The Sky, the Rails, and All of Our Stories

I begin writing this blog from the yawning halls of DFW airport, the start point on my journey to Roanoke, Virginia to cover another round of the 611’s excursions. It is one of those days where the trials of travel compound in every way they can: I have difficulty checking in curbside and must solicit the assistance of a live customer service representative--quite the endangered species these days--then I endure a TSA line roughly the same length as Terminal C. By the time I find my gate, I only have about twenty minutes before boarding begins.

Stress and delays have become a standard part of air travel, but I still get a defiant thrill out of flight itself. What else compares to the roar of the plane’s engines as it  bites into the tarmac, being pressed into the seat by the force of takeoff, looking out the window and seeing that we are on the ground one moment and then, the next, far above? It all feels so pleasantly impossible. I whittle away the flight time by looking out the window, trying to imagine the sight of the entire, curving horizon, or the feel of pitching and rolling like the more acrobatic birds.  Those fantasies make flight feel, for lack of a better word, like magic.

Travel by train impresses to the same degree, but for different reasons. When you feel every joint in the rail drumming beneath you, feel the cars rock and at switch points leading to other paths and other journeys, and hear the grace notes of crossing bells bleating out their warning, what sticks in the mind is just how much it takes to keep a railroad together. The amount of materials required is staggering in quantity, the equipment and significant points are spread through hundreds of miles of territory and yet are all numbered and accounted for. The magic here is not that any rules of physics were flouted, but that tremendous numbers of people have set aside their fractious nature and have built something that has endured for a century and a half.

Actually, to say that it has endured without offering  a qualifier would be somewhat inaccurate. The last fifty years have seen the  American railroad network shrink significantly, especially where passenger rail is concerned. Many of railroading’s iconic trappings have disappeared during that same span of time.   Mainline power is improved in efficiency but feels sterilized, aloof, compared to what came before, when steam and cab unit ‘excursions’ were not notable at all but were instead happy interruptions to the rhythm of daily life.  Cabooses left the world about the same time I entered it. Railroad companies became stringent about security long before I ever picked up a camera. The unofficial heart of town is no longer the train station, where once news from the world beyond the line of sight first was first to arrive and goods and loved ones came and went.

Thinking of all these things and finding their remnants in places like Roanoke put weight behind a longstanding fear that I may  have been born too late to observe railroading at its best, and that nothing in its future will be,  at least from the perspective of one who calls the observation of railroads an avocation,  as enjoyable as anything that came before. Even as rhapsodic as excursions tend to be, they breathe no life into the ruins of abandoned railroad structures decaying near the tracks. They are separated from the experience of actually being in the golden age of passenger rail by the same degree of difference between flying in a plane and actually having wings. 

The allure of a steam locomotive is transcendental, though, and one does not have to have memories of a parent coming home slicked in grease and coal dust or a far-off whistle keening a lullaby in order to enjoy the experience. At every excursion I've covered, I've observed the crowds--and often the crew and restoration team, come to think of it--are composed about evenly of older and younger individuals. Both groups approach the experience and the equipment with the same reverence, speak of it in the same deeply sentimental tones. It runs counter to logic: Those who have fewer memories of a certain thing, it would stand to reason, wouldn't value it as much as those who do. Parsing out what people my age get out of the experience is as difficult as describing exactly what a low and hollow whistle makes you feel, but I think many of us are drawn in by the escapism, the chance to get a glimpse of something far outside our normal comprehension. We approach these excursions and restorations and even long-distance train travel as we did the pop-culture landmarks in our upbringing, like the Harry Potter books and movies.  The power that they hold over us is giving us a glimpse into a different world, reminiscent of our own, but different--maybe even slightly better. They give us a chance to imagine our own place in that world, and tell ourselves that there, the struggles we face will always pay off.

Railroads and steam locomotives in particular remain a good canvass for us to project our stories, be they hopeful or sorrowful, and through this week's excursions there will no doubt me many of them articulated and relived in thought.  For some, the stories will be of going home. For others, like me, they will be of a journey elsewhere, beyond the ordinary, a happy break in ordinary life.