Continued from April CJOW

When I got back to my apartment, I got a closer look at the CD 214s. The damaged ones weren't as bad as they seemed by the pole. One had a burr off one of her ears. Another had a flat chip on her skirt. The remaining three had mostly wire groove chips. I kept the one from the crossarm and the one with the ear damage. The other four I traded for different insulators. The breakage at the pole was a little disappointing, but I was glad to have removed a CD 214 from a pole for the first time, as well as saving the others for the hobby.

Hobo Heaven
September 28,1996 was a Saturday, and I was walking the tracks again. On this trip, I wanted to go farther than I had before. Still, I also looked for insulators at the poles closer to downtown. Along the way, I saw one clear Hemingray #42 grounder with a badly damaged skirt, which I didn't take with me.

I walked past the warehouses and past the Chaney Junction. Just past Chaney and the Studemont Street underpass were two houses. Interestingly, one of these was built facing the railroad tracks. Although the houses were quite old, I wouldn't have minded having a railroad track on my lawn.

The tracks did not form a straight line between downtown and the Eureka Junction. At Shepherd Street, the tracks began to curve northward towards Eureka and onward to Hempstead, in neighboring Waller County. Therefore, it was especially necessary to monitor the tracks for any oncoming trains.

An unfamiliar locomotive horn sounded as I walked past the alternative school and towards a large linen and uniform warehouse and the recycling yard. I looked up to see a bright yellow Union Pacific locomotive coming around the curve towards downtown. I stepped off the tracks at the Harvard Street crossing, by the recycling yard.

Moments later, the heavy UP freight thundered past, its flat cars loaded with oil field pipe. 1996 was the year that Union Pacific trains began showing up on Houston's SP tracks. There would be many more after this one, and the old SP /Cotton Belt "bloody nose" locomotives are nowadays bearing the UP shield and wings.

After the train was gone, I crossed a busy Heights Boulevard and passed the Heights Antique Barn. After walking over the old wood and steel Yale Street underpass, I stopped to look at the pole that towered over Yale Street below. This pole had a sizable number of empty pins. On the Warner television cable were tangled remnants of the old copper communications wires. At the bottom end of one of these wires, a blue CD 213 Hemingray hung indolently above Yale Street.

Beyond the underpass, the tracks passed between two plant buildings for Trinity Industries, a steel fabrication company. Although it was a Saturday, I could hear metal banging and men yelling inside. There were eight or ten poles between the Trinity plant and Bonner Street to the west. One of these poles had doubled arms, and the uppermost set was partially collapsed. At the base of this pole lay a clear Hemingray #42. This one had a flake on her wire groove, but was otherwise whole. I was no longer empty-handed.

There were some rather disreputable-looking apartment buildings past the Trinity plant that didn't seem friendly, so I commenced the return trip. On the walk back, I could see a transient walking about a half-mile ahead of me. He had a huge orange rucksack on his back. Some FTRA members are territorial about the tracks they hang out on, so I kept my distance. It was by the Salvation Army buildings, only a few feet from the malt liquor bottle shards that I accidentally stumbled onto him. He was sitting in the grass, leaning back on his rucksack and taking it easy in the shade of a Salvation Army warehouse. He wasn't rude or threatening. Frankly, he seemed glad to see me.

For maybe fifteen minutes or so, we chatted with each other mostly about railroads. The hobo liked the Southern Pacific, but didn't care much for the Santa Fe or Union Pacific. As we spoke, a Salvation Army truck crept over the Sawyer Street crossing. The hobo spotted the truck and commented on how welfare was taking food out of the mouths of hard-working people. Since I was now working and finding out on my own how hard it was to make ends meet, I was inclined to believe him.

The b-flat klaxon horn of an oncoming SP train caught our attention. We decided to get scarce, so we said our good-byes. The hobo went his way while I disappeared to a dead-end street between two warehouses to railfan the long container train. Perishable goods were on board, as I could hear the soft whirring of the reefer units as each intermodal car passed. All in all, I'd had fun on the tracks that day.

As I turned to go, one of the broken insulators in the grass beneath the pole caught my eye. I reached down to pick her up. She was another #42, and she was horrendously damaged with wire groove chips and large chunks missing from her outer skirt. Something about the insulator's color, however, was not quite right; the insulator seemed greener than usual. Still, I really didn't have time to do a research project right there by the tracks. The next train was probably due any minute, and the Houston sky had been threatening rain all day long.

