Magic, Sadness, Terror and Beauty: The Mystique of Railroading

When people first meet me a question inevitably arises; words and inflections vary but the underlying sentiment is unmistakable: You still play with trains and you're how old? Why haven't you grown up? Oh, as a father I've grown up of course. But my affection - childlike if it must be - was fused permanently unapologetic long ago, and really isn't too hard to understand.

I mean, what's not to love about leviathans as a child? Yeah, Dinosaurs and Dump Trucks and Noah's Ark and the lot... so think about it: you're a tot strung prisoner in a carseat, slowly growing bored of watching the world pass by around you, yet fascinated by this windowed play all the same, when it abruptly comes to halt. You're among the first in this mysteriously charged line forming at the gate and you don't even see anything yet, just some flashing lights. Then you hear it: the low, loud, terrible rumble of God prowling for evildoers. Then it comes into view: The Leviathan – heralded by massive beasts with hearts bellowing noise and exhaust, pounding ground and air into submission, followed by a procession of car… after car… after car… after car… after car... screeching, thunking, groaning in a glorious technicolor presentation of noise. And then, like a powerful summer thunderstorm, the spectacle suddenly passes into eerie quiet, fading from tangibility, over as suddenly as it began. Calm returns and life goes on - with an infused anticipation for a repeat performance, of this spectacle procession of locomotive and cars.

And those cars! I grew up in the 80's golden age of railroad billboards: brightly colored freight cars with bold, beautiful logos in all manner of shapes and sizes - what kid doesn't like those things? The mysteries they held were numerous. For years I thought Burlington Northern's logo was some sort of pitfall-alligator-monster-head-thing; finally seeing the "N" in the silhouetted "B" was a bonafide "Eureka!" moment. And how many rough-and-tumble icons of heavy industry dared manifest a PR coup by adapting a celebrated sleeping kitten into a logo, as did the Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, and Western Maryland when they combined forces into Chessie System? Period artworks like those still provide case studies in timeless graphic design decades later, even as they fade away from use and into history.

Then the impromptu elementary learning experience: what's in those cars? Where are they from? Where are they going? It expands beyond the "what's in the boxcar" game. You see sludge spilled out of a tank car, and you wonder what it is and how people are so careless and why it's always yellow. You love automobiles and go mad trying to peer through the gaps in the protective panels of an autorack, trying to guess which new models are inside... and reconcile the psychology that pits the accomplishment of glimmering new products against the need for those protective panels in the first place. You begin to notice that not all boxcars and hoppers are the same, and although you don't yet know what industrial engineering is, you suspect there must be a good reason for these different designs and begin to figure out what they are.

But if all that merely forges a childlike curiosity from a safe pedestrail distance, the bond is sealed the first time you stand next to the tracks. I spent some of my favorite parts of childhood hanging around Chicago's Minuteman Park - conveniently located next to The Belt Railway of Chicago's famous "every railroad" Clearing Yard mainline - and I still can't get enough as a distant adult. Even today you can still hang lineside and hear it – a low long rumble faintly betraying the distance, its signature resonance throbbing above the city din - and not even see it. It grows ever slow and sinister, threatening, warning, announcing its presence until there it is (!) – coming at you illusory, faster than you expected; crescendo of compressed trashing and turbocharged whooshing and electric whining swirls into a great bellowing symphony as its conductor raps the horns again (just for you) in a personal greeting, as if to herald, nay, celebrate your own presence. Your ribcage vibrates and hurts with exquisite internal vitality as the symphony drones on, railed by the hard clacking thumps of hundreds of wheels pounding the iron, peppered with the occasional screech and shrill howl. Steadfast you dare hold your ground until the guy in the caboose (remember them?) rewards your audacity with a wave, and sometimes tosses you some chalk in an age-old tradition concluding the performance. In the intermission all is quiet again, until the next act commands the full attention of all nearby once more.

