this thing that lift the pin up in between

the two knuckles. So you're lifting ten to twelve pounds with one armed all night, over and over and over and over again. The kind of the train is coming over the hump and you're reaching your hand in there to pull this lever. Yet that allows the car to separate back gravity when it goes over the hump. As the train keeps rolling new cars up to the hump, a pin pullar has to be there at the ready, and some trains are miles long. The plan was to get six cards a night on a shift, so there's

two people doing it. How many nights I would walk ten, twelve, fifteen miles a night on top the hill. I lost forty pounds the first year I did it. It took strength, quick reflexes, an excellent hand eye coordination, and if you made a mistake, it was one you'd never forget. Robert Hudson told me pin pullers had a reputation, you know, the pin pullers, by the fact that they would lose fingers almost inevitably. So they're like two or three fingers on these guys, and they grabuly like pin out and

they'd separate the cars that way. But as you can imagine, like that was very dangerous. JP told me about one close call he had. I was reading the cars on the track next to me, and I accidentally moved over a little bit too far to the next track, and UH car comes flying by, and I felt the wind of it on my shoulder and on my head, So I was that close and then there it went, and I was like, fuck, I never heard coming. But JP knew the hazards and being a pin pully was just

an entry point to something greater. He had his sight set on the best job in the yard, being an engineer who can pull down a hundred thousand dollars a year with just a high school education. Besides the money, driving the train was a huge part of the appeal. As dangerous as they are, trains show you hidden places in the world. As four testosterone purposes, there was nothing better than getting up on the train on a really nice night. You got to really good locomotives. So you're

gonna go sixty and you crack open the windows. It's nice outside. You cracked that throttle and off you go through the back roads of Kentucky all the way through to Tennessee. I mean, there's an absolute allure to the whole thing. Of course, it's almost like you're in the wild wild West riding your big you know, four thousand horses. When you are participating in how you feel that you are really building the country. You're you're out there doing

something that has a long tradition. You're in one of the oldest unions in the United States. There's all this brotherhood's talk, and it's easily to get wrapped up into this whole fucking cowboy movie that you're a part of every night. It isn't just a thrill that attracts rail workers is knowing that you're part of something bigger. Pretty Much anything that anybody has on their body or in their home or anything is delivered somehow on a train.

So it's a very important part of our economy. And we're told that, you know, as part of the company jargon, but we also know that, hey, we're proud. It's a tradition. You're proud is a great tradition in this country. Their tradition, JP is so proud of still uses technology that hasn't been improved upon from more than a century. But these simple technologies, like the hump or the high tech of their time, they changed the world, just like the Internet

or smartphones have shaped our world today. These trains connected America, tying individual cities together into a country. They created a network. Historian Richard White told me how the railroads really were the Internet of their day. Places that have been isolated from each other. They might be thirty miles apart, but nobody would ever see each other because it was too hard to go down muddy roads to do it. With

the rails, those people would become neighbors. And it's not just thirty mile So we've been hundreds of miles away, places that would have been utterly strange would now become familiar. That's essentially the same thing the Silicon Valley promised in the late early twenty first century. The The argument was simply, information could travel so quickly people would be able to see each other, talk to each other, here each other

without filters in between them. Then, in fact, this kind of neighborly listening community would arise from the technology itself. The railroads brought people together, just like the Internet did, connecting people in ways that were previously impossible, And just like with the Internet, there was a lot of commentary

and criticism about the railroads. Phil Sexton, a local railroad historian in Roseville, told me that when trains began to spread in the early eighteen hundreds, they had their own version of the y two K panic. There were actually scientists in Europe who postulated that by moving as fast as thirty miles an hour, you would be irrevocably damaged due to the g forces. But damn the warnings. Americans

wanted to be on the move. Being able to travel quickly and freely change the US from a farming country to an industrial one. Starting with the big growth of the cities. The people who took to the rails of the eighties had something in common with those who are on the rails today. They just had to go. Some

