Two Trains Running

I can’t quite go there with Adman—I haven’t yet found anyone on the rails who’s made me homesick for my freedom. But you have to respect Adman because he’s done something with his romantic zeal. Back in 1983 he created the Penny Route, encouraging people to contribute a penny for every mile he rode; he wound up raising more than a hundred thousand dollars for the National Coalition for the Homeless. Since then he’s established himself as a respected figure in the hobo community, someone who can speak both to and for the transient rail population. What’s troublesome about yuppie hobos in general, however, are the increasing numbers of sport riders and scenery freaks who sally forth onto the rails without regard for the risks involved. Should someone with a little fame—a minor rock star or a peripheral Kennedy relative—decide to hop a freight in order to research a part or just to feel that “Jack Kerouac thing,” and then fall under the wheels of a boxcar, Officer Grandinetti will be turning up on every television program from Nightline to American Journal, wagging his finger and putting the bogeyman face of the FTRA on the tragedy, whether it applies or not, and the media frenzy will begin.

From the standpoint of the railroad companies, one might think that an intensified law enforcement focus on the subject of the FTRA, wrong-headed or not, would be a good thing, since it would probably result in even more security and fewer criminal incidents involving transients. But Ed Trandahl, a spokesman for Union Pacific, laughed when I mentioned Grandinetti, and said, “Oh, yeah. We know about him.” He went on to say that “The FTRA is a totally overblown deal. Union Pacific has thoroughly explored this with our railroad police, and there’s no massive organization at work here. Our investigators have gone over hundreds of cases and we can’t find any correlation to what Mr. Grandinetti is saying.”

The 39-year-old hobo who brought the heat down onto the rails, Robert Joseph Silveria (aka Sidetrack) has the word “Freedom” tattooed on his neck. In his case freedom is, indeed, just another word for nothing left to lose—on January 31, 1998, he pled guilty to two counts of first degree murder, and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for having caused the deaths of Michael Clites, 24, and William Petit, Jr., 39, both transients, by means of blunt force trauma. He is due to be tried in Kansas and Florida on similar charges, and there is solid evidence connecting him with the murders of transients in Emeryville, Oregon, in West Sacramento, in Salt Lake City, and Whitefish, Montana. When I first interviewed Detective Mike Quakenbush of Salem, Oregon, who arrested Silveria, he told me that he believed Silveria was “good for a lot more murders than those with which he’d been linked,” and, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Silveria himself told an uncle by marriage that he had killed 47 people out of a deep anger. In letters to a former jail acquaintance, Silveria declared that he was the leader of the homeless nation, and wrote, “I could have tortured others of your world, but I chose to torture my world, because I preyed on the weak.”

Quakenbush described Silveria as being cordial, amiable, having a pleasant manner typical of serial killers, and believes that this allowed him to get close to his victims. Silveria reminds him of Eddie Haskell from the Leave It to Beaver show. But Silveria is not a member of the FTRA. In fact, he made a point during his confession that his crimes had nothing to do with the FTRA. There’s no doubt that Silveria rode and jungled up with FTRA hobos, but such loose associations are common on the rails and hardly constitute evidence of collusion.

Quakenbush’s take on the FTRA is more restrained than that of Officer Grandinetti. In his view, they have the profile of a ’50s or ’60s biker gang, and though they have no set hierarchy, he suspects there may be powerbrokers among them, “people who can get things done.” But he told me it’s impossible to get a handle on them because of the anonymity of their lifestyle, which enables them to slide through the system, to move two states down the road in a matter of hours without going through easily surveilled areas such as airports and bus stations. Maybe, he said, there’s a pecking order based on seniority, on how long an FTRA member has been riding; but again, it’s hard to be sure. My impression of Quakenbush’s attitude toward the FTRA is that they’re interesting to him from a law enforcement standpoint, but that he’s got more pressing matters on his desk.