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From age 2 to 10, my dreams and the events of my life were punctuated with the passing of the last of New York Central steam, and then the earliest diesels, right past my back yard on the main line east of Rochester: bigger and more powerful and awesome than anything I could yet imagine, great Niagaras came down the line, smoking up as they accelerated out of the yards, pulling wooden cars with catwalks, sometimes with a brakeman walking on top; the silver clad Hudson flashing by in the afternoon at the head of the gleaming Empire State Express, so distinct from the dingy passinger trains that chugged on by every hour; an occasional glimpse in the night of that gray ghost, the Twentieth Century Limited, its signature logo illuminated at the very rear of the rounded observation car carrying sophisticates from one mythic place to another, its light diminishing into the silence, expanding my imagining of the world. These visions forever hooked me on trains. <br />Now I live behind a plate glass view just as close to the BNSF main line into the heart of Chicago, right by Halsted St. before the wye, the Metra and Amtrak yards and Union Station. At all times there are trains passing trains: dozens of Metra trains to or from Aurora, occasionally stopping out front for the little excuse of a station at Halsted; the long-distance western Amtrak trains just starting or ending their several days journey, often meeting right in front of me!; the City of New Orleans backing out of Union Station, stopping out front and pulling ahead on up over the St. Charles Airline to the IC along the lakefront; BNSF coal drags from Wyoming to some eastern power plants, their engines colored green, or warbonnet, or fresh orange; NS freights bound for the first BNSF yards to the west; UP container trains going in or out of the old CNW Wood St. yard to the west. Over the past 19 years that I've lived here I have seen locomotives in every livery of just about every imaginable railroad, even the Alaska Railroad! If trains were my whole life, I'd have already died and gone to heaven!
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