“Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!”  “Honnnnnkkkkk! Honnnkkkk!”  “Clackety clackety clackety.  

I’m very fortunate to hear these sounds several times each day as the trains roll by under my office window and the nearby crossing gates come down.  Passenger trains, freight trains, and the always entertaining specialized track repair cars that occasionally come by, looking like weird doodle bugs and making more honking racket than the biggest freights.

Trains are great.  I’ve always loved them.  I like watching them, seeing them and riding them. Every now and then when I am near Dearborn, I stop by the Henry Ford Museum and go in and look at the railroad displays, including the huge old steam locomotive they have in there, and try to image what it must have been like to stand near the track when that big brute went rumbling and roaring by.

When I was a little boy, I had the opportunity to ride in the cab of an old steam engine.  There was an old train that worked around my home town, called The Old Dolly.  My dad was a doctor and he used to take me on house calls with him sometimes.  He apparently knew the engineer on The Old Dolly, because he flagged down the slow-moving train at a crossing on a dirt road one day, hoisted me up and let me ride for a couple of miles to another crossing, where he picked me up.  Wow!

The old family cottage near Petoskey had a track running right behind it.  Freight trains ran through there, day and night, probably hauling timber.  In fact, the town of Harbor Springs was built as a deep water port for the timber industry. Ephraim Shay lived there and designed the famed narrow gauge design known as the Shay Locomotive.  This little steam powered beauty had vertical pistons instead of the long horizontal pistons of most engines, which allowed the engine to be much shorter and therefore able to negotiate tighter turns on the temporary light rails the lumbermen built through the forests to get the logs to market.

My brother and sister and cousins and I mastered the art of placing soft metal things on the tracks to have them be flattened by the passing trains.  Pennies were of course common, but my favorites were old brass screws, which we had to tape to the track with masking tape.  Once flattened, they were like little two-edged saws.

We also learned to walk on rails, having contests to see who could go the farthest without falling off the rail.

Those tracks are now long-gone, replaced by grass and a bike trail, which Marsha and I ride often. 

My old chum Richard gives me a railroad calendar every year for Christmas.  It is filled with huge photos of old trains, and I love looking at them.

Every now and then, a train goes by my window with an antique private rail car in tow.  Richard tells me that one can charter one of those and take a trip, hooked to an Amtrak train. If you team up with friends, it is about the same cost as taking a cruise.  Wouldn’t that be fun, to luxuriate in a private rail car and cruise the rails from Chicago to Salt Lake City, perhaps?

There is so much fanciful fantasy twisted up with the reality of the rails that I wonder if I’m not better off looking out the window.  Perhaps I’ll test the theory one of these days.  The first challenge may be to convince Marsha that it is a better idea than taking a cruise.  

                                         by Jim Whitehouse

                                                       Index