Little Boys and Trains

One of the great benefits of being a grandparent is that one can do the things one always wanted to do as a kid and excuse it as "showing the kids a good time."  Sometimes the kids even enjoy it too.

Trains were made for little boys.  Ranking right up there alongside watching a campfire, the mesmerizing effect of watching a train pass is genetically ingrained in the masculine DNA.  Most of the grand old steam engines were gone when I was a kid.  The really big ones worked all through World War II but were fazed out starting shortly after that war ended.  By the time I was five or six, just the age for fascination, diesels reigned supreme.  Many times, late at night, though it was about 3 miles away,  I could hear the midnight run pulling on down to the station, running from Meridian through Hattiesburg to points well south.  It was all freight, coal, timber and Masonite products from the plant in Laurel, but that only made for a more full bodied melody.  The passenger run, the Crescent flying down to New Orleans from Washington, D. C. pulled through Hattiesburg at 4:30 pm and the sound was inaudible above the daytime noise.  Passenger trains sing high tenor anyway.  Freight trains, with a 100 cars in tow, are all bass with a nice, steady clackity-clack rhythm keeping every thing honest.

But, as is common with greying memories, I digress.  Being a grand-parent ("paw-paw" in steadfast consistency with my Southern roots), I considered it absolutely essential to a well rounded education that my three grand-girls, two grandsons and their respective fathers, be presented at court at the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road Museum in Baltimore.  I am not entirely sure if they loved it as much as I did... but that is entirely irrelevant.  It was necessary.... 

Anytime I am sandwiched between three big rigs on highway 83 heading North out of Knoxville, my nostalgia for the old days of railroad pre-eminence reaches full blast.  It is a shame that these kids will never really have the opportunity to sit on the river bank, next to a trestle, and simply dream along with the lumbering cars.  Their life is more attuned to the highway: frenetic, chaotic and pulse pounding.  A train is melancholy, wistful and dreamy.  It's the stuff of summer afternoons, warm and lazy, with "nothing to do" as the highest ambition and crowning glory of childhood.  That life seems as far away and alien as Jupiter now.

But at the museum, looking at those marvelous exhibits, touching the grand old beasts, picturing them in their glory, belching smoke and steam, it was almost like being on the old Leaf River again...  I commend the experience and the museum to all of those whose soul is not quite dead yet... for whom romance is forever linked to works of art posing as locomotives, who can hear a song in a whistle.

Comments

[Paul Hoehner]

Romance and trains go a long way for us. Sheryl and I were married in Baltimore (Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Loch Raven) and had our wedding reception at the B&O Railroad museum. The center turn-table was our dance floor surrounded by all the trains decked out in lights and flowers. Our favorite wedding picture is the entire wedding party climbing on the side of one of the big locomotive engines. We had a live "swing band"...no DJ!...and everyone who attended has talked about this reception for years as the most memorable they've ever attended.