Good one, Mr Bob Bulltech !!! I've never had to use my own gun. The places I stayed were gaurded by rent a cops with Uzis....

Funny you should mention Helper, but I went on a Railfans tour from the UK back in 1999 and which spent some time in that area for linesiding Soldier Summit and the Utah Railway operations.
Our van had just visited the Utah Railway loco depot and had returned to the yard area downtown, where we got talking to a couple of local people. Turned out they were in the process of restoring what had been a Hotel/Brothel on the main street and we all got a tour of the building! They were intending to reopen it as a B&B, but I can't remember the name of the place now....

By the 1950's, the traditional "hotel by the depot" was fast becoming the Nora Desmond of many Iowa communities. Most of the old heads could tell you about how some now-seedy place used to be a good hotel to stay and/or eat at, but that was years ago... before the highway was rerouted, or some major employer closed its doors, or the rail traffic dried up.

Same thing with the beaneries. The mother of a relative by marriage used to run a good one back before WWII, but as railroading changed and the branch off the main became a deteriorating spur, she closed up shop rather than watch her business slowly slide into sub-mediocrity catering to what local trade was left.

A town I lived in had a reasonably neat and tidy hotel on the main street, about five or six blocks from the depot. The main street was once an fairly important regional highway, but after a bypass around the town was built, the hotel business dwindled, the nice little cafe in the lower level closed and the building became increasingly sketchy apartments before it was sold and then demolished.

Live by the railroad (or highway), die by the railroad (or highway).

This is a pre-1960 story.
A Negro Fireman from Oklahoma on the Extra List was given a run to Texas and found at the destination that due to segregation, the only place with beds that would let him sleep in one of them was the House of Ill Repute. The protection money paid to the local Police covered not only the Prostitution laws, but also the Jim Crow laws. Next morning, when the Call Boy came to tell him of his return trip, he learned that his engineer, who had slept elsewhere, was now in the next room with one of the girls.
This was somewhere on the Internet in a history of segregation in Texas transportation.

[quote="Given that standard gauge equipment when run with NG trucks on the EBT were notoriously top-heavy and unstable, I see no way a standard-gauge caboose-as-lodging proposal would ever pass muster. Alexander D. Mitchell IV"][quote="

I doubt this would be a problem as far as weight goes. A caboose weighs 20 tons just a small fraction of a loaded hopper car of coal. Also, EBT operates at low speed.

My turn:

There is a well known major tourist railroad outside of Lancaster, PA, that has a well known shop that does steam locomotive repairs. I had to retrieve a main rod with machined brasses from this well known shop, and I stayed in a well known hotel that is made up of a string of cabooses. I awoke the next morning and put my feet on the floor, to about 2 inches of snow that had blown in under the end door the length of the caboose.......

Even in a major city. Years ago I had a Tuesday morning meeting with Buffalo China in Buffalo, NY. I was supposed to stay at a Marriott hotel but that night was also a Bills Monday night football home game and the hotel wonderfully cancelled my reservation because the away team's fans overbooked. Driving around at 10 at night I thought about sleeping in the rental car but it was 15 degrees out. Finally I saw a motel called the Carriage House whose neon sign flickered "Va ncy". Cash only, they didn't take credit cards. At first I thought the carpet in the room was two-tone, but no, the second color was the dirt path into the room and around the bed. I slept in my clothes and used both newspapers and plastic bags on the bed to avoid touching anything on the bed. The TV with bad color and only 3 channels and the bare light bulbs in lieu of fixtures added to the overall ambiance. In the morning, I contemplated taking a shower (using the plastic bags to line the floor of the tub). When I went to look for soap, I noticed a sticker on the bathroom mirror that said "soap and shampoo available at the front desk - $5 each". No shower that day. Fortunately the kind people at Buffalo China let me use the employees locker room/bathroom to clean up!

Did they charge you extra for the "authentic railroad experience"?

One of my most memorable vacation stories included some railroad and railroad hotel highlights. In 1970 my dad came to Alaska to visit and he, my five-month pregnant wife, and I packed ourselves into our VW bug to do a road tour of Alaska. Being only recently assigned to a town 160 road miles south of Anchorage by the USAF after growing up in L.A., we didn't realize that accommodations could be spartan in many places, especially when advance reservations and planning hadn't been made.

