(To view other recent Blog Posts, page down)
A chugga chugga motion like a railroad train now… come on baby do the locomotion…
When I was a baby, my dad was in the Army. He often told me stories of how he, my mother, and I rode the train to his postings in Illinois and St. Louis; how the conductor warmed my bottle, and everyone was kind to the “soldier with the baby;” how the rocking of the train put me to sleep.
When I was three, my parents bought a house on South Main Street, where I lived until I was married, and they lived for 69 years. Across the street, behind the row of houses, the railroad tracks ran parallel to the street. At both ends of the block a side street crossed the tracks with the help of the crossing arm and flashing lights. From the front windows of our house I watched those flashing lights and the traffic stop. I heard the wail of the train’s whistle coming down the track. Standing barefooted I felt the vibration of the powerful engine and waved to the engineer, who always waved back. Dad played the guitar and sang “Wabash Cannonball” instead of lullabies, and I dreamed of someday riding the rails.
My mother read to my brothers and me at night, and on hot summer afternoons while we slurped our homemade frozen Kool-Aid popsicles. (We rested in the hot afternoons so we wouldn’t get polio.) My favorite stories were The Little Engine that Could, and A Tree for Peter, both stories with trains. My brother had a Lionel train set that I enjoyed with him, making little stores and crossings from cereal box cardboard, tunnels from oatmeal boxes. I still love a model train layout, and I’m as delighted as any child to see it puff little smoky clouds before disappearing into a paper mache’ tunnel.
Sometimes a hand truck moved down the track on Main Street with two workmen pumping the handle, like a teeter-totter. They didn’t go terribly fast, but it looked like a fun ride. Occasionally a passenger train used the tracks, quieter than the freight train, and I saw people in the windows, ladies wearing hats, men reading newspapers. Where were they going? In my imagination I created their stories. One time a circus train came by. All the neighborhood hurried out to watch it slowly pass. Just like the pictures in our Little Engine book, there were animals looking out the bars of the brightly painted cars. It was probably 67 years ago, but I remember the thrill of seeing that train.
A few blocks from our house was the big water tank, the depot, and the tracks for switching engines. Traffic could be tied up for a long time, but I didn’t mind; I wasn’t driving. I liked watching them switch engines and bang when they coupled. In the 40s and 50s the trains ran almost hourly, but in more recent years they were less frequent, and the trains were shorter.
As a married adult I spent several weeks touring Europe chaperoning Girl Scouts using Eurail Passes. Even as a little girl, I knew I’d love the train ride.
Today I’ll be boarding a train in Norfolk, Virginia, to travel to Philadelphia, then on to Lancaster, PA, to attend the Catholic Writers Guild Conference at CMN. I’m as excited as any child. This trip I’ll be thinking of Willy, the character in my new book, Waiting with Elmer; it releases next Saturday. The train is such an integral part of this story, it might be considered a character. Is that a surprise?