Trains

Mr. Wright always wants to do things on Sundays. After working all week, and sometimes having gigs on the weekend, all I want to do is sit and veg. But it's our one day off together as a family, since he works on Saturdays, and I work on his other days off.

Last weekend he suggested we go see the trains at the Union Pacific Station in Ogden. I wasn't too sure about this idea, since I don't really care about trains, and we don't have boys, but it was actually REALLY cool to climb all over the trains.

Look how big the wheels are!

Climbing on the trains was a lot like climbing on a HUGE jungle gym, with lots of ladders, steps, and handles.

Be careful, Mr. Wright!
Your feet are dangerously close to that ledge!

This above picture looks like Mr. Wright's feet are level with the gravel on the ground, but he's actually about 8 feet up. 

Spitfire was a little nervous taking this picture, because she was so high off the ground.
"Hurry, Mom!"

How on Earth are you supposed to drive this thing?

This is me pretending to know...

This train could have been the one on Back to the Future III.

Where's the Flux Capacitor?

Next we started to get silly. It was after this next picture that Spitfire said with a laugh, "We're such nerds, Mom!"

Re-enacting an old-fashioned melodrama

All these trains reminded me of a story my dad used to tell me about my Great-Grandfather, Joseph Mormon Pratt. Apparently, JM had gone to Washington or Oregon looking for work. While he was there, he decided that he was never coming home, and was abandoning his wife and children. He wrote Grandma Pratt a mean and nasty letter to that end. But later, he had a change of heart, so he jumped on a train, trying to beat the letter home. He couldn't afford a train ticket, so he hitched a ride, underneath the train. He slipped off, and one of his legs was cut off by the moving train!

Not only did he NOT beat the letter home, but he came home wounded. He and Grandma Pratt eventually patched things up, but you could say that the train ride DEFINITELY wasn't worth the price he paid! My Uncle Tony tells me that in those days nobody wanted to hire someone who was crippled, so he had a difficult time finding work. He paid for that mistake the rest of his life, not only with his relationship with his family, but also in his ability to provide.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of me re-enacting the accident.

While I was underneath the train, I noticed a dusty, cobweb-covered box, hidden on the undercarriage of the train, so we pulled it out. This is what we found:

It looked like it hadn't been touched in quite a while, and both sides of the case were full of cassette tapes. Probably whomever left them there is dead. Mr. Wright suspected that it may have been used to hide drugs or money. We didn't find any drugs...We checked underneath all the tapes for money, but I guess I should have opened every individual cassette case. Since there was nothing of use to us, we put it back where we found it.

What a fun, family adventure!