people just have itchy feet. If you remember the end of Huck Finn, he talks about lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest because it's just too civilized where he is, And a lot of people felt that way, And a lot of people wanted farm land, or they just wanted what they felt was more freedom and kind of breathing space. With trains, remote places whose journeys were once too treacherous or too far, we're now within reach. That meant that people who wanted to go could go

further and much more easily. All those dreamers and scoundrels who wanted a new life could board a train to California, which had a geography much different from the East. Who could imagine seven thousand foot tall amount and being in snow in June or July for you know, the strange rocks that you would see of verdant, vibrant colors in

different mining areas. It's very unlike any in the eastern United States, but it wasn't just California, it was all the stops along the way, the three thousand mile breadth of the country, with the tracks late east to west along the route. Noon was different in New York than it was in Sacramento. Trains had to stay on schedule, schedules had to stay in sync. Robert Husson described the railroad solution when we all used to this day time zones.

Time zones comes from the railroad, you know, we we uh we get time zones because they had to be on the same time when they got to the next town. They couldn't, you know, say like, oh yeah, sorry, noon is different here, fifteen minutes different. Something that didn't work for them. So they had to find a way to like have every begin on the same time zone. I mean time zones. There's such a given in life. I never thought that someone or some busy this invented them.

You know, it's hard to believe that there was a time when people would just look up and be like, well, the suns in the middle of the skuy, so it's new. It had to be right, otherwise there was no way to communicate. If the train was five minutes behind, then they'd be crashing into another train. The railroads accomplished a huge feed synchronizing the world's measurement of time from one zone to the next. So if you're ever curious why New York is three hours ahead of California, the answer

is railroads. Some historians say the railroads invented modern life, and that modernity begins after a country builds his first railroad. So many things developed by railroads hundreds of years ago are still part of our everyday lives. Railroads gave us cruise control and air brakes, even QR codes. The way they synchronized time even had a role in Einstein's theory of relativity. But really was off the clock, out in

the world, unconcerned by schedules. If I was right that she was train hopping somewhere, it was funny to me that young travel was rejecting modern life by hopping on a train, the thing that created the world. They were rejecting something primal, drew people to the rails. Otherwise they'd take one look at the train yard and come straight home. Had weby been through Roseville? Where had she gone? What had she seen? I still didn't know, but I knew

it didn't really matter where she hopped out from. It was obvious that any train yard could kill you. Did Ruby know this when she left? Was that even a factor in her decision? Then again, maybe all of the reasons I was coming up with didn't matter to her. They were a mom's reasons, and the fact that I wanted to find a reason seemed like a very mom thing too. That explanation could be a lot simpler than that, if I was willing to let my mind go to the part of the past I didn't want to revisit.

Ruby had been having a hard time before I moved us to Oakland, and we'd almost lost her. Then I was running off to the rails. Ruby's second attempt at suicide m hm hm, who I I'm gonna tell the truth about We came before she went to hop trains. When she was fourteen years old, she tried to commit suicide and I have a journal of that time. Oh God, they're heavy, um, it says Ruby. Trouble here it comes. So January, sitting in the St. John's emergency room looking

at Ruby hooked up to I V's oxygen. She's taken a drug overdose. A number of different drugs, the names of which are unfamiliar to people at the emergency room. This happened four years before Ruby ran away from graduation, and rereading it was almost more than I could bear. After Roosevelle, I recognized the despair in those pages when passage struck me hard. I consulted a psychiatrist while Ruby was in the hospital. We spoke about moving forward from

this tragedy. What would be the next steps for her. He told me she couldn't go back to high school every day. Min's really pulled the rug out from under me with this. He said that if I placed her back in Malibu, she would do this again, and reminded me that some years the goal was just to keep her alive. That's it, just keep her breathing. That was as much as we could hope for, not dream of her using her gifts and art, her talent in music to make a life that had meaning to her and

brought something to the world. Considering the hopes I had for my daughter, this seems so meager, so base. Reading this, I still feel the anguish that this was the goal again some mother I turned out to be sitting on the floor of my office with my journal scattered around me. The person I wanted to talk to is JP. Right since that first phone call, we talked a lot about how much the rails could take from you physically and emotionally. JP was a railroad engineer with the soul of a hobo.