The first night in Anchorage was without incident. On the second night we slept in sleeping bags on the floor of the former Hatcher Pass gold mine bunkhouse. The third night was at the Mt. McKinley hotel. There were no vacancies in the regular rooms, so we and several other people were put into the basement on rollaway beds. We had planned on going further that day but found that despite the map saying the new road was completed all the way to Fairbanks, the Hurricane Gulch highway bridge was still under construction. This required that we ship our car via the Alaska Railroad and take the train 12 miles to Healy. We were scheduled to pick up the car when we got there, but while the railroad was switching the flats with vehicles on them to the unloading ramp, a derail did what it was designed to do. It put the front truck of the locomotive (an F-7) onto the ground and the locomotive fouled the turnout to the loading ramp. This required that we stay the night at the Alaska Railroad's Healy hotel. When we checked in we asked for our key and were told by the clerk, "We're casual here, we don't have keys." The rest of the trip continued the adventure, but with less drama.

For more Healy Hotel lore, see the story on John's Alaska Railroad Web Page describing the 1976 gunfight between The Brothers motorcycle gang and Alaska Railroad employees. It's reported that 186 bullet holes were found in the walls of the hotel. https://www.alaskarails.org/historical/ ... index.html. Don't miss the links to the correspondence from an anonymous source and the newspaper article.

Did you have any adventures in Fairbanks? We stayed at the hotel nearest to the train station in Fairbanks - I think it was called the Polaris Hotel. Two night there felt like an X-rated version of the TV show Northern Exposure!

Thank you Dick Morris for adding to the "Snake Pit Hotel" part of this wondering thread. RR workers, outlaw biker clubs and Alaska make for a fine story. I had some interactions with MC members since I was 13 not by direct involvement but through friends/family and work places. If you never had some of these experiences the stories might sound like a bad dream or twisted fantasy, much of it resembles truth regardless of what locality your story evolves from. Outlaw biker clubs in the 1960/1970s were somewhat of a subculture and a dark mystery to most civilians. Those were different times and the "rules of the road" didn't always follow the laws of the land.

Many of the outlaw bikers I knew were indeed criminals who rode motorcycles, not anything like the "Motorcycle Enthusiasts" of today. If you had red wings and a one percent patch you get it. I loved this story and resembles a whole lot of incidents where things escalated to beatings, gun fire and occasionally people who disappeared. Often the railroaders did not differ from the bikers except they may not of rode a Harley. But just as volatile and prone to over reaction. Just add alcohol/ drugs and it was bound to happen. As Union Iron Workers, oil field, construction workers were in those days as well. I loved the story Dick. Almost all Outlaws I knew had come back from Vietnam with a twisted perspective on socially acceptable behavior. It was a time most PTSD was very fresh, acceptable or to be expected. Actually I do not really miss those days, but it was a hell of a time to be around.

Coming from a somewhat experiential background I have so little tolerance for trolls who are offended because they might take something offensively. Like a trio of mimes walking into a bar full of circus clowns. You should just turn around and walk away. Thanks Dick you conjured up many memories of similar stories, most with less gunfire but the potential was always there. Almost everyone I knew from those days are dead, in prison or witness protection. I tried hard not to "hear" things I did not need to know about. Regards, John.

I wonder what the status of the railroad bunkhouse in Minturn, CO is these days. I believe that when Union Pacific embargoed Tennessee Pass that they bought the bar in Minturn and then leased the bunkhouse and bar back to the previous bar owners for $1 or something, hoping to keep them intact in case they were ever to resume service on the line. The bunkhouse was about the size and shape of a Super 8, and had been rehabbed so the crews could sleep well, and the Copper Mountain ski resort area was chronically in need of housing for the people who worked there, so I wonder if it is still there. Speaking of the bar, my late uncle Patrick Zinge, who was an agent/operator for the Rio Grande for about twenty years and then switched to train crew/ brakeman in the late seventies when he saw the writing on the wall about operators, was thrown through the big bar window (that thick 3/4 inch or so glass) and badly injured once in the 1970s when he was working in Minturn, I can't remember if he was an operator or brakeman at the time but as my mom remembers it the issue involved a woman in the bar.

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STILL an "authentic old-time railroad experience," depending on which railroad you were dealing with.......

Having not been there, since I was a kid, has the quality of the well known caboose hotel really gone that for down hill?

Also, why couldn't some be parked on standard gauge track in orbisonia once the new operations are built out, with insulation and A/c, for visitors? I could forsee a number of tourists wanting to check it out, when it's more than "train through a floodplain".