CALIFORNIA
The Not-So-Great Train Robbery
What prompted the thefts that led to a fatal derailment?
At first, the derailment appeared to be an accident.
Thirty-seven freight cars had jumped their tracks, collapsed into one another, and tumbled onto their sides. The incident occurred just outside Palm Springs in 1986 and littered the surrounding desert with cargo: GM vehicles, wicker furniture, teddy bears, and red artificial flowers. Several transients had stowed away inside cargo containers, and one died in the wreck.
Since I live in Palm Springs, traveling to this crime scene involved the shortest of road trips. Yet, I nearly damaged my car when I stupidly drove it off-road to visit the accident site. Rocks pinged the undercarriage, and it’s a miracle I didn’t flatten a tire.
After the derailment, railroad personnel figured out that a failed coupler had severed the train. Investigators later discovered that someone had tampered with it. They assumed the perpetrators were the gang that had robbed 20 trains in the area that summer.
A month later, railroad detectives caught the culprits, modern-day equivalents of nineteenth-century train robbers. But these thieves rode trucks instead of horses, used bolt cutters instead of dynamite, and had walkie-talkies and flashlights. And there was one very big surprise: They were U.S. Marines.
How, I wondered, could all this have happened? What were their motivations? The news articles failed to satisfy my thirst.
On a whim, I thought about tracking down the ringleader. I knew his name, and he was about my age, so he was probably around somewhere. Search engines said he was living in Florida. After a few more minutes, I had his cell phone number. I texted him, explaining that I was a writer who explored old crimes. ‟Would you be willing to talk about the 1986 train thefts,” I asked, ‟or is that something you want to keep in your past?” He responded within three minutes, agreeing to an interview.
The former Marine, who asked that I refer to him as Ernie, is now 56. He has a longtime girlfriend and a daughter in her 20s from a previous relationship.
One line in a 1986 news article referred to him as having ‟a lifelong fascination for trains.” I’d almost missed it, but speaking to him, I learned that it was the key that unlocked the whole story.
When Ernie was three, his mom gave him a train set for Christmas. He became enamored with it, and as he got older, he built out bigger model railroads and begged to ride Amtrak. His grandfather drove him to railroad crossings to watch trains go by. Visiting cousins in the Midwest, Ernie wandered from his family and crossed the street to a train yard, to be near the freight cars. A security officer threw him out but said he could return with a parent. The next day, in 20-degree weather, he and his mom sat in the control tower and watched the operator manipulate switches to guide trains onto various tracks.
As he finished high school, Ernie contemplated his future. ‟Everyone said railroads were dying — no jobs there,” he recalled. He scored high on the military vocational aptitude test, and the Marines promised to train him to repair field radios and provide money for college. He survived boot camp at Parris Island and was stationed at the giant Marine base at Twentynine Palms, which sits in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree.
Ernie, then 18, had dark hair over a slender face and a sharp triangular jaw. Between classes at the Marine Corps electronics school, he and his peers washed vehicles, cleaned the mess hall, and stacked tires for planes to bomb in practice runs. On weekends, ‟no one cared where you went, as long as you returned Monday morning,” Ernie explained. Bored, he and his friends sought adventure. Some had vehicles, and small bands drove around the desert or visited the sands of Huntington Beach.
One summer day, Ernie and a friend I’ll call Stuart drifted on inner tubes down the Whitewater River, which flowed down the giant San Bernardino Mountains into the desert near Palm Springs, about an hour from the base. Ernie noticed freight cars rumble across a bridge over the river. He suggested they float there for a bit so he could photograph the passing trains. When one ground to a halt, Stuart ditched his tube and walked over. A freight car is a Pandora’s box; it’s hard not to wonder what’s inside. ‟There’s no security,” Stuart reported on his return. ‟If I could cut the bolt, we could see what was in them.”
‟I had never done anything bad,” said Ernie. ‟That wasn’t me. But I wanted to be around trains — and I had no common sense.”
The following weekend, Ernie and Stuart drove along Interstate 10 at night and watched for freight trains on the parallel tracks. Trains often stopped in the windy San Gorgonio Pass, one of the deepest mountain passes in the U.S., where two 10,000-foot peaks flank the western edge of the Colorado Desert. At the time, most of the area was single-track, and trains waited along sidings near the small town of Beaumont for others to pass.
Two changes transformed freight trains in the 1980s. Boxcars transitioned to intermodal containers that also fit on ships and trucks. During the conversion, truck trailers were craned onto flatbed railroad cars. And, to save money, most rail lines stopped hauling cabooses, from which conductors had watched for mechanical issues and trespassers.
At first, the two Marines didn’t steal anything. They just climbed aboard stopped rail cars, jimmied open the doors of truck trailers, and looked inside. Soon, friends joined them on their midnight rides, and they began each adventure at the unfenced West Colton rail yard. Two Marines would board a train and look for intriguing cargo; one or two others would follow in a truck. They rendezvoused near Palm Springs.
Ernie was hooked. ‟I had a twisted mind or whatever you want to call it. I really enjoyed riding trains, being close to them, feeling the power.” Early on, the stuff they looted was smalltime: canned peaches and raw almonds. ‟We didn’t know what to do to sell anything. We didn’t have a fence.”
