We were picking some late-season blackberries by the railroad crossing, when I saw what appeared to be an El Camino heading for the tracks a ways down. And when I say tracks, these are the Union Pacific’s north-south mainline, which numerous freights per day and the Coast Starlight use, some at a pretty good clip. And there’s no crossing down there under that bridge. What are these guys up to?
Shooting a rap video, of course. Finding an underpass with graffiti is a bit challenging in Eugene, so I guess they were a bit desperate. But I suspect that if a train had come by, the engineer would likely have made a call to someone. Probably not to a talent scout.
Dumb dumb dumb.
I’m no connoisseur of the music, but that must be some lame rap video if they’re featuring Steve Urkel in it. And where are his suspenders? Geez, it’s not even a ‘good’ Urkel impersonator.
Maybe urkel had to grow up and get a real job.. well sorta anyway, or maybe its hisa alter ego stephan.
Haha! Tell me about it! An El Camino is an unusual choice for one too I’d think.
Not a rap fan here too old I guess, but I’m pretty sure low profile tyres and alloy rims are unsuitable for crossing railway lines too often.
I speak as someone with 17 years on the seatbox.
When I see a car that close to the tracks…I have to assume it’s fouling the rail. On the lines I ran, often times it wasn’t tangent track so I wouldn’t be sure it was clear. Or that the car was empty…deliberate suicides, usually involving young people, happen at grade-crossings more than you’d want to know.
Coming on something like that…it’s big-hole time. Dump the air, putting the train brakes into “emergency.” That means several things: It means a fast AND UNCONTROLLED stop. It means there is no way NOT to stop – it takes about 7 to 10 minutes to recover the air. It means a call to the dispatcher and a radio advertisement to other trains, that a train was in emergency. AND…It CAN mean…the train buckles in the middle. Jumps the track; piles up.
Under some operating rules, the crew will have to walk the train before they can move it again. That can take close to an hour.
Railroad cops are sparse in this day and age; but if a trespasser is caught like that, he’s going to be taken in, eliminated as a terrorist, and then charged with whatever is the most severe in that jurisdiction.
Yep I respect rail tracks and sure dont park on them I paced a freight recently heading into town my 21 tonne truck kept up with him on the highway but the train didnt slow at the city limits where I was reduced to 50kmh he was still pulling 90kmh so yeah they dont stop very well at all certainly not pulling half a mile of containers,fert wagons and logs.
@ JustPassingThru…..Well said!..Its always been a mystery to me ,what possible reason, would any sane person ever have, to want to mess with a train.
@JustPassinThru:
You didn’t mention the very real possibility of the train breaking apart by busting a knuckle – I’ve seen it once – and/or some of the train even de-railing.
Not a pretty picture any way you cut it.
The dumbest thing I ever did on the tracks was when a friend and I were at my aunt’s house back in 1965 in Kirkwood, MO, and the Frisco (at the time) was in the neighborhood.
We were walking the line one hot summer day and there was a semaphore and the wiring was right there at the rail. I was wearing a pair of combat boots and started kicking the wires…
Well, eventually the wires all snapped! The semaphore started going crazy, and as this was the double-track main line out of St. Louis, we high-tailed it back to her house and didn’t tell a soul, hoping I didn’t cause real trouble.
Yeah, I was 14, but still felt bad about doing that. Real stupid, especially since I love trains so much.
There’s the possibility of pulling it apart; but when ya “dynamite” the brakes, it’s more likely the train will run up on itself. The brakes take a second a car just to react; with a 100-car train it’s almost a minute before the set or the dump moves from front to rear. If you were pulling hard…and the slack runs in…each car has four inches of in-and-out slack – except for auto racks, which have THREE FEET of give, in and out. That’s a lot with a two-mile-long train.
Surprises or uncertain activities on or near railroad tracks are always a butt-clenching discovery for the crews.
I hate to hijack the thread – sorry, Paul – I’ll be brief – but where I saw this happen was the night after Thanksgiving, 1982 in Montgomery City, MO, the evening N&W eastbound hotshot hit a car at the next crossing and the train snapped a knuckle right in front of us! Fearing a possible derailment, I told my BiL to back up. He didn’t, but the train didn’t derail, thank goodness. We were out in that area on a weekend camp trip.