I first found him through his songs that spoke to modern day hobo life but not no hope been traveling and not going to help Ball. Something about JP's music made me think he would understand, so I called him it's because it's so dangerous. When we were talking about how the yard comes together, you know in the silent hors that are sliding off the hump. A question that was in my mind then, which I sort of suppressed, was was this jumping to the rails that attempt to

commit suicide again? Second attempt? Oh? I mean, do you think that is an overreaction on my part? Most of the people that I've met that has an hardcore travelers, they know that they're going to this place. It's almost like the shadows within the shadow. So you know, it's like I'm I'm so desperate uh to be gone, that I'm going to go somewhere where I know that I will be almost invisible to all of society. Nobody is going to care that I'm out here. It is the darkness.

You're going head first into the darkness, and you're kind of just leaving the whole thing up to faith. If you really just want to kill yourself, then that's a good place to go, if you don't want to actually do it. I mean, in the context of the miss a cool idea of the hero's journey, that's you're standing at the edge of the cliff. I'm taking the risk. I'm throwing all my cards on the table and I'm leaving and I'm gone. Fuck it. So I mean I

could see that. Yeah, maybe leaven nothing. That's my trade. Lonely sorrows. The story I'm gone, Lord, I'm gone. Lord, I'm gone, Lord, I'm gone. Was shp right that walking into the rail yard was walking head first into the darkness. I've been on the edge of the darkness, but I wanted to find someone to take me in. I knew that wasn't going to be easy. The railroads will arrest you for trespassing if they catch you, and if you get someone to bring you inside, that person will get fired.

They could get fired for even talking to me. The only reason j P and Robert Husson were willing to go on the record is because they don't work for the railroad anymore. But how I'll call anybody, And the person I wanted to talk to was a conductor. Freight conductors are not like the ones you see on a

passenger train, the guys who take your ticket. In the world of freight trains, the engineer drives the train and the conductor manages it, meaning he walks the length of the train to check that it's in order and guides it through the yard when it arrives. He knows the yard, knows how it moves and it's rhythm, and he interacts with hoboes all the time. If I could find a conductor willing to take me into the yard, I'd know

a lot. In just a few hours, I hunted down a copy of the conductor's union roster and called our emailed everyone on it, and then just sort of waited and waited, did and waited. I was amazed when conductor Jonathan Esposito called me back and just curious, so you you just found my name? I called. I called several people. You're the only persons that have called has called you back. Okay, all right. Jonathan was weary at first, of course, because he could lose his job for talking to the media.

And I wanted something even worse than that. I wanted him to take me trespassing to learn about life inside the yard. So I asked it. To my surprise, he said yes. So what I will do is I'll take you to Roseville and then I will take you out to either Westgate or Polk I don't I don't want to make it. I don't want to get you in trouble. But the other hand, I really want to do this. No, I've already I've already said I'm gonna I don't have a problem doing it. I was so astonished by this.

I called one of my railroad buddies, who also thought Jonathan was nuts. Oh, I don't care how many tours of duty he had into rack, and I don't care how big his balls are. They will fire his ass for behavior onbecoming an employee. It'll be very hard for him to beat it. Even so, Jonathan kept his word. I met up with him in front of his house near Sacramento on a Sunday afternoon. I thought it would be just him and me, But he had a woman with him in his driveway. Hey, Amy, hy She was

part of the plan too. The reason he was bringing his girlfriend Amy along was for our cover story. I'd sit in the front and Amy be in the bath. If anyone stopped us, he'd say it was his girlfriend's mom. He was showing around. Thanks, Jonathan. So when we get into the yard, do we go through a security gate? We just go through some kind of a gate where you have a gate. I will show you how easy it is to to get into the yard. We set off in Jonathan's SUV out of the subdivision where he

