The Police Caught Me Breaking into a Freight Yard in China

The fence rattled. I looked around. A man had just come through the gate behind us. I could tell by his light blue overalls he was a railroad worker...

I crouched as low as possible in the shadows and hoped he couldn't see me. I hid behind a pile of old railroad ties and between some pieces of scrap rail. The man walked toward me... peeking around the railroad equipment. I'd been spotted.

"Hoooooyeeeaaa," he yelled when he found me. I pretended he'd woken me up and looked up with a sleepy face. 

"Come with me," he said in Chinese. 

Last week, I flew to Urumqi [pronounced u-roo-muchi] to ride a freight train. 

Urumqi is a city in western China. It's a couple hundred kilometers from the borders of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Russia. It's 4,000 kilometers from Shanghai and Beijing.

With all these countries so close, Urumqi is a major trading post. It's also a major stop on the modern Silk Road – the overland route connecting Amsterdam to Hong Kong.

Freight trains carry cargo like steel pipes, cement blocks, new autos, and agricultural products. Riding freight trains is fun, if you don't mind sharing a ride with a shipment of coal or some tankers of petrochemicals. There's no better way to see the countryside. You get the wind in your hair and you don't have to bump elbows with the masses. 

It's also a great way to understand the local economy. Freight-train networks are the arteries and capillaries of a country. By studying them, you learn a lot about a region's important commodities.

Coming into Urumqi from the west, I saw lots of tank cars carrying gas, and wagons full of coal. So China is importing energy from central Asia and Russia. I also saw wagons full of scrap metal heading for China's manufacturing centers. 

In the opposite direction, I saw tractors, diggers, new cars, and even military hardware (like tanks and armed vehicles). China is penetrating Russia and Central Asia with its manufactured products.

To get on a freight train, you go to the classification yard, find the departure track, and wait for a train with a suitable wagon (tank cars and closed box cars are no good but grain wagons and open-top gondolas work fine). Then, when no one's watching, you hop on and hide until the train pulls out.

The railroad through Urumqi is the busiest freight railroad I've ever seen. In the States, you might see a couple of freight trains and the odd Amtrak each day. In Urumqi, 10 or 12 freight trains rumble through every hour... on top of six or seven passenger trains. The trains run every day, all day and all night. 

I spent two nights at the freight yard in Urumqi and couldn't get on a train. There were too many workers and security guards around. Plus, the entire yard was circled by private businesses with their own guard dogs and fences. Jumping on a moving train was the only way to do it... But that's dangerous. 

So I went to the small town of Hami instead. Hami is a village a few hundred miles east of Urumqi on the mainline. It has a small freight yard. 

At 3 a.m., I crawled under the fence and hid behind the railroad ties. I watched the trains coming and going for an hour. There were still too many workers and security guards. To get on one of these trains, I would have to catch it "on the fly."

That's when I heard the fence rattle from behind. The worker took me to the main security compound and woke up the commanding police officer. Two more soldiers came out with him. They looked at me as if I'd just landed from another planet. And they laughed. They couldn't believe a Westerner had been sleeping in their freight yard. "Hotel, hotel," I said and gestured with my hands I wanted to sleep.

Maybe I'll have better luck in India.(They had no idea I was trying to catch a freight. It simply never occurred to them. Even the poorest Chinese don't ride freight trains here.)

So the commanding officer walked me out of the freight yard and asked one of his staff to take me to the closest hotel and help me book a room.