I own a railroad lantern, so we got out of the truck and walked toward the break, near the deadly scene, and used my light to assist the train crew as they installed a new knuckle!
The car that got in the way of the train was a late 1960’s light green Chevy full-size sedan from what I could see. The person who lost his life was a middle-aged-to-older man, unfortunately…
I have an even dumber story from the summer of 1965 to tell, but I’ll save it for another time!
You just told a lot of people.
Why do folks persist in calling rap ‘music’?
I guess to them it sounds like the Eagles sound to us.
Retard alert
I’m staring and staring and I can’t figure out where this is. I figured it was Portland until I read the article.
Just east of High Street, by 5th St Market.
“Rap music” and El Caminos do not a happy pairing make.
The Elky is perfect for a country video or even a surfer boys in rock music video. But do the thugs into “rap music” recognize the goodness of the El Camino? Do their ilk really drive El Caminos? There are many more appropriate vehicles to appear in a “rap music” video; I don’t need to list them. But does this car really suit rap?
Those responsible for this art must be quite removed from reality. A rap video in Oregon using an El Camino on railroad tracks?
I dunno, it’s pretty ironic. Maybe this is the next wave of hipster chic
An ElCamino and a JCPenny shirt and tie combo……..gangsta.
This post so distinctly turns me off to this site. It sure is about that El Camino (at least you mentioned the car once).
A recurring theme of CC Outtakes (and it is called an “Outtake”) is to document auto-related vignettes we encounter on our many walks and bike rides. The tracks run right through town, so I’ve shot a number of Outtakes that involve people interacting with the tracks in different ways. I’ve shot a baby being photographed sitting right on these same tracks. I’ve shot folks walking on the rails themselves. And others too.
Frankly, I have no particular judgement about these guys; I don’t think they’re actually in the way if a train came by. But I suspect someone might not be too happy to see them there. And when they were first driving up on the track area, I was a bit disconcerted, since it wasn’t clear what exactly they had in mind. One doesn’t see a car pointing across the mainline tracks often, away from a crossing. I document what I find…
In any case, what they’re doing is certainly less stupid than some other things I’ve seen on the tracks. And I’m neutral about rap.
Thank you for taking the time to respond- I’d like to apologize for jumping the gun, and my misunderstanding of your intended point. I really enjoy this site for it’s love in all things automotive, in all sincerity.
No, thank you! Many things documented in real life (especially on the internet) are easily seen and interpreted to be intended as being an easy way to diss the subject and event.
I could very easily have seen myself doing the same thing in my youth. I’m still a bit of a rebel at heart. I was a bit concerned for their safety when I first saw the El Camino pointing and moving to the tracks. I went down to investigate, and had a brief but friendly interaction with these guys.
I’m more concerned about any negativity in the comments. While I don’t condone what they were doing, I see worse things on the streets often enough. And after yesterday’s article about the stupid things we all have done in being negligent with our cars, I think some folks are living in glass houses. But we forget so quickly….
Those of us who have worked for railroads know what a dumb and dangerous thing it is to do, and how colleagues can be traumatized by collisions with people dumb enough to try stunts like this.
I like the Outtake series Paul. For me this goes to show how everyone loves a G-body El Camino. They are highly prized around my parts among the young and old, rapper and non, doesn’t matter. You can tell these guys respect it, going easy on the mods and all.
A baby!?! A BABY!!!???!!! Words fail me.
I can see the problem from right here. Matching lobotomy scars.
So what was the dumbest thing you did when you were young? Was it worse than this?
Geez, 30 years later and filming rap videos next to graffiti laden underpasses is still cool?
“I’m from the tracks, yo!”
My wife has been involved in Operation Lifesaver for years and is a real safety nazzi when it comes to railroad crossings and rights of way. When my kids were young we would put pennies on the tracks to see them squished. Instant dog house!
The thing these guys doing the video don’t realize is that they are on private property, and could suffer some serious noogies, and worse, if the bulls were to come by.
Plus, passenger trains have pretty discrete clearance profiles, but you never know about freights. Shifting loads on scrap metal haulers have created some of Amtrak’s worst accidents. An El Camino wouldn’t stand a chance.
