Right after I ETS'ed from Mother Army, I got a gig with the Union Pacific Railroad as a Brakeman/Conductor and eventually got my Engineer's license before quitting in 2007.  We worked at all hours of the day and night, whenever our turn was called out for a train, and I mentioned in another thread that I heard some fantastic spooky stories, and saw some crazy stuff in my three years with the railroad.  Here are some of them........
Railroaders tend to be a pretty superstitious bunch, as with all old-time crafts.  I hired out to run Cheyenne West, which pretty much followed the old Transcontinental Line all the way to Green River, WY (the line pretty much stayed the same from Omaha to Salt Lake, but Cheyenne to Green River was the farthest I ran).  You can actually see the old right-of-way of the old General Dodge right-of way in spots, except from Cheyenne to Laramie on three track.  This is a very historical area of America, with the stories to match.  Anyway, working very long hours, with some superstitious people in the same cab of a locomotive makes for very interesting conversation.  There were actually Engineers that kept a tally in their trip logs of unlucky locomotives, and would walk on razor blades the whole trip.  Here we go..........
I had a Conductor tell me that, while sitting is the Cupola of a Caboose one night (cabooses were pretty much phased out in the late 70's, although we maintain a fleet for "blizzard busses" to haul deadhead crews when the interstates are closed due to blizzards) he and the Conductor watched a glowing sphere hover over the train, while traveling through Medicine Bow, WY.  They called the Front Brakeman to ask him and the Engineer if they could see the light in their mirrors, and they replied, "Yes, what in the hell is it, can you make it out from the rear of the train?".  They replied that they could not, and a few minutes later, it shot straight into the sky.
One Engineer told me that, early one morning, he spotted a human-like figure on all fours that was illuminated in the ditch lights.  It moved in an articulated fashion, much as a segmented insect would, bending at the thorax, without much movement from the legs.  After explaining it in detail, our train went into emergency, and I had to walk 9k foot of train in BFE Wyoming with my Motorola radio and a railroad lantern.  HAHAHAHAHA!!!!  Good Times!
One night, near Harriman, WY (named after the E.H. Harriman, whom saved the Union Pacific from Bankruptcy, by, among other things, straightening out the curves General Dodge built), we came upon the body of a person that was cut in half on the rails.  We notified the Railroad Police (which are actually Federal Agents, and hold the authority from old Railroad/Government agreements), and stopped the train.  It appeared to be a transient that was pushed, or fell from a car, and the train won the wrestling match.  pretty weird how a train causes enough pressure to prevent bleeding form the two halves of a body.  BTW, we run the Union Pacific Historic fleet out of Cheyenne, which includes the world's largest operating steam locomotive, the Challenger, the 844 steam engine, two a-unit stream-liners, a b-unit stream-liner, our Centennial double diesel (6936 which is 6600 horsepower, and the largest diesel electric engine in the world), and several other curiosities.  The below video is the Challenger running through Harriman.
At about 0145 MST, sometime in the winter of 2005, myself and an engineer named Scott were discussing our latest elk hunting adventures while passing through old Ft. Steele, WY.  While we were passing through the fort, I noticed something that looked like a monochromatic roman candle, with sparks behind it, move a rapid rate of speed, and disappear behind a butte.  After passing the butte, we both noticed a pillar of intense blue light emanating from a butte approximately 1.5 miles from our location.  The tip of the pillar of light appeared to have "cinders" flowing through the "beam".  We were pretty quiet until we pulled into the fuel rack at Rawlins.


There are two tunnels at the summit of Dale Junction, named Hermosa, which are supposedly the only two tunnels left on the Union Pacific, which was erected in 1901, and twinned in 1912, I believe.  The tunnels still have a 6 foot tall, by 3 foot deep "man-hole" every 50 yards that were used by track-walkers up to the late 1970's, in case a train were to enter the tunnel while they were walking to their gang house.  I had heard many spooky stories about track-walkers getting killed in these tunnels, and had to walk them when our train went into emergency due to a dynamiter, late one night.  You could hear your foot steps, and the overall experience was hair-raising, especially since mountain lions like th area around the tunnels.  
I will add more later, and will add movies to give a sense of the areas that we run through, and a sense of the terrain.




 

Cool stories, thanks for posting them up (I was the one that requested them in the creepy highway thread)

good creepy stories and relevent to me because i found out a month ago that i'm being stationed in Cheyenne.  please post more if you have any

Why did you quit the business?

I have an uncle who is a firefight .

His first shift stared in the afternoon so that day he took his girlfriend out to lunch before going in.
After they eat they both headed to work.
A call was coming in as soon as he pulled in the station so he grabbed his stuff and jumped on the truck.

The first call of his first day on the job he saw them cut his girlfriend's body out of her car that was hit by a train on the way from their lunch.


