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Intermodal Shipping Containers & A Near Death Experience

I have an unusual interest in intermodal shipping containers. A couple of years ago I started noticing these colorful boxes full of earthly delights. They are really an amazing concept when you stop to think about it: load them up in China, put them on a massive ship that's in port only 24 hours, send them around the world, load them straight to a train, unload and then use as a warehouse for as long as needed and unload them once. Have you wondered why there are no large warehouses anymore? Yep, that's why. Having grown up looking over the deep-sea port of Kenosha, I used to watch them unload ships for days. Longshoremen (who made $22/hour in the '70s) loaded items by hand into seven-story deep ship holds. These ISO containers changed all of that. As usual, when I make realizations like this I end up spending inordinate amounts of time thinking about it and then go risk my life for no reason. The picture above was taken in the Union Yard in St. Paul. I wasn't actually in the yard itself, I was on the miles of parallel track leading into the yard from the North. After shooting the massive Bungee grain elevator (elevators revolutionized the grain commodities market early in the 20th century, but that's another article), I started walking the length of a parked train of TTX well cars. I walked in the snow for quite a while looking at the neighborhood and the graffiti. Then I came upon the image above. I shot over the parked empty TTX cars at a loaded double stack on the far side. I constructed an abstract image which, if I may say, came out pretty well. The contrast of saturated colors and detailed subjects is something I have been working on for a long time and the picture of Sarah at the State Fair Grounds is along the same idea. After the shot, I decided that I could get a better one of the containers if I didn't have the TTX cars in front of them. So I climbed up and over them. That was a lot of work, the 'ladder' was bent inward under the car and there were no handles on top. It took a while and the frozen steel was painful. (Have I mentioned how cold it gets up here in Minnesota?) When I landed on the other side I wasn't going back. I took a few shots which didn't work because I couldn't get back far enough, there was only one open track between the parked trains. So I started backtracking along the empty rail. As I walked, I looked up the track and saw in the distance another train coming. I thought I might get a good engine shot, but I was now on the wrong side of the parked train — there were six empty rail lines on the other side of the parked train and I was sure it was going to pass over there, but I wasn't going over the parked train again. So I kept walking. Turns out I wasn't going to miss that train. As I walked, I realized that that train was on the same line I was on. The parked trains on both sides of me were really long. It was 15 cars to the end between me and the oncoming train and much longer the other way. I started running. I ran and ran, counting the cars to the end as I went. It's hard to run on frozen gravel. Eleven cars to go, ten... Then the engineer started blasting the horn at me. Six cars, five... It became clear that I wasn't going to make it. Now, if you haven't spent much time in rail yards, and based on my lonely experiences there, not many of you have, the rail lines are really really close together. I decided that I had to do something, and climbing wasn't a good idea, I could fall into the path of the oncoming train. So I jammed myself up against a hitch between the parked cars. Again, not safe, but better than standing in front of a moving train. Amidst the blaring horn and the very angry glare of the engineer, the three BNSF EMD 60's rumbled by and I could reach out and touch them. There was about eight inches between the trains. Time moves slowly when you are caught between trains. Suffice to say I made it out alive and it was a nice walk back to the Jeep. The birds were singing, the snow had a lovely crunch to it, and now I had another rule to live by: don't walk on single rails between parked trains. Oh, another disclaimer, my friend Larry has since told me that in this post-9/11 world, walking on railroad property is a really bad idea. It seems that the good old days of railroad bulls beating hobos aren't gone forever. So if my story has a romantic appeal to to you, stay out of rail yards and seek immediate help of a psychological nature.