Chapter Notes: Clintion, IA (Destination Unknown) · 1:17am Nov 5th, 2021
Iowa, not necessarily a destination for a mare on the move, although if she’d ridden the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern, she could have stopped off in Britt, Iowa . . . home of the National Hobo Convention.
Pre-read by AlwaysDressesInStyle
In Eagle Point Park (in Clinton, Iowa), there is a castle or—as Sweetsong described it—a watchtower. It offers you commanding views of the Mississippi River and, I would imagine, Eagle Point Park.
Unlike some ‘castles’ in the US that were built as fortifications back in the day (such as Clinton Castle in New York), this one is fairly modern. According to a source I found, during the Depression, Clinton got a grant to beautify the park, and one of the things they spent the money on was a castle, because why not?
The fact that it’s mentioned in a ponyfic, of all places, indicates that was money well spent.
A flat car is, as the name would imply, a flat car which is useful for odd-shaped loads and things that can be exposed to the weather. Things like tractors and tanks and Boeing airplane fuselages. You can also have a load overhang the end of the flatcar (such as Boeing airplane fuselages). In fact, flat cars are so useful there are a lot of different types, from depressed-center to centerbeam and bulkhead flats.
Source
The two main uses I’ve seen them put to is pulpwood service—the logs are stacked crosswise, and the bulkheads keep them from falling off the end of the car—and they’re also really useful if you have a load you don’t want sliding into the next car forward if the train makes a sudden stop (or the next car back if it suddenly accelerates, but with trains that’s usually not an issue). Steel loads (pipe, rebar, plate) are often carried that way. Usually, the bulkheads are full-height, but they don’t have to be; some cars designed for a specific purpose use shorter bulkheads.
They’re generally not a great car to ride, there’s little to no cover, and if it’s loaded . . . well, since the idea of the bulkhead is to keep the load from sliding off the car if it gets loose, you don’t really want to be between the bulkhead and the load, y’know?
I could go on about railroad ballast (although I’d have to do some research first, lol), but basically it’s the gravel under the tracks. It’s generally sourced from the most local suitable quarry; if memory serves the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad was famous for pink ballast on some of its lines.
While you want the good stuff on a mainline, side tracks and industry tracks often just use whatever. Sometimes it’s just tracks in the dirt . . . where I used to live, that was how the grain elevator tracks were. You really need good ballast for a mainline freight cruising along at track speed, you don’t need it when you’re got a couple of railcars you’re shoving down an industry track at walking speed.
(IIRC, track is rated in classes, and the lowest class is ‘max speed 10mph.’ Some railroads have mainline sections that decrepit; I remember watching a Tuscola and Saginaw Bay freight slow down to walking speed for the really sketchy crossing in Henderson, and then picking up speed again once the locomotive stayed on the rails.)
The Boone and Scenic Valley RR, located in Boone County, Iowa, operates over a preserved section of Fort Dodge, Des Moines, and Southern Railroad’s track. It was founded in 1983 for the purpose of operating excursion trains, and one of their steam locomotives is a Chinese-built Mikado (many steam locomotives are named for their wheel arrangement; a Mikado is a 2-8-2.)
As Sweetsong pointed, Cadillac grainers aren't called that for their ride comfort, but because the side sills are high, allowing a person (or pony) who’s laying down nearly complete cover. That’s obviously not the actual name of the car, it’s probably something boring like “ACF 2970 hopper.” Shoestring’s photo doesn’t show enough of the reporting mark for me to be able to identify the car or the railroad which owns it.
That’s from Hobo Shoestring’s blog (he’s one of the YouTubers that inspired this story), and it contains lots of other pictures of railcars that hobos ride.
And now for music!
The Wabash was a real railroad, named for the Wabash River. They did go to Council Bluffs. From what I understand, the song Wabash Cannonball predates a train actually named that, and the Wabash would have been foolish to not take advantage, so they did—the Detroit/St. Louis run.
I should also say that Wabash Cannonball is a well-enough known country song that it’s mentioned in the chorus of (King*) George Jones’ Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes?
*George Jones is considered by everyone to have been the king of country music.
(EDIT: I was skimming through the wikipedia, and while most articles about prolific singers have a separate discography, George Jones also has a separate article titled “list of awards received by George Jones”)
I don't know a whole lot about ballast, but one of the things I picked up from engineering classes was what is called the 'angle of repose.' Which is the angle from a level surface at which something like gravel or sand will naturally tend to settle at, once poured on the ground. Of course, each material has its own angle of repose. But that's something that would be accounted for on the engineering/planning side of laying tracks. Knowing the angle and having the surveys of the land would allow engineers to calculate how much ballast they would need, and how much room it would take up on either side of the track, for example.