and Amy lived and down a big country road. We driven half an hour when Jonathan pulled into what appeared to be just another vacant lot. No signs announcing an entrance are warnings to stay away from railroad property. But all of a sudden we were inside the yard. Oh wow, here we are Pacific Railroad rose Ville Yard. Part of Jonathan's plan included bringing his railroad radio. He was talking to me, but he had one ear open to hear

if the railroad was on to us. Actual. As he drove along, Jonathan pointed out the tracks that extend from the hump, each name for its destination. This is the east end of the yard. Up that way is too uh cake Falls, Dunsmere. Going that way is Sparks, and the east. The east means the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. These trains claim up through remote wilderness, their own private slices of America. It's a view almost no one in America gets. But it comes with a cost. From what

Jonathan described, it's far from idyllic. I'm sure he's going to be upset with me when I say that. You don't stop now on the mountain deer everywhere here, everywhere. You just turn the lights out and you ring the bell and hopefully they get off the track. And nine times out of tend they get off the track. Jonathan had a passenger seat in the rail cab to all the destruction created by the train, the way the train plows through the world, and no one better get in

his way. He hasn't become hardened to that, even after a decade in this job. I feel sorry for Awesome. They literally follow the rail and you basically end up chasing them down. You're like, come on, man, just just get off, get off. But there you've got to stay in the rail there half the sense of death is so present that it's on the mind of everyone who comes close to the trains. Jonathan even brought up suicide

on topic. I wasn't going to mention. So when you talk about someone who wants to commit suicide, they just stand there and they're looking at you, and you can tell they're trying to time it to jump in front of you, and most often they are successful. A few times they're not successful. The hobos and the railroad workers had something in common. They were outsiders who chose to live in a world defined by these behemos, these huge beasts that shaped our country, and up against that power

every day, death was always close at hand. If the train is going less than ten, I'm gonna hit you and I'm gonna drag you underneath all those locomotives and you will You will probably die, but you are going to feel most of it. So I mean suicide. I attempted it, not in front of a train, a long long time ago, over a stupid thing, and I'm glad it didn't happen. I do understand that part. You get to that point where you're like, there's nothing left for

me to do. But if they don't understand when they throw themselves in front of a train, is that crew has to see that they're going to You're gonna feel it, you feel it. I was thinking about the possums and I was about Ruby when I realized I knew where we were. We were near the railroad offices where Robert Hudson and I stood overlooking the thickest part of the yard. Jonathan took us past a little park near the tracks where he knew hoboes hit out waiting to hop a

train the creek. This is a place where they like to stay. You know, cameras aren't going to see interne here, drones aren't going to see interneth here, and you can quickly jump onto a train. That's the party. The park had a few trees, an old tanker car covered with graffiti, and some drainage ditches where it would be easy to hide. So Ruby would have launched from a place like this. I didn't see a hole in the fence. Maybe there was a tunnel from there to the trains. What was it?

A hunter feet It was hard for me to gauge the distance, but whatever it was, it was too far. There were trains moving constantly on the tracks, and at night the yard is dark. That's at nighttime him. There's no lights in the receding yard, and there's no big right light on the back end. It's me with a lanner. Jonathan told me that when the engineer is shoving his train through the yard going backwards to the hump, he

doesn't have time to look for trespassers like that. I'm not looking for a for a trespasser because my focus is on the rail in front of me. Person tries to crawl through in the twentie car of the train, I'm not going to see that. The engineer is not going to see it. And now this person is crossing through, and who knows what might happen. It's pitch black, and Jonathan is focused on his job. He's not paying attention

to anyone trying to cross the tracks. Chances are they wouldn't see the train either until it was too late. And while Jonathan understood getting to the point where there is nothing left to do, he didn't want to help anyone in their lives that way. But they might force him to. And that's why Jonathan told me he didn't

like hobos. They don't care about us. What I mean by us is they'll walk in front of our trains and not think anything of it, and they'll blindly climb through our train and the next thing you know, they're hit by somebody. Despite what he says, when he's in a position to help out travelers, he does. A yard worker warned Jonathan that there were a bunch of hoboes on his train, so he went to take a look and brought them a case of water. I said, look, I'm not going to get you in trouble. You just

need to be quiet, keep your head down. We're going to Roseville. I will let you off outside of it. I'm not gonna let you off in the yard. I will stop short of the yard at such as heights, and I will let you off there. I was surprised at how moved I was by my time with Jonathan, not just being close up with the train getting the feel of the yard, but his emotions and his integrity.

