and held in a sling at the other, so we could make the turns,” he recalls. Odd cargos, and odd sections of track: A couple of miles west of Ludlow, Rod announced that “this is the only railroad in the country that goes through a ski area.” Sure enough, we were soon passing an Okemo chairlift, and ducking under an overpass that carries a ski trail. ‘Hamburger Hill’ Just before we reached the Summit, we saw a doe and fawn browsing alongside the rails. “Moose, bear, turkeys, coyotes – we see a lot of wildlife,” says Rod. The deer kept a safe distance, but many animals aren’t so cautious. Cattle sometimes come to a bad end when they wander through broken fencing. Modern locomotives don’t have cowcatchers – and even if they did, they would be a cow’s last catch. There’s a stretch of track north of Rutland that railroaders call “Hamburger Hill.” Wildlife and livestock aren’t a train crew’s most nerve-wracking encounters. Just as bad are people who think they can share the track. Rod recalls an ATV rider heading towards him, and, another time, a Jeep – “the guy was either on something he shouldn’t have been on, or not on something he should have.” Fortunately, the freight’s slow speed and a good line of sight ahead kept things from playing out badly. It can be a different story running wide open on a Class 1 main line, where speed limits are a lot higher. “When you’re going 60, things can happen fast,” says Rick Wool, a veteran of CSX and its 21,000 miles of track. “One thing I always worried about was going through an ungated crossing just before another train heading in the opposite direction. Drivers would see me go by, and then think the coast was clear.” “You wouldn’t believe how many people try to run a crossing,” says Rod. I told him about my own experience with a duel between car and train – a duel that the train
always wins. I was riding on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited , clocking 60 or 70 through rural Ohio, when the train inexplicably slowed to a halt. Passengers asked the conductor why, and he gave the grim answer: a teenage driver had tried to beat the Lake Shore to a crossing. The two halves of his car ended up 100 feet apart. He and his two passengers were dead. A train that size, going that speed, takes a mile to stop. We won the fight with the greasy leaves and topped out at a place called the Summit, in the town of Mt. Holly. This is the height of land on the route. From here, our progress required Rod’s fine touch on the brakes rather than the throttle. “Train handling,” he told me, “is all in the brakes – and knowing your terrain.” “The leaves are bad enough,” Rod maintains, “but some of the diciest situations involve winter weather. Years ago I was working this route as conductor. It was snowing, and the brakes weren’t grabbing on the way down from the Summit into Bellows Falls. When you get deep, fluffy snow blowing around the wheels and brake shoes, they cool down and you lose braking ability. The speedometer showed us doing 28, in a 10 mile-an-hour zone. Snow was blowing all around us, and we couldn’t see. I knew we’d be OK, though, when we stopped picking up speed. When we hit flat track, the brakes caught and we started to slow.” On this run, the leaf mash on the tracks didn’t get us into anywhere near as bad a situation. East Wallingford, Shrewsbury, and Clarendon slipped by, and dusk had turned to darkness as we slid into the Rutland yards. Two-thirty a.m. is a beastly time for a wakeup call, but the northbound RDBD, the freight run to Burlington, was leaving at four. I climbed into the warm cab of another GP38-2, one of a pair heading 53 cars – 29 filled with fuel, livestock feed, and plywood, and 24 empties. Engineer Aaron Hahn drew back the throttle and we started off in a light
