In the member introduction forum, I posted about the first experience I had growing up that made me look beneath the bedazzling facade of consensus reality and see something darker underneath. Several people, both in that forum and in private messages, have asked me to talk about the second event that shook me up so deeply at such a tender age.

Well, the summer after my first year of college, I had a huge falling out with my family. It was over politics, natch. My father is reaaaaaaaaaally far Right and the conversations over the dinner table kept getting more and more brutal. Finally one night it all exploded and we were yelling at each other and throwing things (the housekeeper had already threatened to quit if she had to clean up broken dishes that had been used as projectiles once more) and the whole scene just vibed "grand effing finale" in my head so I stomped out. For the first time in my life I was penniless.

Shortly after that I Found a job on the railroad, doing repair work on the tracks. This is hard work, especially if you're just a grunt with no skills other than picking up what you're told to pick up and banging on what you're told to bang. Money for muscle, but the pay was pretty decent. We worked on crews that travelled all over the place. Not so bad for summer work.

One night several weeks after I started we got a call to go repair some tracks out in Maine. We were the closest crew and it needed to be done post haste. Calls to repair tracks at night aren't at all common. It isn't end of the world stuff, but it's definitely "Important enough to get bigshots out of bed" stuff.

There were five of us on the crew plus our foreman, a Mexican dude named Hector. A couple of the guys starting look at the damage on the tracks, shaking their heads and muttering that it was "[expletive deleted] just enough to be a serious pain" and Hector started talking to the conductor of a train that was stopped nearby. Apparently he was the one who had called it in, and he said he had no intention of leaving the train there for the night, he and his crew would be sticking it out until we were done.

There was a lot about the scene that vibed weird, just weird enough to make your hair stand up. The conductor was too tense, but we all just wrote this off as a dude with a deadline who had probably been snorting or popping something to stay awake all night. When our guys were looking at the tracks, some of the train's crew were right down there with them, taking pictures and spending a lot of time huddling with themselves and making phonecalls. Anybody who has worked on the railroad in any capacity knows freight trains don't exactly tend to be overstaffed but every time we turned around it seemed like a new crewmember was showing up. The other thing was, some of these guys were obviously private security guards. They weren't walking around with guns drawn but they kept walking the area around the train and even a college kid whose idea of living dangerously was hitting on waitresses at townie bars could see the bulges under their jackets. They were also the only guys wearing jackets even though it was still about 80 degrees out.

Hector and the guys were a little creeped by the whole deal, but several people told me that they would run into trains with private, plain clothes security guards from time to time. Usually it just meant there was something valuable on the train and you had to keep your nose extra clean and not sneak off to have a drink or anything or they'd report you no questions asked.

Continued....

As we were walking the tracks and checking out the tracks behind the train (we had to see if it had plowed its way through any damaged sections, which would have been a serious pain) several of us thought we heard weird noises from inside the train. I would have sworn I heard crying, and another guy thought he heard voices, maybe crying too. Sometimes even these days you get people who train hop, but considering all the dudes with guns running around it seemed like train hoppers would have been evicted no questions asked. This guy Dick swore up and down that he heard banging and someone saying "Hello? Hello?" He said it sounded like a kid's voice and he was talking, loudly, about just walking off because this whole deal was giving him the creeps. But Dick was known as a lazy drunk and so it was easy enough to just assume he was looking for any excuse to not be working on a hot dark night.

Enough guys were complaining about weird noises coming from the train, though, that Hector went off and had a heated discussion with the conductor and a couple of the train crew. We all assumed Hector's palms had been greased a bit because he came back smiling, telling us everything was fine (although the SOB never got within a hundered yards of the train after that) and to just carry on as usual. I think they told him it had unmarked hazardous chemcials onboard, because he did yell at us, from a safe distance, that we should probably cover our mouths if we stood downwind of the boxcars.

Hector supposedly told one of my co-workers it was carrying "hazardous vaccines" which means we assume they told him "hazardous chemicals and vaccines" and he just got it wrong. Hector was a moron.

Meanwhile, one of the dudes from the train had told me that the train was carrying "livestock", specifically lambs, who could sound human enough when they cried to even freak out the train's crew. When all of us railroad guys compared stories later, I sarcastically remarked "maybe they were diseased lambs that had just been injected with hazardous vaccines".

About three quarters of the way through the job, I swear to God I heard a faint voice near the boxcars saying "Help me" and so I ran over to see what was up. Guys get hurt all the time on the job, and so you learn to look out for each other. The voice sounded real young, but a guy who has just broken his head open after tripping on a track or something can sound odd. I wasn't the only one who heard it, three other guys all went running toward the boxcars. We didn't see anything, and all of us were accounted for, including Hector, hard at work sitting on his butt waaaaay off in the distance. If it had been one of the train crew who got hurt, well....we'd all developed a serious dislike for those guys by that point so they could just handle it themselves. In fact, when we went back to work on the tracks, we saw a couple of them jog over to where we'd been standing so we just assumed they were doing a headcount.

When we finished up the part of the job we had to do and finally split for the evening, nobody really felt right. We started comparing notes and we had all heard one or two things that bugged us. Banging here, maybe a voice there, a couple of guys thought they heard crying, nearly everybody had heard what sounded like chains being moved around.

The more I thought about it later, the more convinced I became that there had been some kind of human cargo on the train.