Of course I'm an adult now, and as I grew into those shoes I came to appreciate railroads differently. The names first of all, because to live in the US (especially in Chicago) is to owe your very livelihood to railroads - and railroads owed their livelihood to country: Burlington Route. (Atchison, Topeka and) Santa Fe. Rock Island. New York Central. Pennsylvania. Wabash. Louisville & Nashville. Milwaukee Road. Rio Grande. Chesapeake & Ohio. Baltimore & Ohio. Illinois Central. Chicago and Northwestern. Frisco. Detroit, Toledo & Ironton. Soo Line. Boston & Maine… The roll call of places far and imagined went on and on and on, tantalizing imaginative minds with adventure and discovery (what the heck does "Soo" Line mean, anyway? Why is Ohio so important? Does the City of Boston really deserving higher billing than the entire State of Maine?). You learn more in slogans: "The Pine Tree Route", "Water level route", "For Progress", "Linking 13 great states with the nation", "Anthracite Route" – doses of social studies and economics proudly emblazoned on the sides of a freight car.

Therein lies the reason I came to lust for open road, seizing a past job opportunity that afforded the discovery of some of those places for myself – a calling that still yearns to this day. Sadly, it's no coincidence that as the US homogenizes away its regional identities, so too have the railroads consolidated into a generic alphabet soup. Gone are all the proud, honorable railroad names (and fantastic colors and logos) of yore; replacing them are dull, monochrome alphabet spoonfuls of "CN", "CSX", "NS", and "BNSF". Today watching trains takes the pastiche of scanning a crowd for a friend: so too might one of the old guard pass by anonymous, hidden under by coats of graffiti and dirt, withdrawing his presence from all but the connected and observant few.

Ultimately though, once you become of working age, you appreciate the people behind it even more. I've met many over the years and have always felt indebted to them. The salt of the earth that greases the wheels of commerce and industry. The Robber Barons who financed the rails and the expansion of a nation tapping its boundless resources. The immigrants (Poles, Irish, Italians, Chinese) who built them. The engineers (of both schools of trade) who bravely wrested with nascent mechanical science (often paying with their lives). The brakemen and conductors who plod the mantra "Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor dark of night" as they inspect their mile-long charges car by car. The drama of people bravely fighting for survival and coming up short (Rock Island). The breathtaking vistas and earth-conquering feats of mountain railroading (Great Northerm, Southern Pacific, B&O). The "Us Versus Them" mentality manifest to case study for better and worse (Pennsylvania vs New York Central).

It's the simple Joe managing his own Nine-to-Fiver for thousands of others' (Metra, Amtrak). It's mechanics keeping locomotives soldiering after 45 years and 20 million miles. It's the engineer "playing the airhorn" for my little girl... it's the engineer waving a geeky teenager with binoculars over to his idling locomotive to ask if he had ever been in one, and if not then climb on up here and check it out! It's hard, honest, dangerous work, from the tiniest short line to the largest intercontinental. Its rewards are the simple satisfactions of a paycheck, safe journeys, and calling home. And for some the private views stretching from the seething underbellies of inner-city slums to the glorious event horizons of God's Country – and everywhere in between. Sure, a plane may be faster and a car more personal, but how many songs have been written about the romance, mystique, and legacy of airlines? The dangers and demands of the automobile?

For over a year I commuted daily across Chicago's 65th Street & Harlem Avenue – and I never gave myself a time allowance and always seemed to get a blasted train when I could least afford it. There's few worse places to get stopped in Chicago than on Harlem because of the BRC railyard logistics in play. But as I sat idle in my car, my thoughts inevitably wandered to the above. Maybe I'd see something rare (admittedly, it helps to know what you're looking at, which can't be said of the average commuter). Maybe an "old friend" would go by. Usually I'd remember running from my grampa's backyard to the street just to see what all the racket out front was coming from, and what would it look like this time.

But if for some reason none of those thoughts would strike, I could at least note all the semi trucks taking up all the space around me, and be glad that single train I was stuck waiting for kept a few hundred more of them off the road. That consideration may be a purely adult, but the child within is thankful all the same.