Text 768, 146 rader
Skriven 2012-07-17 10:22:53 av Roy Witt (1:387/22)
    Kommentar till text 754 av Richard Webb (1:116/901.0)
Ärende: Darwion award candidate
===============================
17 Jul 12 17:37, Richard Webb wrote to Roy Witt:

 RW>>> <guffaw!!!>  Man these folks must be totally braindead!  How can
 RW>>> you not feel that vibration in the ground?

 Roy>>> Maybe he thought it was the music vibrating the ground...IMO,
 Roy>>> morons should be taught to walk to the side of the tracks, not on
 Roy>>> them.

 RW>> Yeah but those little earbuds won't give you that sorta
 RW>> bass!  I'm with you on that one though, they oughta be
 RW>> taught to walk beside the tracks.

 Roy>> Yeah but, "isn't this the Boardwalk?" We used to walk the tracks as
 Roy>> youngsters and teens, but we never had the disadvantage of such a
 Roy>> thing as a 'walkman' screaming in our ears at the same time. It was
 Roy>> the pennies layed on the track and disapperance after the train
 Roy>> passed that still puzzles me.

 RW> Right, vibration shook 'em off the tracks.

If so, they were shook pretty bad, as we could never find them. More than
likely they were squeezed into a few thousands (.001) of an inch and stuck
to to the wheels. Kinda like copper shim stock...

 RW> I've done that one too.  Every once in awhile you could get one to
 RW> stay and see what happened to it, but there's a lot of low freq
 RW> vibration.

Well, those were steam engine days...probably a lot more vibration there.

 RW> which is why I don't understand how the fool with the earbuds didn't
 RW> notice.

Dunno...I wasn't there. I have noticed that the freight cars headed south
are 'hoppers' full of concrete materials and those hoppers going north are
full of sand and gravel. Plus they're perhaps a 1/2 mile long or more and
they have to travel slow because they're still in the city limits, even
though the diesel puller is outside the city limits. With the silent
crossings being constructed in town, I expect more pedestriANS will be
silenced down the line.

 RW>> Yes, as a kid I used to use the railroad tracks as a
 RW>> shortcut between places, but this was a siding serving a
 RW>> couple of factories, and you could hear a train moving a
 RW>> good distance off.

 Roy>> We had to walk the tracks to get to the swimmin' hole, under the
 Roy>> trestle.

 RW> Yep, the railroad trestle over the Cedar River in Vinton,
 RW> IOwa, close to the school for the blind was the illicit
 RW> activities spot.  I remember hanging off that trestle once
 RW> lookingup at a freight train cause I was caught in the
 RW> middle of it when a train was coming.  My home town though,
 RW> which I was referencing earlier, those sidings for the
 RW> factories were good shortcuts, made a square corner a 45
 RW> degree if you did it right.

The yard up there in Illinois had a turntable and lots of sidings. We were
always chased out of those yards. Had to cross the yard to get to the
fishing ponds on the other side.

 RW> But there again, you'd hear the trains long before they came through
 RW> the Burlington Northern shops north and west of there, and just east
 RW> of the bn shops was where  the switch was located for that set of
 RW> sidings. A guy still had plenty of time to get fair warning though
 RW> and get to a good spot to leave the tracks.

Illinois Central ran through Freeport, where my grandfather (clark) would
get on board as the conductor of the Land-O-Corn, ride it into Iowa and
back to Chicago and then back to Freeport where he got off...all of that
track is gone now and so are the yards and the depot. Used to be 3 or 4
sets of tracks ran along the Pecatonica River (Pecatonica was native
American that meant - muddy water). Sometimes it resembled a flow of mud
too.

 RW>> Was another one this morning, three fools in california
 RW>> drinking sitting on the railroad tracks.  Two escaped, the
 RW>> third fool was too inebriated to move fast enough.

 Roy>> In a small town just north of San Diego, Del Mar, the AMTRAK rails
 Roy>> pass over a portion of a seaside lagoon, which is a sweet spot for
 Roy>> fishing. Many people have been caught on that bridge with no way to
 Roy>> escape, except to dive into the lagoon or hang on the side of the
 Roy>> trestle works until it passes. Every once in a while somebody gets
 Roy>> bumped into the lagoon by the AMTRAK train. If the tides out,
 Roy>> you're in a bunch of hurt.

 RW> <rotfl>  YEah see above.  That's where I'd throw out a long
 RW> line and call it even.  I wouldn't fish from out there.
 RW> Only reason I had to hang from the one over that river once
 RW> was that my favorite illicit activites spot was on the other side of
 RW> the river from the school.

Nice thing about that trestle is that the top is wider than the structure
that supports it. No way you could climb under the top and get to the
safety of the supporting structure in time to let the train pass overhead.

I supposed tying a rope around a few ties might give you an advantage
though.

 RW> I used to use another place near downtown Burlignton, Iowa
 RW> as a cut through to make a 45 out of a 90 degree and cut off about a
 RW> quarter mile if i was walking to the south end of town, the main line
 RW> ran between buildings of a boiler factory,

We had one of those too. Stover Steel. My grandpa Witt worked there
around the time the US entered WW1 and on to the mid to late 1920s.

 RW> and a guy could walk those tracks through there. My dad saw me take
 RW> that shortcut one night and raised seven different colors of it with
 RW> me later.  hE maintained there wasn't enough room to get out of the
 RW> way, and might have been right on that one when I think about it as a
 RW> rational adult.

8^) Like my dad, he had already been there as a youngster himself and knew
all about it. The first 20 or so years of your life were a reminder of
his youth.

 RW> At the time I would have said I could hug teh wall of one of the
 RW> buildings and probably get by, but now I wouldn't care to.

Too close for comfort in m book.

 RW> I know I didn't care for hanging below that trestle with my hands
 RW> curled around a railroad tie either.

I'll bet!

                R\%/itt

... besides, IMNSHO, Ward Dossche should resign as ZC2 and surrender his
... net node-number to the ZCC !            - Cato the Elder -

... Reminder:

... On Friday September 8th 2006, Mike Godwin's 16 year experiment was
... concluded and Godwin's Law was officially repealed by a popular vote
... among millions of individuals.

... http://repealgodwin.tripod.com/


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