The train moaned an alert at 4:35 in the morning; I know this because I was awake. I’ve heard the alert during the daylight hours and when I do, will often cry out to my 3.7-year-old granddaughter, “Train!” Myah does not know a train in the way that I do; the trains she sees are cartoons. But trains have been prominent in my life.
When my mother and her children had been brutalized by my father beyond the point of endurance, she would bundle us up and we would take the bus to Penn Station in downtown Pittsburgh. There, we would wait for the train to pull into the station, and we would board it, our escape to my grandmother’s house in Baltimore Maryland. I discovered, long after my mother listened to the pleas of her children and divorced, that Pennsylvania Station was properly named Union Station, a name that I found again in Indianapolis and St. Louis.
When I moved from California to Southern Indiana with my first bride and our child, our first apartment was in New Albany. My workplace was in downtown New Albany and my daughter’s child-care was near there. I would take her to her daycare, then go to work. We had a rhythm and routine and we three would separate at a specific time. Lisa sat in the front seat with me (this was 1976) and when we dallied too long, we would be trapped at a railroad crossing, waiting on the passage of a train. I remember reading the dates of manufacture stenciled onto the boxcars, sometimes amazed that they were still on the rails.
When I moved to Indianapolis in 1986, I worked near Union Station, which brought back memories of my time at Penn Station in Pittsburgh. I rode an Amtrak train from Indianapolis to Chicago, and the clatter of the rails and the rocking of the car was as comforting to me as it was when I was a child. When I moved to St. Louis in 1993, I lived near yet another Union Station, though trains no longer entered and exited there. When my two youngest children were visiting with me from Mooresville, I would take them to Union Station. In the Grand Rotunda there are great arched doorways, and you can whisper into the leg of one arch and be heard by someone standing at the opposite leg.
In my travels through my neighborhood, I will at times be halted by the passage of a train across South Arlington Avenue, between English Avenue and Greenfield Avenue. I stand near the tracks with the tintinnabulation of the bells and the flashing of the warning lights, and watch the graffiti-clad cars, listening to the rumble, clank, and clatter. I patiently wait for the caboose, though I rarely see the traditional red caboose; the train passes, and I cross the track.
When my youngest daughter was a year old, and her mother was pregnant with her brother, I would take her to McDonald’s on Saturday mornings. We lived on Broken Bow Trail on the West side, and one morning, with Lauren in the back seat, we crossed the overpass on West 10th Street. I heard a train sound below us and I watched it briefly, then continued to the restaurant. Lauren and I continued those weekend breakfast outings every weekend until the birth of her brother, though I never saw another train.
The moaning of the train is not a mournful sound to me, but a sign of hope and redemption. I smile when I hear it.
cjon3acd@att.net