TL;DR: Trains are cool. There should be more trains, in real life and in stories. Trains have been historically problematic.
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| Santa Barbara, CA |
Yesterday the largest steam engine in the country rolled through Binghamton on an America's 250th Cross Country tour, and everyone in town went crazy. I mean, they acted like they'd been fanatical trainspotters since childhood. Michael and I drove to Ithaca at peak-Big Boy time, and as we were driving out of town, Michael pointed at all the cars pulled over on a side road waiting for Big Boy to pass and said, Wow. Owego took forever to get through because every person in a fifty mile radius appeared to have taken their child out of school to watch the passing. Lots of men with fancy camera gear. I texted my friend who lives in Owego with an lol comment and she replied that she'd taken a sick day to watch, and sent me a cool video of the engine wooshing through Campville. I was like, I co-taught with you for ten years and I never heard you mention a train once, oh, except for that time you took a train to Florida and the other time you took a train to South Dakota, so I guess you do kind of like trains, ok, you get a pass, but why aren't all these other people out in force demanding we get high speed commuter rail through Broome County?
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| Michael and Ella on the Sugar Cane Train, Maui, HI |
If we had a train here, I would take it all the time. I love riding trains, as I tell you every time I go to New York via Beacon and Metro North down the Hudson River. You get to see the back-sides of towns, the parts no-one is supposed to see. You get to fall asleep somewhere hours out of Sydney and wake up to mobs of kangaroos hopping across barren landscapes and still not be even close to your destination (yes, that is something I did).
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| Me scouting for a forward facing window seat, Grand Central Station, New York, NY |
I spent most of January slogging my way through Dickens' Dombey and Son, and boy, are there trains in that book. Dickens lived through the transformation of the English city, town, and countryside wrought by trains, and they're a big part of the Dombey family story, it must have been insane to see the world change like that, not always for the better. I am teaching a two semester grad seminar on United States history starting this Fall, and you bet we're going to talk about trains. How the federal government funded and facilitated the spread of railroads across North America, allowing a few corrupt men to amass vast personal fortunes, alienating Native Americans from land, leading to crises in debt for farmers. Etcetera.
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| Michael admiring his childhood train set, made by a shop class in St Maries, ID. |
The book I am trying to write currently starts and ends at Binghamton's Lackawanna Railroad Station, which is not something I consciously planned, but makes perfect sense because trains are symbols of arriving and leaving and strangers and progress running you down.
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| One of my favorite trains from literature is in Richard Adams, Watership Down, one of the top five books of my life. Captain Holly describes their escape from Efrafa. "What I'm going to say now is the cold truth. Lord Frith sent one of his great Messengers to save us..." |
Sorry if this doesn't hang together. I'm finishing it in a hurry because.
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