I took the ice blue #42 back to my apartment and immediately cleaned her. About an hour after I returned home, the weather became really bad. Rain fell, and I saw the most orange cloud I had ever seen. This very same storm cell dropped several inches of rain in neighboring Fort Bend County and spawned tornadoes that damaged the then new First Colony shopping center. The Lone Star Insulator Club held its February 1998 meeting a few days later. I mentioned what I had seen to a few of my collecting buddies. While some were mildly surprised, others were skeptical and felt that a green insulator in downtown Houston was highly unlikely.

By this time, I was scratching my head over this insulator. The only way to solve this puzzle was to get that insulator. On the afternoon after the LSIC meeting, I parked in the same parking lot and went straight to the pole. I didn't have to look far; the insulator was right where I had left her.

I took the enigmatic insulator back to my apartment and got a closer look. There were two large half-circle pieces missing from her skirt. This insulator wasn't just mutilated; she had also been abused. The upper wire groove had three chips that were almost perfectly spaced apart. It looked as though some tripod-type device had been clamped onto the insulator's crown. Nevertheless, I was enthralled with the insulator's color. Her aqua coloration had a distinct yellow tint, and she did not match any of the aqua #42s in my collection. I kept the insulator, and I found most of her skirt pieces on later walks of the tracks. Some of my fellow LSIC members have seen this insulator, and they have felt that she is in fact green.

Weather the Storm
I was asleep in my apartment on Monday, May 10, 1999. It was about 6:30 a.m. when I awoke to the sound of a rustling wind outside. Storms would pass through downtown Houston every so often, so I thought nothing of it at first. That changed moments later, when the wind began to blow from the northwest.

The entire west wall of my apartment consisted of windows. There were two large picture windows on either side of a sliding patio door.

The patio door had a security bolt, which was a thin steel rod inserted into a small hole drilled into the aluminum doorjamb. Many times, especially on weekends, I would open the sliding door and stand in the threshold, watching downtown Houston and the rest of the world go by. I often went out onto the apartment balcony, although shoes were needed because the balcony was always coated with a dingy gray inner-city dust.

On this early Monday morning, such a step outside was out of the question. The wind was now blowing against my apartment building at such an angle that it made a spooky whistling noise through the hole in the doorjamb. What's more, the doorjamb began to creak. I could hear glass breaking outside. Whether it was a window, someone's fragile balcony decoration, or some leftover beer bottles from the previous Saturday night, the breaking glass was a sign that this wind was serious.

I got out of a perfectly comfortable bed to monitor the doorjamb. I held onto it, feeling the shock waves through the aluminum. The wind lasted only a few moments, but I was on edge about those huge windows. Just as the harsh wind began to die down, heavy rain began to fall. I went back to bed and got a 15-minute nap before having to wake up again for my alarm clocks.

My broken glass fears were not unfounded. Flying debris shattered a window in the high-rise's lobby. A few blocks west, windows were broken in the Kellogg Building. A computer had been sucked out by the winds, and was shown on the evening news as it lay -- monitor and all -- on the sidewalk many floors below.

A couple of days later, I was driving on Allen Street along the tracks. Just beyond the intersection where Allen Street forms a T with Roy Street stood a pole with storm-tossed crossarms. There was a trace of aqua glass at the base of this pole.

I parked my Oldsmobile at a closed oil field services shop on the other side of the tracks and quickly hiked over to the pole. A single aqua Hemingray #42 lay beneath it. I picked her up and took her back to my apartment. I had to use the Woolworth channel locks to remove a broken pin in the pinhole. The wire groove had some chipping on the Hemingray side, but I added another of the old Houston insulators to my collection.

Act Fast 
May 19, 2001 was an unusually hot spring Saturday in Houston. I took a break from running errands to examine the crumbling poles near the Trinity Industries plant. The Yale Street underpass had pedestrian passageways, as did Houston Avenue. Chain-link fences placed just beside the roadway, however, precluded access to the railroad embankment. Some creative walking was required.

I parked my Olds in a Bank of America parking lot and crossed Washington Avenue on the corner. I then cut across Center Street and past the Heights Antique Barn before reaching the tracks. Once on the tracks, I had to sidestep the carcass of a track-kill opossum that was buzzing with flies. As I crossed over Yale Street, there was a gaping hole in the underpass' wooden platform (which has since been repaired). A car zoomed by underneath as I stared into the hole. It was a mild shock for me, but I also felt sorry for any tramp that had to walk over that platform in the dark.

Once again, I walked between the two Trinity Industries plant buildings. The Saturday crew was there, as usual. A few spans west of Yale, at the base of a pole lay a tramp bracket with four CD 214 Hemingray #43s. Unfortunately, all four were clear and had large cracks in the domes, as well as other chips. I already had an insulator like these in my collection, and these weren't in the best condition. I reluctantly left them behind and went on about my business.

