Gateway, Oregon railroad station

This is the old railroad station. The track has a siding and they used to pull onto the siding and go slow and there was a hook you put out to catch the mail bag on. Gateway, Oregon is now a ghost town, the post office, the store and the depot are old and abandoned, the trees have taken over and the siding is all rusting. The trains still run by Gateway but none stop, all that remains is the side alongside the track that names the siding.

So many memories again of Gateway. Noah Vibbert taught us kids how to listen to the track and tell if a train was coming.  He told stories of how people put pennies on the track to flatten them but how dangerous that was as the penny could shoot out and kill you.  One of my favorite things was how to tell what color the caboose was going to be. I won many a bet in high school when we were sitting at a railroad crossing and I would bet the kids a dime on what color the caboose was.  The cars in between belonged to many and had many different names and colors but the caboose always had the same company name and color as the engine and caboose belonged to the same train company. Funny how no one ever caught on to that fact but it bought me several Pepsi's through the years.

To this day I love the sound of a train. Car traffic wakes me up but a train just soothes me, when I hear that sound of the train whistle it brings a smile to my face and memories to my heart of good times and good friends. There is nothing like the sound of a train whistle breaking up the silence of the night or the loneliness of a hot afternoon in the hay field.

I have never got to ride a train but that is still on my bucket list.