5603912
You are correct, and in fact that angle is critical for railroad ballast to work like it’s supposed to—the shoulder (the angled part) will not resist lateral movement of the tracks, which is bad. I would assume that there is an entire field of study on that subject when it comes to railroads.
Another fun fact, regarding calculating the ballast—historically, a lot of railroads built wood trestles because they were cheap and easy to construct, although (especially in the steam days) they caught fire a lot. When the railroad had more money, they’d often bury the wood trestle, often with ballast or build a parallel causeway nearby, as the Southern Pacific did with the Lucin Cut-Off [the rail line that runs across the Great Salt Lake]. However, the bottom of the Great Salt Lake didn’t work like they expected, and the ballast spread out. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it took them three times as much ballast as they anticipated.
I've used amtrak the last two times I've gone to pony conventions, it's a little on the pricey side, but from what I understand and have seen, it's cheaper than equivalent airfare and even beats those travel websites that claim to save you money. having read this story, I might enjoy checking out Boone and Britt Iowa.
Reading this post, I got curious and checked to see which railroad company uses the tracks around here. Turned out, they ultimately ended up in the hands of Union Pacific Railroad, some 16 years after the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway shut down in 1980. A lot of people here still refer to it as the 'Rock Island', or so I've read.
There was another railway company that tried to use the tracks here back in the late 19th century, but they shut down after only a few years. I see its name a lot when I'm researching farmland.
There's a joke in an old "Pogo" strip: I booked us two lower berths on a refrigerator car!
Now a lower berth is generally the more desirable because you don't have to climb up into it. And "lower berth" could also be hobo slang for "riding the rods"-- hanging on to the stabilizing bars that used to be under boxcars. But what is it about a refrigerator car that makes the joke funny?
Well, turns out that, before refrigeration units became compact enough to put one on every car, refrigerator cars were just big ice chests on wheels. You brought them up to your icehouse that made chipped ice by the ton, loaded them with well-wrapped produce, and packed the cars with ice. Then you cleared the tracks and highballed them to their destination. With the ice melting all the way, and the meltwater dripping through drains in the floor of each car--and onto the rods!
5603955
Yeah, I read that joke and immediately assumed that they'd managed to end up booked inside a refrigerator. The joke being that this is very uncomfortable for cartoon characters and deadly for real people. Good thing these particular hobos are the former!
I always preferred Hell on the Wabash.
Of course, the Black Hats are overrated, compared to the 1st Minnesota. Fuck you, Virginia, we're not giving your flag back.
https://www.twincities.com/2017/08/20/minnesota-has-a-confederate-symbol-and-it-is-going-to-keep-it/
I thought I saw something about Ballast on the UK National Railway engineering reports or such, where filling over the sleepers absorbs the ril noise from the wheels so makes things quieter. That, and gives a larger buffer for when the flush and regrader automated track maintenance train comes along for a brush out, wash up and reflow?
Does the USA have any floating track like the UKs Chat Moss?
"In Eagle Point Part (in Clinton, Iowa)"
"In Eagle Point Park (in Clinton, Iowa)"?
And thank you, as usual, for writing, chapter and blog post both. :)
Taking a train to aie-oh-way?
Surprised you didn't mention
Strongly recommend Lack London's The Road for a good account of what it was like to be a hobo after the Crash of '93 (which was worse than the Depression).
Also this:
5604094
Ah, that brings back memories! Thanks for prompting me to look it up--it led me to this! We usedta listen to it a lot as kids:
Them tasty paradiddles gonna be so yummy
Biscuit you take me to the weirdest of places. The Wiki for National Hobo Convention is certainly one of them.
Hobo Jungle... I'm not sure what to say about that but it's certainly something. I've never worked an event where the primary mode of transit is box car... and I'm not sure if that's cool or something to feel sad about.
5603955
Hi.
Whereas you aren't wrong, it could also go the opposite way: refrigerator cars were powered by the wheels. A lower berth could then be a very toasty ride around the radiators, especially so if these were passive, massive radiators. Hobo Pullman.
5604232
It's a good book, but the slang? Jeezus! Did anyone really talk like that? The education got beneath method, for the train got under way? Sometimes it took me minutes to puzzle out a phrase. I'm still not absolutely certain how "shed" related to some of a train's crewmen.
5604412
O my brother, is his chepooka too difficult to pony?
Seriously I think this is where PKD got his ca-RAYY-zee ideas.