The very next weekend was the Memorial Day weekend. I took a short walk on the tracks, passing through the Trinity complex. As I walked past the poles, the tramp bracket was gone. There were no shards on the tracks, so I knew they weren't broken. My guess is that another collector got them, or perhaps a Trinity employee helped himself to the insulators. Oh, well.

Spurs with Signals that Jingle, Jangle, Jingle
June 27, 2002 was a Thursday. I was coming home from work that evening, driving westbound down Washington Avenue. As I approached Studemont Street, I noticed that the crossing signals on the Sacks spur were lighting up. At first, I thought they were malfunctioning. I had driven this street for eight years, and not once had I seen a train on the Sacks spur. Still, the cantilever crossing sticks came down obediently. Moments later, a klaxon horn sounded, and a Union Pacific switch engine crept over the crossing. The engine continued down the spur towards the Sacks Waste Paper building, passing the new Walgreen's pharmacy on the corner. This was the only time I had seen traffic on that spur.

At one time, the spur crossed Buffalo Bayou and served a Houston Lighting & Power maintenance center on the other side. Two steel trestle structures, both of which had faded Southern Pacific logos painted on them, had overarched Memorial Drive and Allen Parkway. These structures and the trestle were removed in the autumn of 1999.

Better to Have Wigwagged & Lost...

Along Washington Avenue was a railroad antique that I had not seen in a long time. At the end of National Street, before the entrance of a cabinet factory, stood a genuine wigwag signal. At one time, these signals were very common on the Santa Fe. Since this particular one was on a UP track, I suspected that it could possibly be Santa Fe salvage. I was indeed fortunate to have seen the wigwag's performance. On a morning in May 2002, I was gassing up my Chevy truck at the Texaco bodega on Washington Avenue, the same one from which I had bought the bagged Coke six years earlier.

A long freight had just finished passing over Chaney Junction from the north track, headed westward. Bare seconds later, a locomotive horn sounded nearby, and I glanced up National Street in time to see the wigwag signal come to life. I was too far away to hear the bell, but the light came on and the banjo swung back and forth dutifully as the locomotive of a second westbound freight crept over the crossing. This was the first time I had seen that wigwag in action.

On September 4, 2002 in the evening, I was dumping some paper at a recycling bin along Washington Avenue. As I did, a UP train of empty auto-loaders passed by. I got back into my truck and headed for National Street. Sure enough, when I arrived, the banjo was lit and swinging. This time, I could hear the bell ringing, so I now had proof positive that the wigwag was fully functional.

This would turn out to be the only time I saw the wigwag in complete exhibition. A few weeks later, I passed by the National Street crossing only to find a brand-new cantilever signal set at that location. Progress strikes again.

Laid Low? 
Since the terrorist attack on America on September 11, 2001, railroad police have been more vigilant of unwanted persons on or near railroad tracks, regardless of whether they are terrorists or transients or local residents. I still keep a close eye on the poles, all the while trying to remain on public property as much as possible.

On February 1, 2003, the day of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, I did sneak a very short walk behind the junkyard. I had gone there because almost all of one pole's five crossarms were broken in two and hanging by their support rods.

I walked up the Sacks spur, past the bakery's truck yard, to the main line. It was hoped that one of the insulators from the broken crossarms had fallen, but there were no grounders beneath either of the two poles behind the junkyard. I couldn't tell if any insulators had fallen into the junkyard due to the eight-foot-high security fence surrounding it.

I hadn't been there two minutes when a long UP freight thundered over Chaney Junction from the north track to the main line. This train was great for railfanning, never mind that I was hanging out on railroad land. Anyhow, no one gave me any flak for trespassing, and I quickly left the area once the train had passed.

I no longer live in the downtown Houston area, but I do pass through my oId neighborhood now and then. I still get a kick out of seeing these tough old poles still standing in the heart of the city, despite their mostly common insulators. As for the dark CD 152 that I spotted near Oliver Street, that insulator is still atop her pole nearly a decade after I first saw her. Railfanning is easy here, too. I have come back to the Harvard Street recycling yard to watch trains go by as well as drop off my recyclable garbage. The tracks are a railroad carnival, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Mr. N.R. Woodward and I have discussed this line many times, and I would 
like to thank him for the historical information he has provided.

Also, many thanks to Matthew Dittert and Dan Furtado of 
the "Texas Wigwags" page on www.trainweb.org 
for their assistance with the wigwag photos.

Needless to say, the search goes on.

Insulators in my collection from this line.

This pole is on Allen Street. It has the only porcelain insulator that I have seen on the line