by Brooks Riley (who is standing on the bow of the ship above on September 11, 1959)
The freight trains at night are so loud that in my dreams they become horizontal twin towers spewing sound into the air in horrifying percussive bursts. Sometimes they sound like jumbo jets landing beside my pillow. Or a full-throttle matriarch with her brood in tow. Or Wotan at the height of his wrath in Die Walküre. I know these trains now, their varied speeds and decibels depending on the number of cars trailing the locomotive. If I’m awake I count freight cars instead of sheep, adding up the metronomic ticks of the wheels as they cross a switch.
When I was growing up on the right side of the tracks, I never imagined I would one day live right beside them on another continent. But I do remember a crossing near Berryville, Virginia where the Baltimore & Ohio, (or was it the Chesapeake & Ohio?) snailed by on its way to the rest of the vast country out there. It took 15 minutes and more than 100 freight cars to pass before the barrier was raised (I counted them then, too).
That may be why this little girl wanted a toy train for Christmas. I got one, nothing fancy, just a circular track, a locomotive and a couple of freight cars. I loved its simplicity, the kinetic pleasure of its motorization. Most of my friends were into horses. I was into mechanisms of the vehicular kind, those that could move me from one place to another in an interesting way, or better, take me somewhere. A horse could also fit that bill, but I was rarely allowed to race my pony through the countryside, hair blowing in the wind. I would really do this only years later in Monument Valley when a kindly Navajo let me canter through an arroyo seco without supervision, just like John Wayne in a John Ford Western.
I have a full-scale model train now, right at the front door. It’s nothing to look at, nothing you’d want to open up on Christmas morning, just a deadpan locomotive, a chain of grey tank cars and the occasional thread of flatbeds hauling VW Tiguans in an array of colors to places east of here. I get wanderlust every time I hear it go by.
Those trains have traveled well along the synapses in my brain, their siren songs now identifiable as I play name-that-train with my eyes closed. The Südostbayernbahn is especially witty, with its second locomotive as coda, the extra oomph of base tones filling the air as it mysteriously adds push to pull.