The House Beside the Railroad Tracks

The blistering summer heat has been late coming to North Texas this year, but when it does finally arrive, it seems to feel a need to make up for lost time. The highest temperatures this August approach one hundred and ten degrees. This time of year, it’s too hot for train watching to be a pleasurable pursuit, especially if the object of the chase is the kind of locomotive that cultures fire in its belly.

Several weeks of sequestration in my air-conditioned home has not cut me off from contact with the railroads. My house is a stone’s throw from the Union Pacific’s Choctaw Sub, and the freight trains soldier on in defiance of the sweltering ambient temperatures. When traffic is at its peak, a train comes rumbling by every 15 minutes.

I’ve lived here, where seeing a train requires no more effort than looking out my back window and the horns and crossing bells so punctuate daily tasks as to have become mundane, for most of three years now.  I spent the better part of my childhood living  in a house a few miles to the south, about a quarter mile away from a place where this same sub crossed over what was at the time the Santa Fe mainline.   The Katy transferred ownership of “our” tracks to the Union Pacific around the time I took my first steps, and a few years later the Santa Fe sub changed to Kansas City Southern ownership. It was during this time of transition, as the Katy green dulled to the autumnal Union Pacific livery and as Bluebonnet became a strictly horticultural colloquialism, that I began my vigil beside the tracks.

With two busy railroads in such close proximity, we had no shortage of places to camp out and watch passing trains. The Union Pacific crews often tied up on a siding adjacent to a nearby brick factory — some of them were friendly enough to initiate conversation or give us equipment tours on the sly — and a scrapyard that used humming magnetic cranes pick up rusted clusters of metal waste and drop them into waiting gondolas. They always seemed particularly busy on Saturday mornings, when the neighborhood children migrated to the park across the street. I wracked up a sufficient number of hours in these spots to absorb an education from the passing trains. 

The most superficial lessons were those that encouraged observation, in keying in to patterns of traffic and mechanical details. I developed a keen ear to distinguish a string of locomotives growling out of Fort Worth from large diesel trucks idling nearby, and learned to tell whether an approaching train was composed of fully loaded ballast train from mixed freight just by how much they rumbled the ground. Railroads are part of an environment, and one can learn to read their secrets with the same finesse as clouds or plants.

The trains rolling by the house also provided more subtle topics of instruction, lessons that addressed much broader concepts than the physical nature of the railroads. Every passing train lectured that the world must indeed be vast if their cargo was so varied and required in such high quantities. Each signal that blinked on and off proclaimed that if a system as broad as the American railroads could be maintained in near-unerring order, the small disasters in one’s personal life didn’t have to be as damning as they appeared. Most of all, though, the railroads promised an isolated young girl that despite all appearances to the contrary, her world did not begin and end at her doorstep.

I can’t recall having moment where consciously decided to stake my fate between the ties and work in the railroad industry in one capacity or another. It felt only natural, the only logical form into which my life could evolve, and the timing of my transition from onlooker to participant took on a deeper meaning. I began to embrace my interest in the railroads and to make it a part of my identity around the same time that I began to accept that it was not wrong to enjoy or influence the world around me I listened to my own voice and heard to it echo, and then gave myself permission to exist in the first place

Sometimes, then and now, unexpected visitors traverse the rails. The number of freight trains has decreased during these blistering mid-summer months, and maintenence-of-way equipment has claimed dominion over the tracks in their absence. They are like iron spiders that skim over the rails and the ties, compelling because figuring out their exact role in keeping the web of tracks woven together requires a bit of imagination. This year’s convoy leaves the top of the trackbed slightly gouged where ties have been replaced and frosted with a newer, paler layer of ballast.

The rail-grinder is the last member of this procession, passing through some time after the rest of the machines. It makes a fiery show of carving the rails into a renewed profile and then, when the trains begin to come again, the touch of each wheel excites the steel into a sympathetic resonance. Every freight car flies by with the sound of a sword pulled from its scabbard, and the rails make low, a doleful moan that will suddenly jerk up or down in pitch if the train’s speed changes.

This is an otherworldly sound, one of those noises that seems to grab you by your core and makes your whole body stop and listen. The railroads are good at producing these: I’d reckon the sound of fresh-cut tracks to be only a few degrees less potent than a throaty steam whistle. It begins to dull after the first few dozen trains, and becomes quiet enough that a person would miss it completely without having spent years working or living in the presence of the railroads to know that it was still there to hear in the first place.

I’m well aware, of course, that I’m looking at all of this from the perspective of a person who has become inoculated against the railroad’s noise and delays after years of living by and working upon them. My acclimation is unusual: For the average person, that trains serve any function beyond blocking the road they intend to travel is an unproven theory.  There’s no evangelizing to these people, except to get them to begrudgingly admit that were the trains to fall still, the lights in the contemporary United States would quickly darken.

The most philosophical way of commenting on the railroads’ so-broad-as-to-be-easily-overlooked function is to state that while trains do operate in our world, they do not seem fully a part of it.  From an observer’s perspective, a train passes and then is gone; for anyone riding on the train, our hometown begins and ends in the blink of an eye. The trains rarely halt long enough to become a part of their surroundings, and they cannot divorce themselves from the tracks without inviting devastating consequences.

I haven’t handed my neighbors any surveys or tried to get a count of how many of them enjoy living in houses that back up to the tracks. I can only speculate how many of them would pick up and move if all financial and circumstantial barriers were removed, or how many of them  feel that their life is enriched when a passing train makes the pictures on their walls tremble. Most would probably fall somewhere in between these two extremes:  Their passion have taken root elsewhere, in different hobbies, and for them, the railroads are something to be endured.

I can’t help but think that many of us who make railroads a hobby or a career sense the way that trains seem  to operate in our world yet still not be a part of them, and draw an unconscious a parallel to aspects of our own lives that feel out of place or disconsolate.  A faraway whistle, echoing off of hilltops or industrial buildings near the tracks, can make us realize that there’s a physical part of the soul that can be made to ache. We might compare a train’s inability to move laterally to our own inability to alter adverse circumstances except to flee them. I’d wager that there is a not-insubstantial portion of us train fans who are lonesome at are core, malnourished of meaningful friendships, and we’ve spent our entire lives feeling that we are in the same present-yet-aloof place where the trains operate.

For all their might and metal, the railroads can be surprisingly human things.