Just Another Day on Danger’s Fast Track

I live for danger, and believe me, I’ve seen my share. Flirting with death is my thing, you know? My biggest thrill in life is almost losing it.

Hey, I’ve reached over a neighborhood bar on a Monday night and turned the football game off . One time I drove into a garage and told the mechanic to fix a funny noise no matter how much it cost. I’ve even ridden a motorcycle.

I’ve been walking this tightrope so long it’s getting harder to feel a buzz. Nowadays it takes something really special to make me sweat.

So when I got a chance to ride the world’s most dangerous train, I jumped at it. Along this train’s 60 miles of track lurk death and destruction a thousand times over, and I only had to drive as far as Seal Beach to ride it.

You’ve probably never heard of this train, but you will if anything ever goes wrong. This is the train at Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station that pulls ammunition boxcars, and if a string of those ever goes up, you’ll hear it in La Habra.

This 5,000-acre ammunition dump was built way back during World War II. They haven’t had anyone blown up there since 1946, when some bags of black powder went up in a bunker and killed a worker. Now most of the work is warehousing and testing tactical missiles.

But plenty of that naval firepower--huge powder charges and explosive projectiles and missile warheads and who knows what else--is still there. Maybe even nuclear warheads. The Navy always refuses to comment one way or the other on this sensitive point, but in 1983, it implied that the base once had facilities to store nuclear weapons.

Such uncertainty only spices the danger. When I rolled up to the station’s main gate, I was ready to ride and bond with the daredevil train crew, all of us joined by the common peril.

Waiting for me beside the locomotive was a man who looked as if he’d been doing this for 32 years. It was the foreman, Cliff Ochsner, 52, who has been doing this for 32 years. He didn’t look nervous. He looked annoyed. (I was 20 minutes late.)

With him was Bill Hatrick, 25, who was dressed in bib overalls, a beautiful, classic conductor’s hat, an immaculate white dress shirt and a bow tie. “I always wear the overalls and hat,” he said. “The shirt and tie are for the occasion.”

Hatrick, the brakeman, didn’t seem nervous, either. He seemed overjoyed to be there.

“I’m kind of heavy into trains,” he said. He owns his own excursion car, which he occasionally hooks onto Amtrak trains, and he works his off-hours at the Orange Empire Railway Museum near his home in Perris.

Soon the conductor and engineer, Steve Henderson, 35, and Ron Jackson, 36, arrived, and we climbed into an ungainly and unromantic-looking yellow switch engine, a small one with the cab in the middle so you couldn’t tell which is the front end. It reminded me of an old Chevy coupe.

We drove off without ceremony, without even whispering a prayer or looking intensely into one another’s eyes or kissing a picture of Mom.

We drove through open land seemingly marked only by our tracks and narrow roads. We passed the marsh--a wildlife preserve--and warehouses and guard shacks and some of the 119 bunkers--weed-covered hillocks with vent pipes sticking out of them. They’re spaced far apart so an explosion in one is unlikely to set off another.

We stopped, backed onto a spur and gently coupled to a single, silver-painted boxcar parked between two protective concrete and earth embankments. An ominous yellow sign was stapled to the boxcar end: “EXPLOSIVES B.” (The “B,” I discovered, stands for materials with “high flame and blast” but no shrapnel.)

Jackson revved up his engine and pulled the boxcar half a mile, to some sort of workshop building. Hatrick uncoupled it and we all went back to the yard.

That’s it?

Yes, Ochsner said, there’s nothing to do now until Evelyn, the dispatcher, calls with a job.

What about the danger?

Well, he said, every now and then somebody jumps a crossing on the base and runs a vehicle into the locomotive. That’s about it.

Has anyone ever hit a loaded boxcar?

Yes, he said.

Did anything happen?

“Naw.”

I drove back to the office, but I called the station’s PR man, John Frye, and asked him to find out what was in that boxcar. Nobody on the train had known--or particularly cared. Maybe a good party yarn still could be made of this adventure.

“I’ve got some bad news for you,” Frye said when he called back. “They were illumination rounds--parachute flares--and some black-powder charges, but they can’t blow.”

What do you mean, they can’t blow?

“The fuses weren’t with them. They never are. You’d have to put the powder up against an open flame, and they’re sealed in 75-pound metal containers.” He seemed genuinely apologetic.

I should have expected it. When you lead the kind of reckless life I do, even a ride on an ammunition train seems routine.

Next week: I risk death or injury by sitting through an entire Board of Supervisors meeting without a pillow.