One night, they found Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers and took them to a party. Over time, they purloined coffee makers, toasters, and televisions. ‟A lot of times, we rode the trains but didn’t get anything,” he said. ‟We never got anything in enough quantity to sell, except for white Nike hightops. Everyone took a pair, and we sold the rest on base.” Later, police officers told reporters that the Marines were running a major theft ring, but that was never really the case.
Sometimes, Ernie and his buddies encountered transients riding the rails. ‟Some were just hobos for the weekend.” Many were immigrants. Migrants crossed the border near San Diego, walked north, and hid themselves inside eastbound trains.
On the night of the August derailment, Ernie borrowed a truck and went out on his own. By then, he’d been out alone or with others almost twenty times. At Colton, he unloaded six cases of wine from a truck trailer. As he returned for more, a homeless man living in a shack alongside the tracks called out to him. ‟I don’t mess with the bull, and the bull don’t mess with me,” the man exclaimed. Bull was slang for railroad police. Ernie concluded the man didn’t want any trouble. But he left anyway.
He followed the train and hopped aboard again in Beaumont as it waited for a westbound train to pass. When it started moving, Ernie leapt off and followed in his truck. The train slowed outside Palm Springs, and Ernie jumped onto a middle car. Wanting time to investigate, he pulled an uncoupling bar and separated the back cars from the rest of the train.
Ernie thought the train was headed slightly uphill, but the mountains and gently rolling desert generated optical illusions, particularly at night. The grade tilted somewhat downward. As the locomotive pulled the front of the train away, the cars Ernie had separated began to roll and pick up speed. They caught up to and crashed into the first half, creating the massive train wreck. Ernie ran to his truck and took off.
When the accident appeared on the news the next day, Ernie learned about the death, and people on the base peppered him with questions. He insisted he hadn’t gone out that night, but others knew the train involved was the one they usually followed. Though the pull was almost irresistible, he didn’t chase trains for the next several weekends. ‟The adrenaline rush for me was there,” Ernie reflected. ‟Nothing has ever matched that, even other train rides and roller coasters.”
On an unseasonably cool evening in late September, about a month after the train wreck, Ernie headed back out with two friends. Just west of Palm Springs, near where the derailment had occurred, the team loaded black-and-white TVs and tires into their truck. Ernie noticed a white pickup truck nearby but didn’t think much of it. He wasn’t aware that the Southern Pacific railroad police had begun to follow the train they liked to hit. He also didn’t know that a homeless man in the West Colton yards had noted the truck’s personalized license plate earlier that evening.
The trio drove to a nearby truck stop for snacks. When two of them went inside, the remaining passenger noticed someone peering into the back of the pickup at the uncovered televisions and tires. He worried the guy might try to steal them.
The group had never pursued trains east of this area, but they hoped the one with the TVs would stop at another siding. Ten miles down Interstate 10, they noticed a vehicle behind them: the white pickup.
Ernie exited the freeway and reentered going westbound. He accelerated well beyond the speed limit. The white pickup kept pace, and a Chevrolet Caprice joined the chase. The men knew they were in trouble and quickly decided to surrender. There was no debate. Ernie pulled over, and all three men exited with their hands raised. ‟I was scared shitless, actually holding it in I was so scared,” Ernie told me. A Riverside County sheriff came to arrest them and transport them to the jail in Indio.
I’m not a good liar,” Ernie told me. ‟When they asked questions, I admitted everything. I cooperated because I didn’t know what else to do. I knew my father would be disappointed. I didn’t know if he’d disown me.” Ernie and his accomplices were charged with burglary and possession of stolen property.
The Marine Corps restricted the men to base but did not lock them in the brig. Commanding officers yelled at Ernie when they saw him. ‟A lot of ass-chewin’,” he recalled. ‟A few people on base, though, thought we were legendary. But we weren’t. Taking things that don’t belong to you and being responsible for a death is nothing you can smile or be proud about.”
Ernie and the others were given the typical punishment for military personnel who committed misdemeanors off base: ‟other than honorable” discharges. The FBI took over the investigation, and in federal court, the eight other participating Marines, including Stuart, pleaded guilty to theft of goods in interstate commerce. They received suspended sentences and one year’s probation.
Ernie pleaded guilty to interstate theft and the felony charge of train wrecking. Authorities did not indict him for the death of Fernando Miguel Garcia, the man killed in the derailment, saying it was unintentional. It’s not hard to imagine them thinking differently had the victim been a U.S. citizen instead of an undocumented Mexican migrant. A manslaughter conviction could have meant life in prison; without it, Ernie received a sentence of six years and a $10,000 fine. He asked the FBI to help him apologize to the victim’s family, but Garcia’s background and hometown were unknown.
Ernie wound up serving almost four years in federal penitentiaries. Upon his release, his mom picked him up, and he lived with his dad, who had not disowned him. He got a job digging ditches and cutting pipe for underground utilities. He held onto it for 22 years, and he paid off his fine from his earnings.
Readjusting to life in public took time, and Ernie struggled to establish a social life. He resumed chasing trains but just to photograph them. ‟Since the arrest and my release, I have never done anything harmful to the railroads,” Ernie emphasized to me. He currently runs a successful business selling vintage model trains.
Asked about his time in prison, Ernie said, ‟I am not sore. I’m not vengeful. I fucked up, and I know it. I like trains. I still have the fascination.”
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
