A RAINY DAY RIDE

A rainy Louisiana day seems to be the ideal time to write about trips most of us can't take because we can't be exposed to people who may have the dreaded coronavirus. However, I pulled out a small stack of old Ford Times (a now-defunct publication) I'd ordered a few months ago and engaged in a pretend trip via "A Slow Train in Tennessee" that made a round trip to Harriman, Tennessee on the Tennessee Central Railway, circa 1956.


The trip was a full-day, round trip train ride that began on First Avenue in Nashville, Tennessee, cost the traveler $6, chugged through the Cumberland Plateau, slowly, ever so slowly, and stopped only for food since the train had no diner. The painting* that accompanied the Ford Times article reminded me of a train ride I once made from Ahwaz, Iran, in the southern desert province of Khuzestan to Tehran, Iran. I spent an entire night looking down at deep valleys and wondering if I'd come to a plunging end on the narrow track that snaked through the Elburz Mountains.


I enjoyed the Ford Times issue that included an article about the Tennessee Central Railway and a sudden stop a TC train made in Baxter, Tennessee back in the mid-1950s. As it chugged into the station at Baxter, an aged Model T pulled up to the station on three screeching tires, and an old-timer climbed out, explaining that he'd had a puncture of a tire that he'd "only used five years," and three tires would do for a while. He ran over to the train and handed a smoked ham to the conductor, who promptly handed the breathless old-timer a sack of plug tobacco in exchange. The train pulled out, resumed its slow speed, and chugged down the mountain on the Cumberland Plateau. I assume the old-timer made his three-tire journey home, probably grumbling about the puncture of a five year old tire but enjoying a good "chaw" along the way.


Although this article refers to the Tennessee Central, I thought about another slow ride I'd made from Atlanta, Georgia to Lynchburg, Virginia on a train that inspired the question, "Have you ever 'rid' the old Southern?" That ride included a group of young adults from Emory University in Atlanta who sang oldies like "Dinah won't you blow" ALL night to entertain my restless daughter who traveled with me.


A slow train ride during a gentle rain would be a prized experience for me right now, and I'm wondering if the old Southern is still operating? Probably not. The latter incident took place when Stephanie, my oldest daughter, was three years old. She's now sixty.


*Painting by Corydon Bell in Ford Times, April 1956

THOSE TRAINS AGAIN…

Train cars on winter day, New Iberia, LA

After writing 495 blogs, it’s hard to discern whether I repeat myself, but when I have a passion for a certain subject, I’m likely to cover the same tracks again – writings about trains, for instance. However, I usually present a different destination for that subject, often in a poem that better captures the essence of this mode of transportation.

At Christmas, I brought my only electric train out of the hall closet, a gear-driven, powerful Diesel locomotive, complete with light, HO scale freight cars, and a 36” circle of track-- the locomotive is a model advertising my favorite railway, the Santa Fe Railway. I brought the train out for Alex, my great-grandson, to watch. However, it was soon apparent that a nearly-two-year old boy couldn’t just watch this model run on the track that my son-in-law Brad (AKA "Pop") set up for us. Alex kept snatching the cars off as they went by, then he’d run to the controls and flip the switch back and forth when the train stopped moving. “He’s not ready for it,” Brad said, and I had to agree that I could either lose my 25 yr. old model of the Santa Fe or put it back in the closet. Needless to say, Alex returned again and again to the closet, looking for my keepsake. I had difficulty restraining myself from setting the train up again, mostly because I wanted to watch it run!

When I was younger, the sound of a freight whistle at midnight conjured up some overwhelmingly lonely feelings, but as I grew older, the rumbling of wheels and long whoos passing through the night began to incite different feelings, feelings of having a companion for my anxieties and nighttime worries – the sounds sorta’ made me feel like The One Whom None Can Hinder and I were on night watch. Long whistles from eastbound freights stimulated ideas, ideas that seemed to be great revelations, but once daylight came, I discarded them because they bordered on fantasies. But midnight trains brought me through some long night watches.

I wrote about my longest train ride in Iran in a former blog, but the account was sketchy. I didn’t relate that the Trans-Iranian Railway came into being in 1928, and at the time, the work of building a railway that ran from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian, was a difficult task because the workers met with great technical obstacles in the sector that crossed the Zagros and Elburz Mountains. This engineering feat was not completed until 1938. It was financed by the Iranian government from its monopolies on sugar and tea, and Richard Frye, the guru of Iranian studies, said that the story about the building of this railroad would “occupy a book in itself.” The train that I boarded in Ahwaz, Iran ran sleepily through 226 tunnels and crossed 5496 bridges before I reached Tehran, and in several writings, I described my terror at riding on the roof of the world at 7200 feet, looking down at valleys of bottomless darkness on either side of the narrow tracks. I was comforted only by the aroma of shislik drifting through the darkness of that Friday night and sighed with relief when we reached Qum at dawn.

Despite this terrifying experience, I’ve retained my fascination for trains, and one of my midnight fantasies is that of riding the famous Orient Express, the train that provides the setting for an Agatha Christie story. Meanwhile, I watch for Santa Fe Railway cars, talk with friends about lobbying for the return of railway transport instead of the eighteen-wheelers that are the bane of the highways, and write poetry about trains such as the one below:

THE SANTA FE IS
no covert traveler,
train boiling through high desert,
red, blue, yellow freight cars,
imperatives on landscapes
going everywhere.
In the pinpoint of my eye,
miniature boxes of color
fret empty plains,
make me aware of destinations,
distant mountains
welcoming bleached cloudbanks.
We pass small stations
snoring at track side
while bright-colored cars sway
on miles and miles of track
like ants relocating,
good times left behind,
mirages passed,
and a lonely figure waves
from the engine window,
face turned toward
an indifferent there…
                                                            going on forever.

“The Santa Fe Is” appears in my book of poetry, Just Passing Through, published in 2007. The cover is derived from a painting by my brother Paul Marquart.