Not really spooky but sad as hell

There is a stretch of track called Lookout, between Rock River and Old Wyoming (near Laramie) that is supposedly haunted by an old Gandy Dancer that was killed by a transient in the late 19th century, and certain people can sense him in locomotives passing through the area.  I had a close friend that, like me, considered these stories as entertainment, albeit stories that made you pay attention walking trains at night, that swore his conductor had the following story late one night on an older square nose Dash 8 locomotive.  





Going through the area, eastbound, they topped the hill, headed into Lookout, and the Conductor says to my engineer friend, "Holy shit, you didn't see that, did you?"



My buddy states, "Ummmm, WTF are you talking about?"



The Conductor explains to him that some guy walked into the cab form the engineer's door (the only way you can access the long hood from the cab), and this guy got into the engineer's face, and went berserk movie style, moving in a blur...then in an abrupt manner, turned to look at the conductor like the entity knew that he could see them, then moved in a blurred movement through the short nose of the cab.





When my buddy told me about this, I asked him what he would have done if his train had went into emergency, he stated, "I would have walked the train with the Conductor...there is no fucking way I was sitting in the cab of that motor after hearing that shit!!!".   HAHAHAHAHA!!!!

tagged for morn

The United Transportation Union and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen made it difficult to work there without 20+ years seniority.












 

I once fell asleep on an Amtrak and awoke with some guy touching my thigh. Thats the only creepy railroad story I have for ya.

Okay....one last story for the night.  There is a place just outside of Rock Springs, named Bittercreek.  This is where Territorial Governor Francis E. Warren (whom the AF Base is named after in Cheyenne) had troops killed many Chinese railroad workers and coal miners as part of a Chinese insurrection.  There is a place outside of Bittercreek called Rock Cut, that several Chinese workers were mowed down in their attempts to escape the killing, by hopping UP trains.  This is a very eerie place, and "something" follows you whenever walking through this cut carved through solid rock, to the point that several people I know that have had to walk trains in this area run the train, if capable.





ETA:  While I am on the subject of Rock Springs, for the three years that I worked on the Union Pacific, we had three separate instances of suicide by train.  Mind you, that most of the trains going into Green River are hot-shots (70 mph trains with quite a bit of HP per trailing ton).  One of the engineers that trained me as a fireman (baby engineer) had hit two people in "Death by Train" suicides.  The latest one happened about 6 months before I started firing, and he told me on one trip that the last thing you see before you throw the air out of the window (put the train in emergency) is their eyes staring at you...directly in the eyes.  He said that an engineer that sees a death by train suicide will never forget it the rest of his life.

I imagine ball lightning is pretty common. And Wyoming is a damn strange place, especially at night... Hell of a combination





6936 is quite a sight... I went chasing it when it came through Portland several years ago. It's a shame the steam engines don't get out more often, I'd love to see them.












 

A few questions (I obviously know dick about trains):



What does "walking the train" mean? Are you outside of the train relaying guidance info or something?

What does "putting the train into emergency" entail?

I'm not a railroad guy, but it's pretty typical stuff. Trains use air brakes in a fashion similar to a semi truck. Loose air pressure, and the brakes lock up(emergency part). On a train with a lot of cars, that means there are a crapload of connections to check - so you have to get out and walk down the length of the train listening for air leaks and looking for broken connections. Makes me glad I don't work for the railroad, that would get old fast.



 

Thanks!

We also assume everytime a train goes into emergency (we lose all of our air pressure, all of the sudden) that we just derailed, so we walk the train, doing the stuff mentioned above, and making sure the train is still on the rail.



 

TAG

When I'm on a call at night I always try to give you boys a ride back to the head-end.

Back up for MOAR

- Clint

Sorry, No stories....but a few pictures
HONK! HONK!






Another

Another

Skg_Mre_Lght I've been waiting for you to start this thread.  THANKS!

I talked to a guy (conductor) who watched a transient get pushed off a bridge.

ETA: He said he didn't scream or anything...just looked him in the eye the whole way down.

I have a story about trains, it's a funny one:

Living in a small town, you could jump on the train while moving and ride it into town while it was steadily slowing down.  Well we always knew not to ride the train back because the trains pick up speed as they leave town.

Well my stupid friend decided he would ride it into town to get some beer and ride it back.  He was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, sandals, and a hat.  We did not hear back from him until about 5:00 in the morning. Here Is What Happened:

He got the beer and hopped on a train coming back and told himself he would jump off before the train got going too fast... well, he failed! He kept holding on until it reached about 35-40 mph and decided he could not jump.  So he was stuck, holding onto the ladder on the side of a cart and he had to hold on for a good 6 hours at night.  He rode the train all the way from Memphis, TN to the far south of Mississippi.  It was also about 55 degrees out side so do the math on windspeed, weather, and no clothes on.  He finally got off the train as it was rolling into the rail yard and tried to get into a gas station to call us.  Well, he set the alarm off and the cops arrested him.  We had to go bail him out of jail the next morning. He was sitting in his cell and his skin was as red as a hot tamale from the cold burn.