Jonathan had seen the determination of the people in the yard who wanted to end it all, and most of the time, if you died there, no one would know if you'd decided to kill yourself or if you'd just left it all up to fate. The Ruby Ditch says a graduation. She wanted to live. She wanted a life that was fully under her control, where she didn't have to answer to me or to anyone. But there's a

difference between a rebellious act and a reckless one. After my trip to Roosevelt, I wondered where Ruby was on that spectrum. I didn't know. I didn't know anything about her anymore, including where she was. I was in the kitchen, staring a big pot of soup and not yet adjusted to cooking for one when the phone rang. When I heard Ruby's voice, I went straight to the Ruby reporting station I had made at my desk. She was in a van with a bunch of musicians, traveling over the

border from California to Oregon. One of her companions in the van knew of a place they could crash in the San Juan Islands, and that's where they were headed to spend a week or more writing songs. On the porch of this old house overlooking the water, I was shutting down notes frantically, trying to get as much information as I could about where she was and who she was with. I was so busy listening for clues, I didn't think to ask her why she'd left or what

she'd been thinking. She said she was happy, happier than she'd ever been, and she had no plans to come back. I shouldn't worry. She was with awesome people and they were taking good care of each other. She had to get off the phone, though. I guess she'd said all she wanted to say, and she was in charge of our interactions now. But who was she with and how could they take care of her and each other? Did any of them have money? Could these new friends keep

her safe? Could they make her life worth living? And what was that life like, especially for a young woman? Next, I find people who tell me how to live life on the rails. I wanted to come out there and see you face to faces. I always think it's better when you see people face to face. Oh you're gonna see and oh, Bette, you rode freight drain. I've seen a lot of old bats, but not too many women.

Next episode, I mean train writing legend CC Rider, a woman who survived decades on the rails, and I tracked down present day writers who can show me their world there's places on train tracks that you can't go on a regular road. You know. I think back, and I'm like, you can't. I'll never be able to see this again. High adventure all the time, the grittiness and just living

in the crack. She opened her mouths and I put my fist dimmer throat, And when I was done with her, I told her the only reason I whooped your asses to save your life because you would not shut the fund up. That's next week and coming up this season on City of the Rails. And he pulls the trigger and it just goes click click, and then he cocks it or gets it right or whatever. And then it turned to blah blah blah in the crew change, if you read where you get off in the spot it

talks about. And that's was this little magical thing. New Orleans in the wintertime is the festival of dirty kids, the festival of traveler kids. Your daughter probably went back and forth on this bridge, and I know she didn't know about all this. There's no way other places that you come from, so diversion of of what you considered to be utopian life that you would rather exists of friends of society, squad. I'm doing stuff like this. It's

kind of like walking into another dimension, another world. Every day was different and never knowing what that day was going to bring that taste, that feelings as well to drinking Castle Mal sit on the beach and just turning the blue came out with the brand new drug and that sadded to pull up plug, look what You're done. City of the Rails is hosted by Medal Morton and developed in partnership between Flip Turn Studios and I Heart Podcasts.

At I Heart, our team is executive producer and showrunner Julian Weller, senior producer abu Za far and producers Emily Maronoff, Shina Ozaki, and Zoey Denkla, with production support from Marci to Pina. Original music every episode by Aaron Kaufman. Thanks to Scott Mishod at Flail Records for our theme music, Wayfaring Stranger performed by his old hobo band Profane Sass, and thanks JP Right for the use of his song

Hobo Life. Our executive producer at Flip Turn is Mark Healey and I Heart thanks to Nikki e Tor and Bethan Machalooso. We'll be back next week with lots of hoboes, young and legendary on City of the Rails because and made a lo