Trains

I was listening to the radio yesterday, No not NPR, but a music station and I heard Arlo Guthrie singing "City of New Orleans" and it reminded me of my own fascination with trains.
When I was a child, we always had a Christmas garden with handmade houses and of course, a church, encircled by an American Flyer train set.
The trains were actually my Brother's and every year a new piece would be added to the garden, a signal switch, a cross gate, a beacon tower or additional cars.
Originally our train was industrial, a locomotive with a coal tender, a tanker car, a logging car which would dump it's cargo when it hit a certain section of the track and you pushed a button,and a cattle car and milk jug carrier which would also unload onto a vibrating platform . The engine would puff out smoke, and naturally there was the little red caboose bringing up the rear.
As time moved on, we acquired passenger cars as did the country apparently, as air travel out of reach for the average Joe, and trucking became more practical for commerce.
But I didn't know this when I was young, I just enjoyed the trains for the season, all the lights in the little houses, the whistle of the engine, the clack of the tracks.
My Dad stopped setting the garden up, but when my boys were born he started again. He even built a platform for us, so we had our own set of HO scale cars with a Diesel engine and a KFC instead of the church.
When I became older, the train became more romantic to me. It was the scene of many a soldier going off the war in movies, those tearful goodbyes, sweethearts waving, tearful kisses blown into the wind. It was also the scene of momentous reunions and stump speeches by politicians from the caboose.
It was a sad day when the train pulled through Baltimore with the body of Robert Kennedy. It gave the people a chance to salute him and say goodbye.
When Woodies transferred me to the Metro Center in DC, I would drive 1/2 hr to West Baltimore in the dark, park for free under the bridge on RT 40 (same neighborhood as the Wire) and catch the Marc train to Union Station where I then boarded the Metro to my stop. On the nights I had to work later, or just plain missed the Marc, I rode the Amtrak for $1 more.
Somehow I felt very excited riding the train everyday. It made my job seem more important, and once, when Rocky was trying to make a comeback into my life, he surprised me at Penn Station with flowers, a sweet gesture.
We have a coal train that runs through here that carries fuel to The Indian River Power Plant. When I am tucked in at night, I can here the whistle and the clack of the tracks. Some nights it rocks me right to sleep.
I can see why so many musicians write songs about them....