A romance with trains I can hear the train from my computer room. Two long whistles, one short, and one long as it's entering and leaving town. Plus the chugga-chugga as it speeds along the tracks. I've always lived near a railway. In my childhood home I could hear it at night while I was falling asleep. It's a familiar sound, it makes me happy when I notice it here. A friend recently asked me if I'd ever wanted to hop aboard a freight train, like the hobos in movies. Until that moment I don't think it had occured to me but I did think about it for a while that day. At first I was thinking about how romantic it would be to be carefree, riding wherever the train was going. Then I started thinking about how you'd manage to get home, and then about what you'd do if you didn't have a home, and my romantic imaginings went downhill from there. Still, there is something about trains that captures the imagination, isn't there? Travelling from one place to another, far away, destination. Passing through towns and farms and wilderness on it's way. More so than cars or trucks. I especially like the railways that wind through the Rocky Mountains. That in and of itself is romantic. Built at the turn of the century, through beautiful and often dangerous terrain. At the time, they were doing the impossible, taming the Rockies for passenger and cargo transport at a large scale. Now we might look back and see it as the beginning of the end for the pristine wilderness of the mountains, but then it was a brave and noble thing to connect the two coasts of the country. Imagine living in a country the size of Canada back when it was still "Nature against Man" rather than "Man against Nature". What a wonderful thing it must have been to finally bring the two ends together and exert a little dominance over the wild lands. Now some say that we've gone overboard in our domination over nature, and I'd be the first to agree with them. But I can still imagine the triumph those long ago pioneers must have felt. |