He said he'd been a train engineer back in the '50's, or maybe the '60's, I don't remember. An older man, wrinkled, smoking, wearing faded work clothes that looked soft and comfortable from wear, he sat back relaxed in his chair, legs crossed comfortably, with smiling eyes that sparkled a bit in the midst of telling me the stories of his collosal mistakes.

It seems he once engineered a train by himself across the Arizona desert. Loaded with freight, all by himself and dusk settling in with all its desert purple, he did the obvious; parked that train just outside of some fart of a desert town and hoofed it into the nearest pub.

Apparently one drink led to another and, once last call had come and gone, he'd set out on foot to find his train. Only, it wasn't there. In his haste, he'd failed to set the brake. The desert, while seemingly flat, is hardly that, and the ever-so-gentle gradient had been enough to coast the
un-manned train some 15 or 20 miles.

"I couldn't find my train" he says, eyes sparkling with joy at the memory.

The police found him sleeping on the tracks.

"The worst part was" he says with a crooked smile, "makin that damn phone call to the boss."