The New Road

My Monty Python King Arthur moment

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail there is a scene where King Arthur approaches a French castle. From the ground way below he talks with the French in the castle who unceasingly heckle him. I had an similar experience this weekend.

I drove the truck to the dump and found myself in a line of about ten cars waiting on a train that was at a dead stop right in front of the entrance to the dump. I waited for about twenty minutes before driving down to the side of the train, hopping out and walking the 3/4's of a mile to the engine.

As I was walking there was a dude down the way who was crawling over the cars, and ended up walking towards me on the other side of the track. I caught up with him and ducked under the cars. "Hey!" No response. "Hey! Can't you move the train." I finally got his attention. Turns out he was another guy like me who had asked them to move. He said that they told him to "f*** off". Nice.

I finally got up to the engine. Now this thing was huge. In fact, there were three engines, and they were all huge. So here I am this little spec beneath this huge engine where there is an engineer with his back turned to me in the window. "Hey! Would you mind... moving the train... please?" Amazingly he hears me and turns around to respond. "Can't. Red light." So, I ask, "Maybe it's broken. It's been a while." He replies, "There is a train coming." "How do you know?", I ask. "Red light."

"You can call Union Pacific!", he says.

"What's the number?"

"It's written on the box at the junction."

"That's almost a mile back there." My shins were killing me. Hell if I was going to walk back and get the damn number and then walk all the way back and tell this guy to move. So I start on my cell phone dialing information and getting the runaround.

Finally another head pops out of the engine. "Mister!", she says. "Yeah!" "Trains coming!" Eventually this tiny commuter train appears in the distance and zips by. At which point, in a wrenching symphony of klanking the train starts up and pulls away. Leaving me with the long walk back to the car and last position in the long line to get into the dump.

Oh well, it was still fun to yell up at this enormous engine, "Hey! Would you mind... moving the train... please?"

In my own defense, the notion that there was incompetence or extreme stupidity involved was only the third item down on the list. The first notion I had was that the engineer was just having a smoke break and didn't know he was blocking the intersection. The second was about technical difficulties with the train that perhaps needed some help. I also figured that I could offer some unique out of the box thinking, like, perhaps backing the train up. You figure a train engineer would likely think about going forward and might not have considered going in the opposite direction.

I probably wouldn't have staid if I had remained in the car. It was over thirty minutes between when I started walking to the train and when they finally left and the way was clear. Nobody I saw in the original line was still in line when I got back.