No need to worry about the “bulls” – those days are long over. Railroad police departments are a skeleton force in most areas; and even where they aren’t, the days of stomping the snot out of hobos is long gone. Out east, on CSX, they had one officer cover over a thousand miles of right-of-way. He was there to take reports, not throw trespassers off.
Hitting a car – not a truck with steel I-beams, but a car – wouldn’t do much to the train, generally speaking. Parts…you know, bumper or engine block – could fly up over the nose and smash the windshield glass if the impact were at speed; but mostly, to the train crew, it’s a day of gore, of police reports and statements and photographs and waiting for the road foreman to pull down event-recorder data. And nobody sane wants to see death and destruction.
It can affect them. A good friend of mine hit a car on a dark crossing outside of Cleveland; it was a suicide. A nineteen-year-old girl; boyfriend dumped her. She put some country-western CDs in her car’s player; and parked her car on this unlit crossing…and waited. The crossing was on a curve.
The police report said the coupler knuckle on the lead locomotive impacted the car square on the driver’s door glass. The engineer was a young guy…26. He was sick about it for weeks.
I don’t care WHAT kind of artistic endeavor someone is making – if you want to use railroad tracks as a prop, pick either a line out of service, or at least a branch line with a 10-mph speed limit on it; or else call the railroad’s PR department to get some help where and when you can do it.
When I was designing the control cab for the Amtrak AEM-7 locomotives I rode head end as often as I could on business to talk to the engineers and get their input. Scared the living crap out of me! One evening, rush hour, I was riding from Chicago to Milwaukee on a French Turbo. We were running 60 mph. In the north suburbs of Chicago surface street traffic was pretty heavy. We came around this one curve and immediately ahead of us was a set of crossing gates and they were still up! They didn’t come down until we were nearly at the grade crossing. Scary. The engineer told me about a recent suicide on that line in which a driver got out of his car, stood in the middle of the tracks, and flipped the bird to an oncoming train. His estate won an award from Amtrak, the Milwaukee Road, and everyone else his lawyers could sue. Being a locomotive engineer has to be one of the most stressful jobs out there.
Former ElCamino owner and current Caballero(Diablo,that is!) owner here. Sounds like something I still do although I would think twice before putting my pride and joy in harms way. Some things I have done are drive onto the lawn of a few parks and other property just so I could get a jet fighter or other piece of miltary equipment in the background. Once I got caught and when I explained why I did it the cops were really cool with it and let me off with a warning. If you do do this make sure you do it early on a Sunday morning when everybody is either at church or still in bed.
The first thing that came to my mind was that the dude in the purple shirt was reinacting a scene from “The Bodyguard”.
I don’t listen to rap or hiphop so I could care less about it…….but the other night I was loading some fresh tunes onto the MP3 and as I was reading the lyrics(KISS) I couldn’t help but think that the format was more or less the same. They were(rap and rock) about the same thing. Sex and money. The only real difference IMO was that the rock guys had more talent because they could actually play a musical instrument instead of just sampling(stealing) some background noise. Oh and the rockers didn’t use vulgarity!
Nice car/truck stupid producer and or driver.
The ElCamino is nice. The producer or driver have the intellectuall agility of the small soap dish.
Sadly, this outtake post is probably the most fame they’ll get from their video efforts!
That’s a mainline?!
Were they perhaps Europeans Paul? 😉
(incidentally I’m also baffled by all the hate in the comments – this is CC right? A: We’ve all done plenty of dumb things in our time and B: since when was ragging on others’ musical tastes what we do here?)
Nice car anyway – I hope the video came out well
Nice Trucklet, I always wanted one. Bad immature move to get that close to tracks. Trust me not all Rap fans are thugs. Carefull of stereotypes, lots of middle aged WASPs drive around down railway gates every day in Chicago and other cities.
Ugh, the commentary here is far from the worst I’ve seen – but there’s nothing sadder than old white guys talking shit on hip hop. I don’t want to sound like a jaded community college professor, so I’ll save my lecture – but suffice to say that rap had moved beyond the thug/gangster aesthetic before most of you even became aware of that stereotype.
No disrespect intended. I’m an aging white guy and an out-of-touch nerd as well, just saying. Modern country and arabic music (only two examples of many) sound like nails on a chalkboard to my ears, but I’m willing to concede I know nothing about them and am probably missing/misunderstanding some nuances. Not fair for me to judge being that uninformed. Same situation here!