Simple pleasures remembered

I  miss and wish I could recreate in my life today the excitement I felt as a sixth grader at the sight or even the sound of a train. Come with me back almost 60 years, to Sulphur Springs, a town of 9,000 or so in northeast Texas that was lucky to be visited by the Dallas branches of both Kansas City Southern and Cotton Belt. I grew up there, and the best day of the week was Saturday. After lunch I’d bike to the KCS station, about half a mile from our house, to wait out the two freight trains certain to come if I would just stick around.

The KCS agent, R.S. Sheppeard, was a gruff old man, and I almost never had the courage to ask him the whereabouts of eastbound freight No. 53 or the westbound local. So I’d sit on the freight platform, out of sight of Mr. Sheppeard, and listen and think. Or I’d throw rocks at rails tops and count the times I hit the target. Or I’d balance myself on top of a rail of the house track and see how far I could walk. If it were particularly hot, I’d visit the ice plant next to the team track and ask permission to stand in the storage freezer (about a minute was all I could take, but what comfort that minute was).

Ultimately, my patience was always rewarded. At some moment in the afternoon I’d hear a whistle to the west, meaning 53 was at the other end of town, at the first of more than a dozen street crossings. After a minute or so, it would come into view, led by six red and yellow Electro-Motive F units, and slowly drag its 100 to 150 freight cars through town at 12 mph. Mr. Sheppeard would emerge from the brick depot, often with a train order delivery fork in hand. Maybe someone in the lead unit would recognize me, open the door and holler, “Hey Red!” my nickname among the KCS crews.

When the local whistled its approach to town, the tension was pretty high. Would the conductor be Claude Boose? He would let me sit in the bay window of the caboose as it was shunted back and forth during switching. Or I could really get lucky and be offered a ride in the brakeman’s seat of the GP-7 locomotive. That’s where at least one future teacher of mine in junior high school first noticed me.

At night I could hear Cotton Belt’s Blue Streak, from 10 miles away, thanks to unmuffled exhausts, jointed rails, and some acoustical quirk. The sound was a slowly building roar, punctuated by a whistle in the bottomland of White Oak Creek. After almost ten minutes of silence, I’d hear more whistling as the train came through town, almost a mile and a half away. To me, lying in bed, trying to go to sleep, the passage of the Blue Streak was like a symphony. I’d ache to go wherever that train was headed (Dallas, actually).

It’s been years—decades—since I sat for hours and waited out a train. Yes, I would grow restless, but the reward was quite enough to keep me in place. I guess there were so few trains to see, that each one mattered. Today I simply don’t have that level of patience. Where I live now no train can be heard, so no more lonesome whistles waft through the night air.

Those were great afternoons, among the happiest of my life. So little happened, and at the same time, so much took place. We can’t go back in real time, but I still replay the movie in my mind’s eye, and take pleasure at the memories of those trains and the railroaders who befriended me, just a kid. — Fred W. Frailey