Few sounds are more able to evoke
a sense of nostalgia in me than the high lonesome whistle of a distant midnight
train. On a still summer night with the
window cracked to let in a faint breeze, the wail of a faraway train takes me right
back to my childhood.
I am snuggled into the comforting
depths of the ancient featherbed at my grandparents’ home in Elma, NY. As the nightly train blows its whistle at the
crossing about a mile south of us, I awaken briefly and then drift back to sleep,
feeling warm and secure under one of Grandma’s hand-stitched quilts with freshly
ironed sun-dried linen sheets, and crochet-edged pillowcases.
My family had a love/hate
relationship with trains. When Grandma
Pearl was sixteen years old in 1903, her dad was killed by a freight
train. He had been wading through deeply
drifted snow along the tracks, gathering pieces of coal in an attempt to keep
his family warm. It was the day after
Christmas.
Because of this gruesome tragedy,
Grandma was forced to end her schooling and help her mother to support her five
younger siblings by taking in laundry and mending. She was afraid of trains for the rest of her
life. She rode them when necessary
(Grandpa never drove) but I remember how she used to flinch when the train
roared past if we were out for a Sunday drive and dad was forced to stop too
close to a railroad crossing.
On my dad’s side of the family,
however, his father worked for the railroad between his many attempts of trying
to make it as a baker. He moved his family
back and forth across Canada from St. John’s to Saskatoon, Halifax to Winnipeg,
and a dozen towns in between - no doubt implanting his wanderlust into my dad’s DNA.
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| My Grandpa's tool chest with his initials on one end |
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| Grandpa wrote V for Victory in Morse code on the other end |
Dad could not abide sitting still
or even living in one place for too long.
He was infamous for racing across tracks to beat an oncoming train. Of course when my mother was in the car we
had to sit and watch the train go by; I always pointed out Chessie’s image on
the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway cars and waved at the caboose.
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| Chessie the railroad cat, sleeping like a kitten. |
For some unknown reason, when I
was really little I used to love drawing trains. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor and
turning out page after page of drawings - locomotives, coal cars,
passenger cars, box cars, and the caboose.
Mom would tape them all together for me and then try to find a place to
display them.
When I was in kindergarten my
class went on a brief train ride (probably on the Attica and Arcade
Railroad). I remember the trip was loud
and sooty and I came home clutching a souvenir - a clear glass locomotive
filled with hard candy. As I recall, neither
the train ride nor the candy impressed me very much.
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| This came with hard candy inside |
The Silver Lake line of the Buffalo,
Rochester, and Pittsburg Railroad (a branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad)
played several roles in my family’s history.
As youngsters, my grandmother, my mother, and I each attended the
Methodist camp in Silver Lake, NY.
Grandma told the story of falling asleep on the train from Buffalo so
she missed the Epworth Inn station. The
conductor discovered her several miles later and the train actually backed up
all the way to Silver Lake to let her off.
Grandma was mortified.
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| The Epworth Inn, Silver Lake, NY |
When I attended camp there, I
liked to sit on the little grassy bank above the dock below the ramshackle Inn,
and wave to the engineers when the little train chugged by. They were always kind enough to wave
back.
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| The dock below the Epworth Inn |
The other memorable train ride I
went on was when Paul and I first moved to Canada in 1968. We, and the black flies, were camping in
North Western Ontario, and we decided to take the train from Sioux Lookout to
Armstrong and then back again. We figured
it would be an adventure and we could walk around the town or sit in a restaurant
or the train station for a couple of hours until the return train arrived.
What we did not realize that the train we were
on was the “milk run” and for the entire 130-some miles it stopped and started
seemingly every ten minutes to let someone on or off or deliver groceries to
people who just appeared out of the
trees. Then, when we finally arrived in
Armstrong, there was no real station, no restaurant, not even a town - just
a lot of cabins tucked into the forest – little pools of light dotting the
night.
We were lucky there was a bench
on the platform for us to sit on. We got
a lot of strange looks from the locals, and we were too embarrassed to try to
interact with anyone (such idiots we were back then!). We sure were happy to be back on that train
to Sioux Lookout!
Another Canadian train story came
about a dozen years later when a friend and I attended the Northern Lights
Borealis Folk Festival in Sudbury.
George was a bonafide train nut (he used to travel all over to
photograph trains and he was also a model railroader). He booked our lodgings for the weekend - an
old rattletrap hotel right across the street from the rail yard. All night long the trains shunted and
squealed back and forth, coupling and uncoupling engines and cars. I barely slept a wink all weekend but George
was in train heaven.
All in all, I have come to the
conclusion that I prefer songs about trains to actual trains. From the Chattanooga
Choo Choo(which inspired one of my all-time favorite shaggy dog stories - punch
line beginning with “Pardon me, Roy . . .”) to Down By the Station (when my mother forced me to accept the prom
invitation and she attempted to teach me at least one dance, the cha-cha, to
this record -
dear Lord!) and then there was the Stan Freeberg parody of Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line. I still love both versions.
Next came the Great Folk Scare of
the early sixties and many train songs I still love to this day. Here are my favorite recordings of these
popular train songs:
City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman.
Daddy, What’s a Train? by Utah Phillips
Freight Train by Elizabeth (Libba) Cotton
Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash
The Canadian Railroad Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot
Life’s Railway to Heaven by the Amazing Rhythm Aces
Orange Blossom Special by Seatrain
And lately I have been listening
to a lot of Fred Eaglesmith - he has a couple of really stellar train songs - I Like Trains and Freight Train are my favorites, especially with Washboard Hank
doing the percussion.
To add to the nostalgia about
trains there are the famous train scenes in various TV shows and movies. Due
South’s epic episode All the Queen’s
Horses combined trains, horses, Mounties, music, and romance. What’s not to like?
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| The Musical Ride from All the Queen's Horses on Due South |
My favorite train movie is Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and
Richard Pryor, although Antonio Banderas’
Legend of Zorro comes in a close
second with its thrilling yet humorous train sequence - especially since it
features his talented black stallion Tornado who assists Zorro in outwitting
the bad guys.
Odds are I will never ride the
legendary Trans-Canada across the Great White North or travel to NOLA on the
City of New Orleans. But I can still crack
that window on a still summer night to hear the lonesome whistle of the
midnight train.
