A coworker of mine alerted me to this place that he'd stumbled upon while driving out west a few years ago. After finding the scratch of it on google maps this winter, my partner and I were pleased to find it in tact, more or less, when we took the long drive out to the western border of the state.
The rail route is maintained up to a factory on the other side of the street from this stretch (where you see the silos in this photo), and as far as I can tell it's abandoned west of here.
So we walked up along the length of the cars for a bit. Excessively pleasant day, which we both needed after the way this winter's been.
We climbed inside about midway down the run.
"The other side is them", words sprayed on the inside of the outside door of the last car in the line. The couple of cars at the far end were more blitzed out than the others, I'm not sure if they'd just suffered more heavy vandalism or if it was because there was less tree cover to block the wind, or what.
At this point, we turned around to make our way inside back toward the first cars we'd walked by, but my partner looked out down the way and noticed a truck parked next to where we'd pulled the car over a ways away. After a brief discussion we decided to be outside of the derelict in case anyone was coming to look for us specifically. I'm sad our exploration was cut short because I would have liked to have had a lot more photos of this place, and I'm anxious to get back there, despite the distance from where I live (about 4.5 hours).
Ostensibly, this car may have housed a meth lab at some point? I was poking around on the internet at the cafe we had lunch in the next town over and did find a fairly lengthy blog post about this spot by a dude who may have reported it at the time (propane fueled, alarms, etc...) but it also seemed like that guy got into some weird internet trouble with The Republicans and all evidence of him existing (Flickr account which otherwise would have held the photos linked in that post, Twitter, and Facebook all gone) seems to have evaporated as of 2010 or something. I think the post also said the track had been pulled up and shipped overseas which... it was definitely still there at least as far as I could tell and continues west in google maps. So. Maybe he made that shit up, I have no idea. I also don't really know the practical logistics of setting up a meth lab and therefore cannot assess how practical or impractical this green caboose would have been for the endeavor (I haven't watched Breaking Bad
or read Methland but I
have been to Oelwein more than once).
...anyway.
So it turned out the truck was just some old guy from a private company maintaining the radio tower. He looked at us for approximately two seconds as we legged over the slouchy barbed-wire fence half-heartedly standing guard across the tracks, and then we left. Definitely planning on having another go at this next I've got a chance, especially since there was some other stuff I'd like to have a better look at with more time. I have some more photos from this afternoon of couple of other spots (one being an abandoned home built into a hillside at the next intersection west of here that we quite liked), but they're on my phone and I don't have the things I need to pull them off right now. So it will have to wait for another day.
I hope you're all having an adventurous spring. Cheers.