5604432
Yarbles.
5603923
Obviously, a lot of it depends on where you’re going and how much time you have . . . there’s pros and cons. I’m hoping to take Amtrak to EFNW next year, and it’ll be more expensive and way longer than flying Delta, at least if I get a room (which I plan to); on the other hand, it’ll be a better experience than being stuffed into a winged bus. Used to sometimes take Amtrak from college back home, it got me reasonably close and the rate was decent . . . on par with Greyhound which didn’t get me closer.
As far as I can tell, aside from the Hobo Convention, there’s nothing in Britt. If it’s close for you, might be worth driving by, but I don’t think it’s worth a special trip. But I could be wrong. . .
5603927
Affectionately known as “The Rock,” and famous in the last years for painting their locomotives and cars in a really pretty blue and white scheme that was often called “Bankrupt Blue.” Early 80s were bad times for a lot of railroads and I think (but I’d have to crack a couple history books to know for sure) that some major bankruptcies among railroads at least in part spurred Regan to deregulate the railroad industry, which had its pros and cons.
The closer you get to major population centers, the more historical railroads you have, and it’s an art unto itself trying to untangle and sort them all out. A lot of times they became part of a different line and never changed their name publicly or legally, or somebody else had a controlling interest . . . it gets weird. And maps don’t always reflect the current state of things, I remember that being a big issue when I was researching Michigan rail lines in the pre-internet days; it’d show lines as being C&O into the 90s even though the C&O had been absorbed into the Chessie System which had then been absorbed into CSX and those lines had been sold to someone else anyway.
5603955
That was actually a big industry back in the day, and at the railroad museum I was just at, they had an old-fashioned wood-sheathed reefer with the roof hatches. I think by the time Pogo was written, railcars with truss rods were not legal for interchange service any more, although I don’t know for sure. Either way, yeah, riding the rods was dangerous.
I think they kept cars with ice hatches into service into the sixties, but I’d have to look that up to know for sure. Wikipedia tells me the Pacific Fruit Express introduced mechanical refrigeration in 1941, and that the last ‘ice bunker’ cars were retired in the 70s.
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My guess would also be inside the car, but under it is also possible. Even if it wasn’t a truss rod car, there might have been places underneath to ride, or lower hatches you could get in at the bottom of the ice compartment.
5604094
That’s a good song, although it’s almost certainly not about the railroad.
5604100
I’m not sure, to be honest. I don’t know if much consideration is given in the US for how much noise trains make, although some municipalities have put ‘no train horn’ laws into effect. I would guess that the modern ballasting techniques are the most cost-effective and long-lasting, but don’t know that for a fact, either. I’m pretty sure I remember somewhere out west where they basically built the subgrade like a road (including paving it) and then put the track on top, I don’t know if that’s a more modern practice or if was to solve a particular problem with where they were laying the track.
I don’t know. They’re talking about putting a commuter train on a floating bridge, though, that’s kinda the same thing?
5604145
Correction made, thank you!
5604179
Heh, I’m only gonna be able to scratch the surface of train songs in these blogs. Unless the story goes on for a really long time.
5604232
This is the first I’ve heard of it, and I just ordered it.
That’s a good song!
5604304
You love it and you love me for it.
I feel like it can be both. There’s both freedom and desperation, depending on the individual rider, I think. Sweetsong does it because she wants to, not because she has to . . . but there are others who do, where it might be their only means of travel . . . . and it’s probably safer than hitch-hiking, at least some places.
5604318
I knew they had wheel-powered generators on some equipment (like cabooses), but I didn’t know they also used that on refrigerator cars. Huh, today I learned!
5604412
I can tell you some mechanic slang is difficult to parse, and a lot of the historical railroad slang is weird, and (assuming Crichton did his research) the slang in The Great Train Robbery is sometimes difficult . . . Not to mention some of the text slang these days. . . .
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As an aside, stuff like Nadsat and Cockney rhyming slang is deliberately incomprehensible to outsiders. When you're a criminal, you really don't want eavesdroppers to know what you're talking about.
5604638
I thought the modern idea of floating bridges would be related to oil platforms and wind turbines, where it looks like a normal multispan cantilever beam, but the induvidual pylons were heavily positively botunt floating, and held down in place by multiple tie anchors to the bedrock? So they dont have to caisson or high pressure full foundation build?
5604658
Sure, of course. That's why whole scenes in Shakespeare are unintelligible without footnotes. Because they're written in Elizabethan street slang that's meant to exclude the unhip.
