A Train Story

There’s something about trains.  The clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack of the steel wheels.  The soothing sound of the whistle.  The rocking back and forth like being cradle in a mother’s arms.  The slow pace of the engine, as if the trip is the most important thing going on that day.

When I was a kid, I loved the sound of the CSX freight train passing behind my neighbors’ houses and the park across the street.  Lying on the bed I shared with my older sister, I listened for the train that would whisk my imagination far away from my tiny Wilmington, Delaware.  Maybe I could jump through the open door of a boxcar and hang out with the hobos.  The sound would lull me to sleep and to far-off places.

Sometimes, I ran to our bedroom window when I heard the whistle, and if the trees were bare I could catch a glimpse of the train, hoping that this time it would be an Amtrak.  Passenger trains set my imagination wild with dreams of adventure and escape.  Only recently did I find out that Amtrak never used that CSX line.

My mother warned us to “stay away from the tracks.”  For the most part, we did.  Once, my oldest brother put a penny on the rail and it was flattened by a passing train.  Lincoln’s profile had melted to look like the face in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The vision of being mashed under the sharp, hot wheels was enough for me to keep my distance.  Yet, my curiosity never waned.

Mother never found out about the time my childhood friend David and I threw rocks at the train from the safety of the woods, or how in the summer we pretended the rail was a balance beam, never checking behind us for a train.  Train tracks have a certain stinging odor when the tar gets hot, and as I looked down the tracks as the heat rose like a mirage, I thought, “If I kept going, I could walk right out of here.”

Two of my uncles visited my family one weekend.  At breakfast, they asked us how we could sleep with the sound of the training whistle blaring all night.  We looked at each other.  “What whistle?”

Thirty years later, I’m in the Business Class car of Amtrak’s “Carolinian” Train No. 80 out of Charlotte, headed back to Delaware.  The ride will take eleven hours, versus one-and-a-half hours by plane or eight by car.  People look at me with bewilderment and ask:  “Eleven hours?  What do you do for eleven hours?” For me, riding the “original steel horse” is like spending a stress-free day back in time.

The train pulls out of Charlotte at 7:40 a.m..  I prepare for the long journey by extending my seat and  footrest, opening my laptop, getting out my DVDs and books, and cracking open the thermos of hot coffee I will sip for the next five hours.

We slide pass the industrial underbelly of NoDa and as we gain speed, the window becomes a green blur as kudzu takes over the scenery.  Along I-485, a red barn and silo with a giant white cross emerge. It’s surrounded by row after row of identical vinyl-sided houses where the farm used to be.  Pasture meets progress.

The attendant gives us pillows and blankets and a complimentary drink.  We’re soon upon Kannapolis, where the landmark smokestacks for Plant No. 9 are a memory, and in their stead is the North Carolina Research Center.  We stop to pick up passengers and continue on through the gritty part of Landis, where their textile factory has closed.  The history of the South is along the train tracks that go through small, forgotten towns that are now decaying.  Their church graveyards hold more people than the towns themselves.  The train whistle blows, letting people know life is passing by.

China Grove has a Main Street and mill houses, but no more mill.  The tracks run along the backside, where work got done and people got their hands dirty before the manufacturing jobs fled overseas.  Bungalows have chipped paint and speckled windows where worn-out faces peer to watch the train.

We’re soon upon the “American Century Home” plant and its empty parking lot.  The cars are all at the correctional facility down the way.  Farther, a billboard reads: “Foreclosure affects the whole family.”  Less than a mile later, another says: “Be happy, have fun.”  An old house with a gazebo, grand in its heyday, drips with ivy and sadness.

The romantic, faraway places I dreamed of as a little girl have turned to rubble.  Vacant factories and textile plants represent abandoned ideas and a bygone era of middleclass America.

It’s 8:30 a.m.  Long ago, people would be filling these factories to start another day.  Co-workers would say, “Good morning!” and share stories of their boys’ Little League games or their girls’ dance recitals or of how their oldest was graduating high school and hoped to get a job in the mill to carry on the family tradition.  What happened to those families?  What happened to their town?

In the approaching distance, “The North Carolina Finishing Company” was imploded. The water tower with the company name stands among the crushed bricks—proudly, quietly—as if to say, “Something great was produced here.”  The train rocks gently past with respect.

Riding past these towns is like having a front row seat at a funeral.  Rusty trailers, rusty cars, rusty people. Across the aisle, a woman watches a movie on her portable DVD player.  How can she watch a motion picture when real-life drama unfolds outside her window?

