Everyone should be so lucky as to have a train track nearby. 

From our house, we can hear the passing trains, just four blocks away.  We can hear the lonesome whistle blow.  Five hundred miles, five hundred miles.  I hear the train a’comin, it’s rollin’ round the bend. Won’t you choo choo me home?

Better yet, from my office window, I look right down on the track and the most schizophrenic crossing gate in Michigan, that opens and closes whether there is a train coming or not.  It practices.

It closes itself.  The bells clang and the flashers flash and the arms bar the way.  Cars stack up, patiently waiting for a train that isn’t coming.  Eventually, the drivers tire of the game and begin to very cautiously drive around the ends of the gate, running the slalom course between the ends of the two barriers.  Usually, at that moment, the gate goes up, leaving the gutsy driver caught lengthways in the tracks with all the other cars now wanting to streak straight across.  I can hear the crossing gate chuckling mirthfully from my office.

Lots and lots of trains come by.  Not like the old days when dozens and dozens of trains came through here on double tracks----sensible system, that---an eastbound track and a westbound track---a fairly foolproof system.  But, like so much else in the railroad world, good sense bit the dust long ago and one of the tracks was removed, and now, every so many miles, there is a siding where one of the trains pulls over and waits while the other goes by in the other direction.

At any rate, from my high vantage point, I look down on several Amtrak trains each day, streaking between Detroit and Chicago.  Every now and then I am treated with the bonus sight of a private railcar---one of those fancy restored things that rail aficionados can charter to ride around the country with their friends, tacked onto Amtraks. 

There are several freight trains every day, too.  Since I always see the engines first, I can tell how long the train is going to be by how many engines there are.  Some of the really long ones have six engines. 

I get a sense of the health of the economy from the cars they pull.  Here lately, I’ve seen precious few automobile carriers going past, but plenty of grain cars.  There is a large ethanol plant on the west edge of town, and I wonder how much of the grain is headed for that facility?  I know that since it opened, the number of grain trucks rumbling through town has increased tremendously.

I also see a lot of the cars that carry coils of sheet steel—they are specialized containers that are easy to spot. 

Only rarely do I see coal cars coming through.  My dad, who grew up within sight of my office, tells me that during the depression, when everyone burned coal in their furnaces, he and his sister would walk the tracks to pick up the coal that would spill off the cars as they jiggled along.

My favorites are the railroad maintenance vehicles that occasionally come along---I call them doodlebugs.  All kinds of weird looking yellow and orange vehicles used to set ties and tracks and to tear it up as well.  They have booms and derricks and blades and buckets, looking for all the world from my vantage point like water-spiders dancing down the tracks.  And do they ever make a racket!  Their horns and whistles are louder by far than any on the big locomotives that pass by, and since they usually travel in packs, each one is blasting away, so it sounds like a New Years Eve celebration coming down the track.

That’s enough for now.  The westbound Amtrak just went through. I need to walk down to the tracks and recover my penny.  You never get too old to enjoy that!

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