Back in 1968, my folks bought a new home in the Rustic Hills area of Colorado Springs. The house was located at a T-intersection opposite a short street that went up the hill about a block and terminated in a cul-de-sac. Beyond the houses and yards on this cul-de-sac was a rocky bluff, and running along the base of that bluff were some railroad tracks. Rock Island Railroad, to be exact.
I recall there was a great deal of freight train traffic on that line. The rail bed through that section had a fairly substantial grade, meaning that trains heading west to east ran very slowly - many times around 5mph tops! Of course, trains heading east to west would fly down that grade.
In 1968, I was in junior high school. During the summers my neighborhood buddies and I would be hanging out, hiking around on the bluff or riding our bikes on a pathway paralleling the tracks. Whenever we heard one of the slow trains approaching from the west, we would make a bee-line for the tracks.
As the train passed slowly by we would wave to the locomotive engineers and wait. After they were safely far enough away to not see us, we would climb onto the ladders attached to freight cars as they passed by. They were going so slowly, it was really just a matter of walking alongside the car, and easily stepping on.
We would hitch a ride for about half a mile to just ahead of the point where the grade started leveling out and trains could pick up a little more speed. Then we would just hop off the ladders and go on our way. Harmless adolescent fun, eh?
That Rock Island rail line out of Colorado Springs is now long since gone. The rails have been removed and parts of the grade have been made into a walking/biking path.
What's all this got to do with model rocketry?
Last night I was reading the interview with Vern and Gleda Estes published in the Sep./Oct. 2006 issue of Launch magazine. I was intrigued by the part on page 29 where Vern was describing the shipment of Estes catalogs from the Penrose mail facility, in which Rock Island truck trailers were loaded with catalogs after which they were driven to Colorado Springs and loaded piggyback onto railroad flat cars to be transported to points east.
The article doesn't specify which year(s) this occurred.
Reading that interview article sparked these memories and makes me wonder if any of us kids hitching a ride on those trains did so on one of the flat cars laden with thousands of Estes Industries
catalogs bound for the East Coast...
I found a photo online of part of that same rail line in the process of being dismantled. This pic is from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. This section of track is a bit further west of where I lived.
