Keeping Track

“By the looks of the loads on the trains, housing starts are up,” my father said to me. “There’s more lumber. That’s a good sign.”

That was last month. Today the report came out from the Commerce Department: Housing starts were up in June 6.9% over May. They were at the highest number since October 2008.

No, my father is not a psychic. He’s a railroad man. He’s retired now, but he spent 38 years working in the freight rail industry. Now, he and my mother live in a house that’s only three lots down from a train track. When they looked at the house, he was afraid the trains would drive him crazy. Six months later, they often don’t notice the sound (and I can personally attest that the ones that come through in the 4am hour sound like they are tunneling into the living room).

Those tracks carry commuter trains too. They come lighter, less thunderous. But when a freight train comes through, my dad can tell what’s on it just by the vibration of the ground, the sound of the rails under the weight.

“Intermodal,” he’ll say.

All those years in the rail yards have taught him a lot about what comes through when the economy’s good, and what drops off when it’s not. I’d guess that for at least 30 of those 38 years, Dad could predict a mild uptick in construction before the construction industry could. He knew when the automotive industry was falling off – not just from deliveries of cars but from parts and tires. He knew when the weather had been bad somewhere along the line because shipments would slow down or back up. When Katrina hit in 2005, he wound up in a helicopter surveying the 20+ miles of track his railroad had lost to flooding, and eyeing the train cars that had been lifted and moved by the water, sometimes finding high ground a mile or two from the track. When the economy went bad in 2008, the trains got a lot lighter.

The country could learn a lot from guys like my dad.

The railroad industry is one of the least appreciated in the country, I’d suspect. It’s taken for granted. Sometimes people barely seem to recognize trains are even there. Unless they’re griping, complaining about waiting at a crossing, complaining about an accident at a crossing as if it’s somehow the train’s fault, complaining about hazardous materials coming through their towns.

The truth is, when railroads stop, the American economy stops too.

If it weren’t for trains, there would be exponentially more heavy trucks on the highways, leading to more crashes, higher fuel costs for everyone and higher sales prices at Wal-Mart because it costs more to ship the goods over land. There would be shortages of food, dry goods, paper, cleaning solvents, coal for electricity, cattle… almost anything you can think of. And yes, lumber.

This country is criss-crossed with train tracks. The connection of east to west with that rail was one of the finest hours in American innovation, paid for with a lot of actual blood, sweat, tears and broken backs. I grew up listening to one side of phone calls about shipments from one yard to the next, hearing my dad get up and go to a derailment at any hour of the night, drawing on the backs of pages and pages of intermodal routing printouts. For my first 18 years, the railroad impacted me directly. For the next four, it helped pay for my college education. And as an adult, I’m lucky to be a little more aware than most about all the things railroads do.

And if I forget, the housing start statistics… and the distant sound of a horn… will remind me.

******

Now on my bookshelf:
The Sense of An Ending – Julian Barnes
The O’Briens – Peter Behrens

 

Time Travel

From my seat on a quiet car, declared by small paper printouts taped to the crossbars in the ceiling, I watch old cities go by. There is no hassle in this travel, no removing of shoes or early arrivals to ensure timely boarding. I’d gotten to the train station 30 minutes before my trip and had more than enough time for coffee and a muffin. I had watched a few people run to catch their rides, guessing this was their regular commute and smiling at the ease of arriving minutes before leaving.

Sleepy in my seat, I hand the conductor my ticket and watch him punch a simple hole with a simple instrument I probably still have in a drawer somewhere from 20 years ago. Such an old-fashioned, simple way to do the job. Train travel sends us back in time.

Outside my window, scenes roll by in quaintness that quickly slides into sadness, the images punctuated by the sudden passing of trains heading south within inches of my eyes. But when those trains clear, the scenes do not: dilapidated houses, crooked and perpetually on the brink of falling down. When had that begun? On what day had they settled into their lurch toward the ground? Were lives still lived inside them, or did their walls house only the memory of vitality? This is the fate of the homes along the tracks – once beloved, now abandoned to chance and decay.

This stretch of rail running through the Northeast never looks for signs of civilization. It merely reflects the signs of what once was, rolling through the past and making riders wonder how they once must have appeared. Could they ever have been shiny with promise?

A few minutes’ time, and another town gone. Aboard this train, I watch hundreds of years go by in minutes. Buildings stare back at me from their places in glory days, unused now, and blighted, signs of industry once lauded and now left to rot. The tracks are littered with the detritus of ages, with ties that may have been there for months or decades. I think of Ayn Rand, and a wan smile comes to my face. It is railroads that have put food on my family’s tables for a generation and more. Pulling through Philadelphia, I watch workers make repairs and wonder if I will see my uncle.

This is always the surreal part of the trip, riding parallel to I-95 and watching cars on a highway I often drive. I see familiar street signs and identify neighborhoods, recognizing easily the ramp I would take to go to my grandfather’s house. And then, with suddenness, I remember he is not there, my image of him in his chair changing to one of the chair sitting empty, the home’s occupants since 1945 both buried now in the cemetery of the church a mile away. The snap back to the present makes me feel less connected to the city, less from it now that there is less in it for me.

But then Philadelphia is gone, and Trenton comes. I look out at the bridge with its dormant sign that will glow red in tonight’s darkness: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES. Aged pride now turned to bravado. The giant words seem to try to convince rather than to declare.

My train passes empty platforms in Trenton, in Metro Park, in Newark. When it pulls to a stop at Penn Station in New York City, there is no crush of clustered riders waiting. There is only a picture in my mind of corseted women and suited men with bags and baby carriages, sepia-toned and charged with human electricity as they wait to embark on their journey.

By train, there is no sense of tomorrow. There is only yesterday.

Now on my bookshelf: The Magician’s Assistant – Ann Patchett