Zoomdoggle: More fun than work!

It’s the most important day of the week, the day when you tell us what YOU think would be fun and, if it sounds like a good time, we do our best to make it happen…with you in the driver’s seat.

Laura always wanted to drive a freight train. Then she sent us an email. This, in her own words, is her account of a day spent doggling.

California. Late ’80s. As my fellow toddlers slobber over blocks, I’m drooling over model railroads.

Mid-’90s. While Sega and Nintendo battle for my demographic’s attention, I’m still content with the likes of Lionel.

Driving trains, you see, was my childhood dream.

Regrettably, calloused hands and imminent death by derailment were an incongruous fit for someone my stature and with my unabashed affinity for pastel Post-Its. I settled into a teaching career instead. Nevertheless, the allure of helming a hundred tons of get out of the way always stuck with me.

With my summer vacation quickly approaching, I sent Zoomdoggle a note. Convinced I’d never hear back, I did a little research.

Google said:
- Modoc Railroad Academy is the only school of its kind in the world.
- The academy is just two hours from my apartment.
- Graduation takes six months.
- Tuition is roughly $24,000.

Zoomdoggle called me back. Seems knowing the right people is all it takes to drive a train these days.

“I told the guy you’ll get there first thing in the morning,” they said. “Modoc’s got you penciled in to learn the ropes from the comfort of a simulator, and by the end of the day you’ll be a freight-hauling pro”

And I’m off.

The drive from San Francisco takes me past endless acres of farmland before I reach my destination in rural Sacramento. I park my car in a pickup-sized rectangle of matted grass and scope out my new school.

By all appearances Sutter County is several orders of magnitude removed from the city by the bay, but I am facing a boat. A large, rusted vessel sits in the field, looking sun-bleached and sullen. I scan the horizon and see a man crouched on his knees, bottle-feeding some puppies.

I clear my throat. The guy twitches.

“Oh, you must be Laura,” he says, rising to meet me and extending his hand in an effusive welcome. “I’m Dave.”

I’m still wondering whether I’m in the right place. I’m not sure what the boat and whimpering pitbulls are doing here. But unlike the waitstaff at the diner where I stopped for breakfast, this man hasn’t flinched at my striped-blue conductor’s hat and overall shorts, so I figure I must be in the right place.

After some small talk, Dave finally leads me to a passenger train that sits on a long strip of track. I knew from reading the school’s barely functioning website that this train, land, and track all belonged to Modoc.

“Welcome to our school’s humble home.”

I humor him by oohing and ahhing, but I still remain more confused than impressed. A passenger train? I’m beginning to wonder whether I skipped a day reviewing Othello for a tour of a glorified Amtrak. As Dave fumbles to open the double-padlocked door (”gotta be careful vagabonds don’t turn this into a meth lab,” he explains), my fear of dying a suspicious death at Modoc Academy is replaced with apathy and regret that I’e come at all.

Once we’re inside, though, I realize what Dave is showing me. The ultimate in on-the-job training, Modoc’s passenger car has been converted into a classroom. A dozen wooden desks line either side of the cab.

“I took an apprenticeship when I was your age,” Dave tells me, sipping a Diet Coke after we’ve settled into two desks. “Back then, working on the railroad was a boys’ club. My main job was to keep the chest filled with ice. The guy’d really let me hear it if their beers were warm.”

He goes on to explain that, by the end of a 12-hour run from Los Angeles to Orange counties, the conductor and engineer long since passed out, he was often left to singlehandedly man the train.

“Before a few months, I was ready for soloing.” Dave smiles sadly. “And then the damn vertigo happened.”

Struck by a sudden bout of vertigo that rendered him unable to even climb a ladder, Dave was forced to take a medical leave. Indefinitely.

After some bookwork during which I learn I’l be driving a green-friendly hybrid - plus some time in front of the latest in high-tech simulators - Dave shows me to my locomotive.

A new class is graduating today, and the scene is not unlike what you might see at a UC ceremony. Mothers in sunhats sit under the Shady Rest Station, a mix of pride and bewilderment on their faces; fathers wearing fanny packs and clutching flashy digital cameras scan for their sons among the men who are at work on their final exam, which involves driving spikes into the ground.

“Laura’s from the internet” is how Dave introduces me to one, a relative who’s flown here from Peoria. The octogenarian eyes me suspiciously as I board Modoc’s $2 million locomotive.

Dave’s return to railroading came in 1996, when his wife came up with an idea of how Dave could use his latent railroading expertise: Start a vocational school in their backyard. The man’s got a soft spot for the needy; those puppies I’d seen when I first arrived had been orphaned on the highway and carried back to the academy in Dave’s arms.

He relives the memories of Modoc alumni as he talks me through juicing up the beast. There’s the Czech immigrant who made it here on a shoestring; the double amputee barely proficient in fifth-grade math; the state lobbyist who was bored with his white-collar gig; even Dave’s own son, Jarrod Rangel, is a Modoc success story, supporting a family of three by hauling lumber in West Virginia.

Next up: Me!

I take a seat behind the wheel - err, lever - and soon what I learned in the train-cum-classroom takes shape. I switch a lever that puts the train into gear (a gear called forward; I’ll let you guess what the other gear is) and, holding my breath, switch another, releasing a loud hiss, and the brake is off. I thrust the throttle back, and we’re moving!

I’m closing my eyes, clenching my fist around the throttle, pretending that instead of empty cars I’m hauling essential raw good - coal across a South African plain, or iron ore from Australia’s Eyre Peninsula. It’s the Civil War and I’m delivering armaments. It’s 2028 and I’m the apple of Al Gore’s 80-year-old eye, traveling with ten times the efficiency of diesel trucks. Fantasies such as these are what happen when you put a school teacher behind the wheel.

An earsplitting buzz wakes me up.

“The crew reset button,” Dave reminds me.

I have to press this yellow button every few minutes, or the watchful machines will think their engineer has passed out and all systems will stop.

I take a quick look out the window for an aerial peek of the farmland and I see some young goats, hired to eat weeds so Modoc doesn’t have to use herbicides.

I’d come for the Wild, Wild West. What I got in its place is a bizarre collision of environmentalism, Aristotelian views on education, and one man’s entrepreneurial spirit. Oh, and I got to drive a train. That bit was pretty rad too.

Thanks Zoomdoggle.

PS: My pictures hardly do it justice, but I don’t have to pay for this bag of train-goodies they sent me home with, do I?

—LauraCopeland@zoomdoggle.com

Riding that train not your thing? What would you like, then? Wanna punch a gator? Go on a stakeout? Learn to skydive? Don’t be scared to dream big. Let us know what you’re into, and if it sounds like it might be a good time, we’ll see what we can do. Send ideas to dreamdoggle@zoomdoggle.com. Also, we’re still on the hunt for a video guy. Think of all the fun that could’ve been had if we’d brought a pro along for the ride.