The Eiteljorg Museum invited media members to a preview of “Jingle Rails,” its annual exhibit of miniature railroad trains. Paula Nicewanger, the Creative Director of this publication, invited me to attend with her, knowing my history with trains.
When I lived within a few blocks of the train tracks that run through South Irvington, I would hear the trains’ whistles as they approached the crossing at Arlington and English Avenues. Occasionally, while walking, I would be caught on the North side of Arlington, and I would stand near the tracks, listening to the ringing of the crossing alarm bells and the rumble of passing boxcars. I would try to read the dates on the side of the cars, just as I used to do when a passing train would stop my transport of my oldest child to school in Southern Indiana. If I was late in getting started toward downtown New Albany, I would have to wait at a crossing as a passing train dissected the street. My 7-year-old daughter sat quietly next to me as I silently counted the number of cars being towed by the engine and waited for the caboose to pass.
At a recent Christmas party sponsored by the Warren Township Democratic Club, I listened to Andy Whitehurst describe a train trip he and his wife took from Indianapolis to Chicago and on to Pittsburgh. I pictured the Union Station — commonly called Penn Station — that the train entered in Pittsburgh and remembered the many times I had taken trains from that station. When my father’s assaults on his wife and children grew too great for my mother to bear, she would bundle up her three babies and head for that station and take the train to Baltimore, Maryland.
I love trains. When the advertising department at L.S. Ayres would send me to New York City for photo shoots, I would take a train from the World Trade Center to Hoboken, New Jersey, connect with the light rail to Danforth, New Jersey and make my way to Jersey City, the home of my daughter Lisa, and my first grandchild, Xavion. But I do have a bittersweet history with trains. I got a train for Christmas when I was about 8 years old, and I laid quietly in bed on the night before, listening to my parents trying to assemble the pieces. I heard my mother alert my father to the presence of a cockroach in the caboose and heard the whoosh of his breath as he tried to blow the roach out. On Christmas day, I plugged in the train and watched it circle the tracks, the engine emitting puffs of smoke. When I placed old glass fuses beneath the tracks to create an incline, the train got stuck on the point of a fuse. I couldn’t see the obstruction and in frustration, I placed my mouth on the electrified rails and shouted, “RUN TRAIN!” I received an electric shock that blackened my gums.
I have hopes that I will be able to assemble the plastic train set given to me by a neighbor a few years ago. The pieces of the “Thomas & Friends Trackmaster Motorized Railway” are scattered on my living room floor but I hope to be able to decipher the instructions before Christmas. It will not have the majesty of the trains I saw chugging about the beautiful landscapes and into and out of tunnels, but it will be mine, and the little batteries that charge it cannot fry my mouth, and I’ll have my Christmas train, again.
cjon3acd@att.net