Putting a dime on the tracks will not cause a train to derail. If it's a derailing you want, come on over to my neighborhood on the West Side, where derailings are so common we're thinking of setting up bleachers and charging a dime for admission.

It happened again yesterday, as I sat in my back yard making notes for this column about trains derailing. I heard a grinding, scraping noise over the usual din of the morning run. I peered over the fence and sure enough, a couple wheels had slipped off the rails and were running along the street, sending up a cloud of pulverized pavement. The engineers had no idea; the train kept rolling along.

Trains on the West Side are freights running to and from Davenport, typically sporting 4 locomotives and dozens of cars weighing 100 tons each. Coal, cement, sand, gravel, and lumber are among the cargo types you might soon find blocking a road near you.

Some people think it's pretty ghetto to have to live by the tracks, but I think it's cool. Twice a day the whole house rumbles, and it makes so much noise that it's hard to maintain a telephone conversation. When the horn blows, as it does frequently, all the dogs go nuts.

They blow the horn so much because over here the train crosses a number of streets that have no mechanical crossing barriers. If you don't see the train or hear the horn, you might drive right in the path of the train. I've seen several near misses, and each and every time the driver was preoccupied with a cell phone. Maybe they were calling Union Pacific to demand that the train stop.

Even if they got patched through in time, a 3000 ton train doesn't stop on a dime. Maybe on a minivan, but definitely not on a dime.

In my capacity as the Unofficial Rail Incident Inspector for the West Side, I've investigated four derailings within the past 18 months, all within easy walking distance.

Just a few weeks ago, a more dramatic version of yesterday's derailing occurred. As a northbound train rounded the curve at Bay Street, a few wheels towards the back of the train jumped the tracks and started rolling along the ground. The trail of debris told the story of a train shaking itself apart. The tracks were increasingly littered with torn up wooden ties and chunks of pavement, then large springs, then brake parts, then bearings, and finally several axles and wheels before the train came to a stop just past Swift Street. The swath of damage was nearly a mile long, damaging 9 streets.

Pretty cool stuff.

In the wintertime, cars that slip off the tracks don't roll along on the dirt. They sink in the mud and the train stops abruptly, spilling the engineers' coffee. This past February, five cars sank to their axles between Almar and Fair Street, and last March, 7 cars did much the same near Bay and California.

Bring on the heavy equipment. First the big cranes pick up the stranded and broken cars, and then the track repair crews come in to bring the rails back to their previous state of mediocrity. It usually draws a crowd and helps bring the neighborhood together, but it's not for everybody.

"You're such a boy," my girlfriend says as I put on my rain gear to go watch. I can't help it. It mesmerizes me. Somewhere in life I took the wrong path, and my rightful place at the controls of the Model TS-50-27 Harsco Technologies Track Stabilizer was taken away from me.

I'm not so into the trains that I hop them, but occasionally I do see people clinging to the freight cars. Not the cozy boxcars full of hay that Hollywood hobos always seem to enjoy, but hopper cars, with uncomfortable and dangerous open-air steel platforms on the ends. As a friend learned the hard way, once the train gets out of town on its way North, it picks up speed and you're pretty much stuck for the ride to Davenport. Forget that idea of a little jaunt to Wilder Ranch unless you have stunt training and good insurance.

Last March, an engineer hit the brakes when he saw a man lying in the train's path near Bay Street. Even at eight miles per hour, 12 cars passed right over the guy before the train came to a stop. Did a dastardly villain tie him to the tracks? No, he got drunk and took a nap between the rails. He woke up unharmed, looking up at the bottom of a coal car.

I hope I never get that bad.