About Me and Trains

When I was seven years old, we moved out from under the shadows of blast furnaces and forges just outside of south Chicago in an attempt to escape the patch of rust quickly growing on the industrial economy of the area. I was in the middle of second grade at Park School, three short blocks down from our house, one block over from my great-grandma Torrenga’s house. Park School was a kindergarten-through-third-grade affair housed in a little red-brick building on a corner lot shared with Riverdale’s only park, a tiny catholic church, and four sets of railroad tracks carrying both freight and chrome-bright commuter cars. We surfaced a couple of suburbs to the west, in a house with a large, fenceless backyard featuring another four sets of tracks a literal stone’s throw from the back patio. From an early age, I learned to be comfortable with the blaring horns of trains; the roar and the shake: They did not keep me from learning my d’s from my b’s in Miss Marcunis’s classroom as they thundered by in the afternoon, nor did they wake me up every two hours as they rocketed past and shook the Lego bins against my bedroom wall through the night. I could stand close enough to the tracks to stare into the engineer’s eyes and study with leisure the look of consternation on his face as it dawned on him that no amount of persistent horn-blasting would open up any further distance between my person and his engine. Mind you, I wasn’t reckless, nor were most of the kids in my neighborhood. (Glenn was reckless, but that’s another story.) In the ebb and flow of the day’s rhythm, we grew to instinctively know when to expect the trains. We knew what kind of freight to expect: Mornings brought boxcars and grainers; mid-afternoon meant a potpourri of automobile carriers and flatcars carrying semitrailers and bulk containers; later afternoon and early evening brought torpedo cars with their mysterious orange-glowing molten cargo: They came one after another in short order all through the evening and into the night. They looked to me like some sort of mournful, mystical parade of endangered mammoths linked tail-to-tusk, thundering sadly, slowly off into the dark West.

My poor mother tried every trick imaginable to leverage my predisposition toward nervousness to keep me from growing too comfortable with the tracks and the trains. When it became apparent that appealing to my sense of self-preservation was gaining no traction, she pulled out all the stops: She informed me that if one stood too near a passing train — through some mysterious feat of physics that she was at a loss to elaborate upon — this would cause the train to derail, no doubt killing any workers and passersby, and causing untold millions of dollars worth of damage. And wouldn’t that make me feel terrible? This approach saw some success for a few weeks, until the hypothesis was challenged and put to the test by the neighborhood crew and found wanting.

I’ve always had a terrible sense of geography, direction, and place. Because of this, I easily filled my imagination with ponderings about where these trains came from and where they were going, free of any practical understanding of where the Dolton railyard was in relation to my home, or how the mills and foundries were arranged to shuttle liquid steel and slag from one arm of the operation to another via rail. Long before I understood hobo lingo for death — catching the Westbound — I would find myself studying trains from the first hint of arrival in the east to the last glimpse of dissipation to the west. I was filled with a sense of sadness and longing that is hard to describe and embarrassing even now to admit. It’s always been with me.

The odd thing is, anyone who knows me will testify that I’m by nature a cautious man. My childhood was filled with secret worries and self-imposed pressures that darkened my poor little heart with terrible and unnecessary wall-clouds. Think of long dark hospital hallways at night, absent of mothers or fathers. And yet, where trains are concerned, walking along a line of desolate freight cars at night is a far more comfortable prospect to me than buying tickets, navigating a schedule, and facing a car full of people on the South Shore line with my oldest son to get to the Auto Show at McCormick Place on a bright Saturday afternoon.

As I write this late at night — no joke — I hear two train horns out on the old Wabash line in town. It awakens in me some sleeping old ageless wonder; it makes me want to get my hands on that secret Rand McNally railroad map, adjust for declination on my Silva compass, stuff a notepad, pen, a lighter, some cigars, sunflower seeds and an extra knife into a freezer-sized Ziploc bag, cocoon this all inside a quilted flannel jacket, cable-tie it all together … and catch out. It makes me want to wake up my oldest son and put him in the car, drive him down to the tracks, and watch the trains pass by together, answering any questions he has. It makes me thank God for my good wife and my family; my warm bed; my house and my garage full of tools; the many, many lonely miles I’ve seen north, south, east and west, and the Heaven beneath them.