Trains 2

It’s 3:42 AM and I hear a train whistle. The train is passing through my small city. I really enjoy hearing train whistles, and even hearing the steel wheels cruising the rails. I grew up traveling on trains. My mother told me this story: When I was a baby, she went to the bathroom on the train, and she laid me on the toilet adjacent to her toilet stall, and of course the next thing that happened was I rolled off the toilet seat onto the train car’s floor. BAM!

A few years after that, I was at the nearby train station waiting for the Silver Meteor to arrive. It roared into Union Station and came to a stop. The conductors lowered the metal boarding steps and I climbed onto the train car. The first thing I saw was a drinking fountain. I call it a fountain for lack of a better name, but it was one of those things where you hold a paper cup under a spout and you push a button to get water.

I rode the Silver Meteor to and from Florida many times. Half of my family lived in Florida (my dad’s half). I was born there. So we visited by train, because driving there was a two day trip. (This was before the Interstates were built.) The last time I drove to Florida from my home in Virginia took about 12 hours each way on the Interstate, and I drove at 85 mph. Everyone was driving at that speed. I was just keeping up with the traffic.

I can recall walking between the train cars. There was a metal plate that covered the coupling mechanism. Cold air blasted through the space between train cars. I could smell diesel fumes from the engine. It was wonderful. Maybe not for a grown-up, but for a kid, yeah, it was wonderful.

One time when we were making the trip back to Virginia, the train broke in half. A coupling between two cars had failed. I was in the train half with the engine. We stopped and began to go into reverse. We had to back up quite a way in order to reach the rear half of the train. It took a while but we linked up and continued our journey.

I remember well the steam locomotives. I recall standing in my front yard and watching a train pulled by a steam locomotive passing over a trestle above my street. It was night and all the wheels of the train were outlined in bright circles of fire. The train had its brakes on. It was a freight train, and it takes a while to stop a long freight train. You might ask, if the brakes produce so much fiery sparks, isn’t that dangerous? Couldn’t it start a fire? Yes, it could. When my mother was a child, she and her parents lived in a rented farmhouse. One day a train came past and started a grass fire that ended up burning down her home. Her family lost everything they owned. Did it cost the railroad company money? No way. There was a time when the railroad was king. My mother’s family found another place to live and started over. Such is life.

But diesel-electrics have their own charm. Not like in the days of yore, when trains had a dining car and a club car (a.k.a. lounge car) where you could purchase liquor. The last train I rode had a dome car. A dome car is a train car with a glass dome where passengers can sit above the train and see in all directions. It was nice.

People who have never ridden a passenger train have missed an experience that is impossible to fully describe and will never return. I know kids will say, “Poor geezer, he’ll never know the fun of using TikTok.” And they’re right.