Blowing the Whistle for Trains

 

I love having a railroad running through my yard. Seriously.

 

The whistle blows at least once a day, but it never wakes us up at night. The engine and its rail cars, filled with coal, travel from the Virginia mountains through South Boston to the power plants in nearby North Carolina.

 

Visiting kids love to run to the railroad bridge when they hear the whistle, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Norfolk Southern engine, the 100 cars and the caboose, just a quarter mile from the house in Cluster Springs.

 

Trains must be in my genes. My grandfather was a telegraph operator for the Northern Pacific in Washington state. My father, not getting along with Grandpa, ran away at about age 14 and “rode the rods” during the Depression. That’s a term for dangerously jumping on the ladders of freight cards, perhaps climbing inside, riding for hours and then getting off when the train stopped.

 

He loved to regale us with tales of hobos, railroad police and smoky tunnels. It always sounded terrible to me, but he looked on this period nostalgically as one of the best times of his life.

 

So as a train buff, he persuaded me to go on a month-long train trip around the United States in 1961, near the end of the golden age of rails. From Richmond, Calif., we went to Ogden (Utah), Denver, Omaha, Chicago, Buffalo, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans. Tired of travel we stayed on until Los Angeles. We actually learned to sleep sitting up in coach cars.

 

Some memories: the porter telling my dad that tobacco was not grown in Virginia, only North Carolina. Wrong! The beautiful Vista Dome cars on the Union Pacific from Denver to Omaha. Luxury dining cars. Observation cars. Spending an entire day and night traveling across Texas, it was so big.

 

My dad loved to sing railroad songs. His favorite was “The Wreck of the Old 97.” He had never been to Danville but would have loved visiting memorials to the crash at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History.

 

There have been other great trips in recent years: Speedy rides from Lynchburg to Washington. Scenic rides from Oakland to Reno and from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A short tour from Washington to Harper’s Ferry. And the Auto Train from south of Washington, D.C., into Florida. I always take the train to New York from any point on the East Coast.

 

So many rail lines are planned. Do I think we are going to copy Europe with an extensive rail system? No. We are too spread out and dependent on automobiles. Too bad.

 

The train in our yard may stop running when the Duke Energy power plants south of here are supposed to switch from coal to natural gas, one in 2030 and the other in 2035.

 

Will our train tracks be converted to a bike path? Dream on, Mike!