This is sure to teach folks things they did not know and never expected. Feel free to take notes. This could take your life down another path or end it completely. The choice is yours. You have been warned, tell your family not to sue.
Here goes.
I bet you didn 't know this, but the wheel-width of a 1956 Chevrolet fits exactly atop railroad rails. There are probably a bunch of other cars that have the same width, but we concentrated on that '56 Belair. It was a beautiful car, black, lowered, with a white insert painted down the side. Black leather interior, extra speakers, semi-loud mufflers, four-barrel carb. If memory serves, Don Kelly owned it. I may be wrong about that, but I am not wrong about the car. It was fine.
Anyway, I never thought to ask, so I don't know how someone in the car that particular night knew, but when they said, 'Did you know you can ride the railroad with this car? Up on the iron rails? You don't have to let any air out of the tires or anything. You get it lined up and the weight of the car keeps it there. You can just put it gear and idle along. It's pretty cool.'
To say something like that to me any time before I met Diane and got married, at 23, was like throwing gasoline on a fire. The result would be a huge explosion. We didn't exactly explode, but I demanded to be shown, immediately. So we went to the closest place tracks crossed a street, turrned sideways to traffic, lined up the wheels, and eased off.  I realized later the car owner had dones this once before, because he didn't complain as we started putting his nice ride at risk of falling off the rails and being stranded on railroad tracks. In the early 50's there were a lot more trains than there are nowadays. If we were up there, idling along, and happened to meet a train, the only thing we could do was jump away from the car. There was absolutely no way we would have been able to get that car clean off the tracks.
We didn't care. it wasn't our car, and evidently the owner didn't care, either.
That first night we only rode from one street where we got on the tracks to the next street where we got off. We weren't taking too great a chance. We were testing.
The test worked. It was great. A huge rush. It wasn't that we were seeing the world through different eyes, or anything like that. Anyone who had ever walked down a railroad knows there is nothing to see. The rails stretch out ahead, and behind, and it's level. There is usually a bank on both sides, where the builders graded the ground to make it level. And there are usually trees behind those banks because railroads bought right-of-ways where the land was cheapest. You scenery wasn't nice, but we were doing someting 'dangerous'.
I instantly became the tour guide. I spent hours trying to come up with places we could  ride the rails that would be different.
I hit two home runs.
Back before they built Hartwell Lake there was a long railroad bridge back behind Denver Downs that was relatively high. I found that bridge. Actually I didn't find it. I knew where it was the whole time, I just thought of it. It just happened to be near an old house where we played 'Sarah' from time to time. (But that's another story.)
If we got on those tracks, we'd be up there for a couple of miles before we could get off, and if the car fell off the tracks while we were on that bridge, we'd have a long way to go bump bump bumy between railroad ties trying to get off. And I wasn't completely sure the car would do that. Did I mention that is wan't my car?
We  had no idea what time the train went through, so one night we went up about dusk and just parked there until almost midnight to see if a train came through. None did, so we figured we were home free.
The next night we were on those tracks. We had to get on a long way from the actual bridge and we weren't extremely sure this was going to be fun. I figure we felt just like Evel Keievel felt just before he set off that rocket car trying to jump the Snake River canyon. And we didn't realize just exactly how far we'd have to go until we got started. Once we were away from the road, everyone wanted to stop, put it reverse, and back up to where we could get off. But we had never done that, and weren't at all sure it would work. So we went on. Finally, after what seemed like all night and 40-miles, we got across the bridge and to the next road.
Not even Olympic medal winners could have been happier than we were to see that road show up. We were stilll alive and the car wasn't hurt. We had made it.
Now we were just too afraid to tell anyone what we had done.
We knew if we told that bunch we were raised with, railroad tracks all around town would be filled up with automobiles. So we kept quiet.
We kept our Home Run to ourselves.
My second homer was on Fant Street. Fant street ran parallel to main street, and the train depot was just off East Orr Street, between there and where McCants Junior High still sits. We had lived on East Orr one time, and I had walked those tracks over and over.
And they ran beneath town. They still do. We could get on the tracks on Fant Street, go under mcDuffie, and then beneath Main Street. Then we would go beneath Murray Avenue, and finally come out over on Bleckley, right at the Railway Espress warehouse.
We couldn't wait. We lined up that car like the veterans we had become, and headed under town. Once we got past McDuffie, there is a long section where people once boarded and got off the trains, a stor or waaehremetItrt