Jumping the track-almost

The Nickel Plate New York to St. Louis railroad tracks (NKP) marked the common township line between the village of Westlake and Bay Village, Ohio where I lived from the age of six until sixteen. Today Bay Village is a large, metropolitan suburb of Cleveland, back in the days of my youth, it was a much more stand alone community or as its name states, a real village.

It was a great place to grow up. There were streams, woods and fields for my friends and I to play in. The Lake Erie shoreline was only a mile north of my house, an easy walk for a swim on a hot July afternoon or a fishing expedition for white bass of a spring evening. There was little traffic and we could play 'Kick-the-Can', or 'Hide 'n Seek' on my street all evening long without having to move out of the way of a car. Nobody locked their houses, neighbors got along with each other. It is for me the 'good-old-days'.

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 The NKP actually had a station a mile to the west of my street where the tracks crossed Dover Center Road, where one could get on a local to the Cleveland Terminal Tower, or send or pick up freight, and there was a siding to two small manufacturers. The railroad tracks were a fascination for my friends and me, especially because of the thrill of watching and listening to the huffing and puffing and the whistles of the massive steam locomotives that sped by pulling their load of Chicago bound passengers, or great, lumbering freight trains where from empty box cars hobos waved at us and we waved back. And where we risked our carefree young lives by putting pennies on the rail as close to the front of an engine as we could, the flattened copper showed off proudly as a talisman of our daring-do. Before I left the Village for good, I had four in my treasure box.

One summer evening—I was ten-years-old at the time—my friend, Tom, and I were casting about for something to do having failed to rally enough of our friends for one of our evening games. We wondered aimlessly south on Glen Park looking for something interesting to do and ended at the NKP tracks. When we heard a westbound locomotive blow a warning at a crossing two miles to the east, we searched our pockets for a penny; neither of us had one. But I did have a Coke bottle cap. Since I owned the cap, it was up to me to put it on the track, which I did maybe twenty or thirty feet in front of the huge locomotive. When the first bogie wheel in the tandem set hit the bottle cap, it jumped straight up about (I swear) a foot, the second bogie likewise. When the first driver hit the bottle cap it jumped up also and I had a panicked vision of the behemoth leaving the tracks at the head of a massive derailment with me at fault. But before the second driver could come in contact with the bottle cap, it slipped off the rail—hardly damaged—much to my very great relief. I don't remember going near the tracks again for the rest of my years in the Village. (Kids, don't try this. It's stupid!)

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