ColdWarrior, I love you, man, you know it.
BUT, you are not going to out-stupid me!!
So, yeah, we were also probably about 13-years old at the time, just three of us that day if I remember right (the "gang" varied from about 3-7 kids total).
The Potomac River takes a bend at Point-of-Rocks, and that slowed the trains down and that's where we'd jump on to head up-river (you still had to run to catch them, but just not real hard, we did it because we COULD, I guess).
The train was a coal train, a long line of hopper cars. The hopper cars were empty (returning from feeding West Virginia coal to the GSA steam plants in D.C.). We hung on the ladders for the ride out. But that was work to hang on to the ladders. One of us got the idea: "let's go down in the car and sit". We did. But after a while the ride was beating us up (coal car suspension isn't much).
So we all climbed our way out of the bottom of the coal car, and grabbed back onto the ladders at the top of the cars. About 5-10 minutes later, we hear a BIG bang, a heavy "crash", and looking down into the coal car we see a sight that made us all REAL quiet:
- Right where we all had been sitting, the hopper door had dropped OPEN...we could all see the railroad ties speed on by as the train whipped along.
We were quiet for a second. But we were 13-years old. So in just a second or two later we were all good! Nobody dwelled on it. Somebody said something like, "Wow. That was lucky". And it was. Yikes!!
Needless to say:
- We never rode the bottom of any empty coal cars after that.
We kept the story to ourselves ("Hey, Mom, guess what we did today!!"). And, too stupid to know better, we just kept jumping trains.
The End
