Two Trains Running

The chief source for almost every news story concerning the FTRA is Officer Robert Grandinetti, a heavyset, affable man closing in on retirement age, who works out of the Office of Special Police Problems in Spokane, Washington. He has made the gang his special project, not only pursuing and arresting them, but also devoting considerable time to raising the national consciousness as regards their particular menace. He’s appeared on America’s Most Wanted and makes presentations on the subject to federal commissions and law enforcement groups. Days, he patrols beneath the city’s railroad bridges, areas where riders gather to “catch out” (the hobo term for hopping a freight). He carries a Polaroid camera with which he takes the picture of anyone he suspects of associating with or belonging to the FTRA, and these pictures are then mounted in hefty scrapbooks, along with mug shots and photographs of FTRA graffiti. He’s compiled an extensive database on the gang’s membership, and has a collection of FTRA artifacts, the most impressive being a Goon Stick (he calls it a Goonie Stick), an ax handle to one end of which has been welded a softball-sized lump of lead. He speaks with relish about the subject, expressing what seems a gruff fondness for certain gang members.

As we sit in his office, a fluorescent-lit cube with several desks and a prominently displayed employee award, Grandinetti utilizes visual aids—photographs, FTRA bandanas, and so forth—with the facile air of someone who has given the same show many times before (this due in part, I assume, to the fact that over the years he has lectured on police matters in the Spokane school system). His awareness of the FTRA derives from a series of unsolved murders in the early ’90s, bodies found near the tracks along the Highline route from Cheney, Washington, to Sandpoint, Idaho, all with their jackets and shirts pulled over their heads, and their trousers pulled down. “If there’d just been a couple, I could buy them as accidents,” he says. “But after six of them, the accident theory didn’t fly.” He goes on to say that there were over 450 trespass deaths on railroad property during the past year, and he believes a significant percentage of these were homicides perpetrated by the FTRA. To support this assumption, he cites cases in which the victim was struck by a train in a switchyard, yet there was little blood at the scene, suggesting that the victim was killed elsewhere, and the body placed on the tracks so the impact of the train would cover up the actual cause of death: blunt force trauma. But Grandinetti admits that in most of these cases it’s impossible to determine whether the crimes were committed by the FTRA or independent hobos…or by anyone else, for that matter. Switchyards are generally situated in or near dangerous neighborhoods, and the idea that an indigent may have murdered a hobo is hardly unthinkable.

Over the course of an hour, Grandinetti sketches his vision of the gang. He talks about the various subgroups within the gang—the Goon Squad, the Wrecking Crew, STP (Start The Party). He explains “double-clutching”—the practice of obtaining emergency food stamps in one town, hopping a freight to the next, obtaining more food stamps there, and continuing the process until a hobo accumulated six or seven hundred dollars worth, which are then sold to a grocery store for 50 cents on the dollar. He describes how FTRA tramps will “hustle junk” (pick up scrap metal) and steal wire from freight yards, strip the copper and sell it in bulk to recycling businesses. Otherwise, he says, they “work the sign” (Will Work For Food) in order to get cash for their drugs and alcohol. He talks about the “home guard,” homeless people who serve as procurers of drugs for gang members. But most of these practices are engaged in by hobos of every stripe, not just the FTRA, and little of what he says would be denied by the FTRA; though several members told me they would never steal from the railroads—you don’t shit where you live.