Now, why is it there? Most people would say "for the groundlings," but I have another thought: it's there for the middle-class kids who wanted to shock their parents.
"Why sirrah, thou goest out of this house with thy stockings down-gyved to the ankles! Why must you fellowes do the most foolish damn'd thing in the most foolish damn'd way every damn'd time?
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Walt Kelly was born in 1913 and loved trains ever since he was a little kid, so although the rods may have gone out in the 50's (when Pogo got big) he would probably still have in mind to the railroads of his youth. Especially since the setting of Pogo is deliberately somewhat old-timey--no TVs or telephones or even radios. Much like Ponyville (the characters even live in trees as well; they're holbytlas, hole-dwellers, an ancient Anglo-Saxon term that Tolkien invented ;-) )
Kelly got his start with Disney and was one of the animators on Dumbo. He worked on the Casey Jones sequence, animating the engine, which was something of a dream job for him given his background.
Also, Porky Pine's relation, Uncle Baldwin, is a reference to the Baldwin Locomotive works in Philadelphia, where Kelly was born.
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I was thinking about EFNW myself, hey maybe we'll be on the same train or at least meet up at the train station. Be kinda cool if it was the former.
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It’s a fun con! I can’t totally commit to a train just yet (although I really want to), since work schedules be what they do. Then again, currently I’m indispensable so if I take a week and a half off, they’re not going to fire me.
5604658
Heck, that’s still the case. And it also plays into beating some online algorithms, for example some YouTubers I watch on occasion call guns “pew-pews” to keep from being demonitized. (Obviously, in that case it’s clear to most of the audience, but the automated content-bot doesn’t know)
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I think the one near Seattle is a floating bridge that’s anchored down to the bottom of the channel, just because the local geography made building a traditional bridge stupidly expensive or outright impossible. And I think that part of it sank once, but I’d have to look that up to know for sure.
5604757
Funny thinking in a modern age of someone in a past age longing for a more-past age although of course that always happens. I’ll admit while I’m passingly familiar with the comic, I never read it all that much. And I’m guilty of doing the same; while lots of Silver Glow’s Journal was based on present-day Kalamazoo and the things that were currently happening there, a few of my favorite places got put in even if I knew they were gone--Blake’s, The Zoo, etc. And there is very much youth influence in things you like; my dad favors steam locomotives while I prefer first gen diesels and some of the (probably bankrupt) railroads of the early 80s. He’s into muscle cars and 50s cars, and I like late 70s and early 80s auto styling.
Huh, that’s interesting! Baldwin was quite the storied company, couldn’t quite make it in the diesel era although they tried. Checked on the web and some of their diesels are still going, although it wasn’t easy to find a definitive list. Apparently a few of them are not overly far from me, last known to be stored in operating condition.
5605042
"Romance!" the season-tickets mourn
"He never ran to catch his train
But passed with coach and guard and horn
And left the local--late again!
Confound Romance!"--and all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.
5605035
So I went to Ponyville Ciderfest this year and made sure to request the time off well in advance (like July or August). They approved my time. I got home on Wednesday at around midnight, they wanted me in at work 7 am to 3 pm the next day. I was also given a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday shift. Almost as if I was being punished for my time off. We've been pretty much chronically short staffed this semester and I do my utmost to be a reliable worker even if I don't necessarily want to be there.
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Seen a couple of UK Victorean Viaducts that seemed to have problems with sinking. Just the one spanning the next town up the road, sank twicee during build, and the one at Whally, the Abbey arch piers look like they should be something from Lord Of The Rings?
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It’s a little tougher for me, ‘cause there’s only three people in the shop, so we really notice someone missing. Especially since we’re way behind . . . this week we only worked four days (manager wanted to go hunting), and I still clocked 47 hours in the four days I worked. Gah.
He does sometimes keep the horrible jobs for me to do when I get back, but on the other hand when I was gone in October, he borrowed a tech from the other shop to fix an awful Explorer I wanted nothing to do with.
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Ooh, that’s a good one. That’s one Silver Glow would have liked.
5605137
I don’t think soil engineering was well-understood back then, and stone viaducts are heavy. You’re right, they do look like they belong in LoTR.
5606369
So on Tuesday, we had an all-staff meeting, the other option was on my day off (NO THANKS) and besides being introduced to our newest manager (the latest of four in the past year give or take). He is from my brief interaction incredibly BY-THE-BOOK. Anywho, on one day (I think this was while I was gone) they had 18 people scheduled and only 8 bothered showing up. The other day we got hit by three tour groups during lunch, if people had pulled out like that there is NO WAY we would have survived.