I was reading your other post about human sacrafice. I find what you have to say very interesting and look forward to reading more about what you have experienced.

Thanks for posting this.

That story sends chills down my spine. Thank you for reporting this for the rest of us. What year did this occur in and around what area, if you don't mind me asking?

Originally posted by Scurvy
That story sends chills down my spine. Thank you for reporting this for the rest of us. What year did this occur in and around what area, if you don't mind me asking?

Sure, this happened in the summer of 1999, and it occurred between Portland and Augusta, which was kind of a long stretch of nothing at all.

Wish there was more to this....

Or more to be said or learned about it, to make any kind of conclusion. Prisons all over, rumours of some even being underground. Funny, how there seems to be some kind of a train track connection to a couple of the "camps" that exist.

Some people though, are known to smuggle people. The human trafficking business used to be huge. Dunno if it still is.

Was there anything unusual about the railcars themselves? Do you remember if there was a passenger car immediately behind the engine?

I have seen somewhat similar trains in the Utah/Nevada/NM area.....

Interestingly the Pan Am Railway bought out several rail lines in a short amount of time and replaced a lot of the management and policies in place for those rails. This proves nothing though, more or less just opens up the conspiracy door. I don't think we'll find anything on this as charges of human cargo would have been plastered all over the place if there were prior charges.

Originally posted by Scurvy
Interestingly the Pan Am Railway bought out several rail lines in a short amount of time and replaced a lot of the management and policies in place for those rails. This proves nothing though, more or less just opens up the conspiracy door. I don't think we'll find anything on this as charges of human cargo would have been plastered all over the place if there were prior charges.

I believe that my pay cheques did, in fact, come from Pan Am Railway. Other than this one incident (and the fact that it took me a couple of months to get my severance cheque when I left for school again) I never noticed anything particularly sinister about the company though, and I've never really seen them come up again in conjunction with any research I've done.

You are a good writer; quite possibly too good. LOL.

I can't find the link to the satanic story. Can you post it?

[edit on 25-8-2008 by Sonya610]

Good story...VERY creepy. I can't say what I would have done other than been creeped out too...heh I noticed the way you spelled "cheque". Are you from the UK? (Not really relevant, I was just curious.)

Do you recall if the freight equipment had any distinguishing reporting marks?

DODX, FGWX, MHAX, USAX, DAFX, ATMX?

I know it was dark, but if you do recall any marking this might help explain who or what agency was moving this freight.

Interesting story.

SIRR1

Originally posted by BRQuick
Good story...VERY creepy. I can't say what I would have done other than been creeped out too...heh I noticed the way you spelled "cheque". Are you from the UK? (Not really relevant, I was just curious.)

Good catch...it's also the Canadian spelling. Certainly not the American spelling...should we call shenanigans on this tale? Hmmm....

Hiya Leo!
I grew up bike-riding distance from one of the coolest interchanges in the Midwest. Rondout, Illinois. As I grew up. My dad instilled in me a love of trains and being so close to a prime railfanning spot, many hours were spent by me and my friends watching trains, walking the tracks, hanging out under the trestle over the river, etc. As I got older, I would take my lunch breaks in my car, sitting in a gravel parking lot next to the (now) Canadian Pacific tracks. Long freights we common and the Metra commuter trains were on regular schedules. Amtrak used the line too, so, a point-to-point Amtrak train would go through 4 or 5 times a day as well.
Sundays were the best, though. Low Metra numbers and there just might be a unique train excursion running from Milwaukee to Chicago. Steam and old diesel train lash-ups are a sight to see.

One bright sunny Sunday I was sitting in my camper van watching trains go by and a...different train went by. It was just like a lash-up Amtrak train with a P-40 Loco on one end and a Dash 8 on the other with cars in between. I thought it was odd because it wasn't and Amtrak-marked train. The equipment was all white and the 8 or 9 baggage cars were white with a blue, wide stripe and blue car numbers with only numbers and no designation letters. Just low numbers, like, 82, 67, 155. I don't remember the actual numbers, but, I did note the oddity of no reporting owner marks like DTTX or AMX.
Another difference was Amtrak trains rarely stop. Usually, they are hauling ass, kicking up a great following of dust and debris as they rip on through the grade crossing. This one stopped about 100 yards before the grade crossing and just sat there, idling. 10 minutes later, it throttled up and continued south towards the city. This in itself isn't too odd because many trains pause here while an EJ&E freight passes at the crossing of the CP 60 yards south of the grade crossing (Illinois Rt 176). But, this one stopped and nothing crossed or interfered with it's journey that I could see from my good vantage point. As it passed, I lazily watched but thought it odd that there were no passenger-hauling cars, but, just the baggage cars that usually accompany the passenger cars.
As a train-fan I was pretty intrigued by the color, numbers and actions of the train, but, it wasn't till a few years later, with my interest in Conspiracy-themed stuff, that I really thought it fishy.
This thread really woke it up from it's slumber in my memory.

Thanks, OP Leo.
Starred and flagged.

Cuhail

Leo,

Very interesting.

Do you recall which direction the train was heading in? N, S, E, W?

Do you recall the color of the cars?

Any discernible accents from the train guards? NY, Boston, Philly, Southern??

Sorry for the detailed questions, I am just trying to get a bigger picture of that night.

M