If you have ever been to Mississippi, and you have seen the train bridges.  The bridges are just wide enough to fit the train through.  He was hanging on the outside and he said whenever he came up on a bridge, he thought he was going to die. His back actually bumped the rails on the bridges a couple times it was so close to him.

I'll tag

Dang

My grandfather was an armed plainclothes special agent for Union Pacific from the 1960's to 1980.  He was also a decorated WWII combat veteran of Patton's Africa campaign and Italy landings.

He made the run between Salt Lake City and Nebraska routinely.

Somewhere on this route, in 1964, was the only instance where he fired his weapon in the line of duty outside of WWII.  I have this story third hand, so I'm not sure of its accuracy, but my grandfather was a soft spoken man, who did not tell war stories about WWII or this occurrence.  This story was told to my father by my grandfather's partner after grandpa died of brain cancer in 1983.

They were in the last passenger car in a train that was mixed passengers and cargo, with the cargo cars in the back.  Separating the passenger cars from the cargo cars was an almost empty flatbed car with some lumber strapped to it.  My grandfather dozed off in the middle of the night.  His seat was right next to the back door of the car, facing sideways.  He looked out the window to his right and saw a man standing stone still on the flatbed.

The back door was locked and as a combat vet and light sleeper he had not heard anyone open the door much less jump the gap to the flatbed.  He elbowed his sleeping partner and they both stepped out onto the small platform to yell at the man to come in.

Once they made eye contact all hell broke loose.

My grandfather's partner did not go into details that I remember but he said that they stared into the face of a demon that night.  There was no doubt they were looking into the face of evil.  He froze up and my grandfather emptied his service revolver at a distance of 15 feet on a moving train.  The man walked to the side of the flatcar and just stepped off calmly into the darkness.  They got the train stopped at the next stop a few miles later and checked the car, there was a heavy blood trail leading to the side of the car.  No other details, but something scared my grandfather, a combat vet, enough for him to empty his gun that night.

cheapskate tag (bookmark)

Found this, last night, while surfing the web.  Good old railroad ghost stories.





http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/super.Html

Maco Light - Famouse NC Folktale

Heres a spooky one...






http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=de5_1243442739

Good stories, thanks for posting them.

Your lack of seniority did you in, hiring out on a railroad is all about timing, but I'm curious, as BIG as the UP is why didn't you go to another terminal, even if it meant moving. We have had plenty of guys go to other terminals for the very same reason. 3 years is a lot of time to flush away on the railroad. FWIW because the economy tanked we have places with guys with 4+ years furloughed but it's starting to get better.


Will

I actually quit one year before the system wide furlough...I was one of the ones that saw the writing on the wall.  A few of the old hand engineers and conductors carried around seniority rosters from our district from around 1979-1982 era, to drive home the point that your first 10 to 15 years in train service is a shaky career, at best.  If I remember correctly, during the Carter years, UP laid off 40% of their train service personnel, which started with getting rid of cabooses, and both brakemen, and going from a four man crew to Conductor/Engineer only crews for most trains.  When I left, I had 126 people under me in seniority, just on my district, and they are now all furloughed.  When I first hired out, they would hire about 20 people for train service, just on the Cheyenne sub, about every 2-3 months.  You had the usual Christmas time furloughs, but those people would usually come back after the first of the year.  At this time, there are guys I knew that were holding pretty steady engineer turns that are now forced into yard brakemen positions...and all of the "Borrowing Out" jobs have all dried up...you can't go to another district due to the same scenario playing out system wide.  Not sure how the BNSF works, but the UP goes on 20 year hiring/firing cycles, and I was on the tail end of their latest 20 year manpower build-up, and, like I said before, I saw the writing on the wall.  My wife and kids couldn't sit around and wait on the railroad to call me back in a few years after everything settled down.



I also got sick of watching the old hands screw younger guys to the wall.  They would go under miles for a half, and vote to furlough 10 people off of the roster, which would, in turn, produce over mileage for the old hands.  I hated playing the Union game, and having the Union screw me to death on not enforcing the payment of penalty time and miles, while concerning themselves with making sure the old hands got their over miles.  Another thing that really bothered me was getting bumped by someone in higher senority, at the last minute, and getting shit jobs until my turn was replaced on the board.  Instead of the old hands putting bids in for jobs in a timely manner, they would sit and wait until the last minute, call the crew dispatcher while you were on your first trip on the long pull (our best job on our district...70 mph hot-rods to green river and back...$3800 halves, with about 2-3 days home a trip), and ensure that you would be bumped to the Rawlins local when you got home (180 miles away from home for 5 days to work the Rawlins local).  I just got sick of all of that crap, and moved on...good thing I did, too, or I would have been jobless for over a year now.
 