We close in on an empty single-story factory with the delivery dock facing the tracks and an abandoned blue pickup truck in the weed-infested parking lot.  A living-room chair and a folding chair are outside on the dock where I imagine coworkers sat and laughed over a good smoke.  Now even the cigarette factories have vanished.

We stop in High Point and then, toot-toot, we’re off to Greensboro, Burlington, Durham, Cary, Raleigh, and Selma.  It has begun to rain and streets are glistening.

As the train speeds along, snapshot images zip past: rows of soybean and cotton, a forgotten field, boarded-up shacks like in Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  The whistle blows again, soft and gentle, and the cows don’t look up from grazing.  A red pick-up truck waits behind the railroad crossing gate.  We catch glimpses of life, landscape, and loneliness.

My mind drifts to my first train trip to New York City when I was a teenager.  Penn Station and its crush of people, high ceilings, and organized confusion was intoxicating.  At my house in Charlotte, occasionally, I hear it in the distance — if the night sky is clear and traffic is quiet—a long chooooo, then two short choos.  A far-off train calling me home.

A woman sits next to me in Wilson and awakens me from my wide-eyed slumber.  We exchange pleasantries and I go back to writing.  She opens her cell phone, and from the conversation I hear that she’s traveling to Washington, D.C., to see her 19-year-old niece’s premature baby in the hospital.

A family is socializing on the porch of a house facing the tracks.  They are African-American.  Their daily view, and entertainment, is this.  One man lifts his hand and waves, and I quickly press my hand to the window, trying to make a human connection from a speeding train.  Seconds later and two doors down, an elderly white couple shuffles to their tired, old car outside their rundown antebellum mansion, all past their original glory.  I wonder if these two families, so close logistically, even know each other.

At each stop, the ebb and flow of passengers continues.  As the train pulls away from the Rocky Mount depot, we approach the shopping district, and I see the reflection of the moving train in the empty storefront windows.  A middle-aged man stands with his arms crossed and a “take me away” look in his eye while his three daughters lean lazily against the doorway of an ornate, vacant bank. I want to wave, but they are gone.

There’s a certain beauty about these Carolina towns trying to cobble together an existence.  Whitakers and Enfield fly the American flag and have town names on water towers, fire departments, and post offices.

We slip out of North Carolina into Virginia and towns dissolve into a landscape of green farmland.  At a train yard, a blonde man in a scruffy green t-shirt and jeans carries a duffle bag over his shoulder.  Hobo, I think.  They do exist.

We pass downtown Emporia at 2:20 p.m. where “The Virginia Hotel” boasting “Polite Service.  Friendly” has been converted into an antiques store.

I head to the café car to briefly eat my packed lunch in one of the comfortable, cushioned booths.  Across from me, a young man wears earbuds, blocking out any noise or potential conversation.  Two people in the back play cards.  I return to my seat.

We have run out of towns and are moving fast.

“I love trains,” the woman behind me says with a Boston accent.

“I used to work on the railroad in college,” replies the man across the aisle.  He says he’s watching the rails and is carrying a 1972 railroad timetable.

North of Richmond, we pass through a storybook town called Ashland, home to Randolph-Macon College, where the Victorian houses and trolley make it look like Candyland.

Out of nowhere, we’re on a bridge that carries us across a wide, stunning river with herons and fishermen dotting the surface.  Suddenly, we’re upon a group of men and women in uniform practicing a drill.  “Quantico Marine Corps Base, Virginia. Crossroads of the Marine Corps.”  We slow to a gentle stop at the commuter station, barely long enough for anyone to board.  Maybe no one did.  In a short hour, we’ll be in Washington, D.C.

The phone of the woman sitting next to me rings and it’s her sister. I can tell from her hushed tone the baby didn’t make it.  Throughout the trip, I’ve been so busy writing and taking pictures, and she’s been listening to music, that we haven’t talked much.  But during the last leg of her journey, we put down our distractions and bond over the loss of a child, not here long enough for the whole family to meet.

The Washington Monument juts up from horizon and then the dome of the Capitol.  The train takes us right through downtown where she will depart with a heavy heart.

The conductor says we’re parking at Union Station for 15 minutes.  I want to dart inside for a coffee and a croissant, run up the escalator, spin in the atrium like Mary Tyler Moore.  But he warns: If you miss the train, you miss the train.

I’m looking forward to sleeping in my old room where the furniture has not changed since I was a little girl.  And once again, I will be lulled to sleep by clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack as the train hits that one spot on the tracks that still sounds the same after four decades.

~ Sheila Saints

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