trains

I never quite made it deep into the world of railfans.  See wouldn't the term train nuts be more fun and descriptive?  I certainly thought so, but when I mentioned that to actual train nuts they didn't think so. 

I grew up a couple blocks from a trainyard (as one of the dawgs said, who doesn't in Chicago?), but we neighborhood kids took them for granted, and I rode the train between Chicago and Champaign a lot, but I have no memory of what the twelfth street station looked like.  Between downtown Urbana and my apartment there was a lonely little track between two railyards where sometimes a long line of boxcars rumbled by.  I liked to edge up to as close as was safe and let the cars caress my eyes, the ka thunk, ka thunk, caress my ears.  I liked the little peeks between the cars that showed the world on the other side, as close as a few steps away, but for the moment it might as well be a thousand miles away.

The first time you take the watercolor class that I have been taking for just under thirty years, you do things like plaids and color wheels and mixing colors and not until the end do you get to paint anything as exciting as an apple.  But when you return after that first term you can paint anything you want.  Well that was great, but what did I want to paint?  Um, maybe trains, they're kind of colorful and there's all those pieces, the locomotive the box cars and tank cars and cabooses and all different colors and they always seem to have a nice background.  Yes let's do trains. 

I bought a book, i ended up buying a pile of books, I subscribed to the magazine Trains for maybe five years.  There was a guy in the class who was a bona fide railfan, he knew the names of all the engines and how to tell them apart and where all the trainyards in the city are.

The trainyards are private property and officially tresspassing is verboten, but in practice it's just too damn hard to keep people out, and those railfans are pretty harmless, all they want to do is take a mess of photos.  The engineers are pretty tolerant, because who doesn't like to be thought of as a hero for backing old number nine unto some backtrack.  They would talk to us and once they even let us into the cab, but had us leave as soon as they had to move old number nine.

But after awhile, a few years, they all began to look alike, all the names sounded alike, I had taken photos from every angle possible, and  tht ka thunk, ka thunk, the rhythm of the rails, was getting monotonous.  I guess if I was a true railfan this would just have opened me into a wider world of minutiae, but I wasn't.  I started painting cats.

I thought I would say a few words about trains and then get on to Ayn Rand, but I guess she will have to wait till tomorrow, and I'm kind of waiting to hear what Old Dog has to say.  He doesn't seem like much of a Randian, but her song was strong in our youth.