The only good story that I have is one that was told to me.  A crew (engineer and conductor) were taking a coal train east from Grafton, West Virginia, to Cumberland on CSX's Mountain Subdivision (former B&O).  About halfway down the the big hill (17 Mile grade), both the engineer and conductor saw something extremely tall float out of the woods, across the tracks, and down a hill.  I was told that they described it as looking like the stereotypical "Death" figure.  Which I take to mean it was a figure in a long, black cloak.  The reason they said it floated, was because it left no footprints.  It had been snowing that day, and there were no tracks or anything in the snow.  Coal trains can only legally go down that hill at 15 mph maximum, so they had plenty of time to see if there were footprints and where whatever it was went.

I have never seen anything really strange on the tracks.  I've had to walk trains before, where I could have sworn there was something or someone following me, but I just attribute that to having an over-active imagination sometimes.  It is kind of eerie at night, walking a train and coming up on a dead deer that got hit by a train.  I couldn't begin to think how many times I've almost stepped in a rotten deer carcass because I wasn't looking where I'm walking.  I've been on the ground in Baltimore before, and seen some locals staring at me intently in some rough parts of town.  That's usually when I make a beeline for the locomotive.  As of now, I'm working as a locomotive engineer between Cumberland, Maryland and Baltimore, Maryland.  So I don't really have to get out and walk the train as an engineer.

Come on guys, mo stories...

Never know what goes on in the WV type areas...................lots of satanists and the like, I know just a few people that live in a few bad areas of Appalachia and have some crazy stories.

Cool stuff.

My dad worked on the Union Pacific for 40 years as a brakeman, then switchman, I'm sure he has a bunch of cool stories to tell.

Creepiest train (actually, any) story came from someone here. He worked the trains and he'd seen and heard of lots of suicides on the tracks. He said the worst are the ones who turn to look at the train as they're hit...with their crazed, wide staring eyes and open mouthed smiles...

Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

The wierdest thing that happened to me was  one time i was walking along rails near my town, this is single track line owned by R.J. Corman, I am in the middle of nowhere and i hear a frieght train horn coming towards me, i'm talking loud enough to be just around the bend from me heading towards me at decent spped form what i could hear, so i stepped off the right of way onto a bank next to it and stood there waiting for the train to come by................

Nothing ever did!!! The horn was close enough i should've been able to hear the diesel engines on the GP-38-2's he has on the line, but all i ever heard was the Diesel Freight train horn and then nothing ever came through.

My older brother lives a half mile from an abandonment that has had the rails and ties removed yet every now and then he hears a train come through with the rails and wheels clacking on the rail joints and all on that line.

He also has the ghost of five coal miners that are buried alive under his property and never recovered appear in his yard every now and then, he said they dissappear as soon as you try talking to them. His wife and daughter and MIL who live next to them have seen them too. I have never seen them but have felt them watching me while working with my brother on his property.

There is a series of railway tunnels along the Susquehanna river that was dug in the 1880's to around 1900, well they hired a company from Kentucky to dig some of them, the company brought crews of Black guys to do the work and some dies of Cholera. Well the folks around here would not allow them to be buried in their cemeteries because they were black so the company digging the tunnel just buried them by the mouth of the the tunnel in five unmarked graves. Locals say at night you can hear them moaning or singing gandy songs if you are by that tunnel at night.
I've never heard them and i have been on several Search parties in that area at night for missing boaters and have been within hearing idstance of that tunnel.

There is a "ghost light" on the railroad in northeastern NC, near Ahoskie,  on the former trackage of the Atlantic Coast Line RR. It is now part of the NC-VA RR, a short line.  This light has been appearing for decades. I have seen it numerous times from two different crossings. It is sort of an orange color.similar to a kerosene lantern,always low on the rails. It moves up and down the rails and fades away at random, then comes back in various degrees of brightness. My friends and I have seen it at all hours, in rain and clear conditions. It will appear on both sides of a crossing, but never right near the crossing––––looks to be a couple of hundred yards down the line. Some local guy told me he faked it at one time, when groups of folks were walking the tracks, just to scare them. I can say, from personal experience, I don't think there is some fool in the woods with a kerosene lantern on a fishing pole at 3AM on a cold, rainy morning just waiting for some fool like me to stop on the crossing to catch a glimpse. Also, I don't know of any ghost story attached to this situation.

I'd like to know what this is, supernatural or not. Maybe it is indeed swamp gas, whatever that is. The Maco light is the more well-known such light. Not much attention given to this one..the Earley's Station Light.

Taggage & Bumpage.

One of the stories from the link:

Bumping this thread.

IN

Tagitty

well get him to sign up

Bump for MOAR stories.