There's a certain odd kind of person that's in love with trains, all the melancholy hobo romance of it.

1 November 2011

One Man's Love of Railway Lore

Calgary Alberta - For 15 years or so I lived and worked in various places, all within a block or so of the trains that pass through Inglewood on their way from far-flung places, full of mysterious cargo, to other far-flung places.
 
There's a certain odd kind of person that's in love with trains, all the melancholy hobo romance of it, who dreams of hopping in a boxcar some night and riding away, who likes to put Hank Williams on the jukebox at the Blackfoot truck stop, singing "I love you babyyyy, but you gotta understand, when the Lord made me, He made a ramblin' man."
 
I'm one of those people, couldn't tell you why, and so I loved to live as close to the tracks as I could, even though the screeching and banging goes all night and all day, too.
 
I could hold my hand against the wall of my house and feel the diesel thrum, and now when I think of my youth there are trains rumbling accompaniment to almost every memory.
 
I'll admit I never did get around to riding the rails off into the sunset like I imagined, somehow it was good enough to just think about it.
 
The best my gang ever did, in terms of hopping trains, was jumping the slow-moving ones to get home across the tracks from the Shamrock after a bout of shuffleboard and rye.
 
You leap onto a passing ladder and then clamber across to the other side to jump off on the other side, pretty much freaking out the whole time, because the rails are haunted by severed limbs looking for their owners, and the CPR police were lurking.
 
One such night we made it home and realized we were short one buddy. We couldn't figure out where he'd gone until the next morning, when he called from Banff, where he'd ended up, unable to get off what he'd gotten on, as the train picked up speed.
 
Truth be told, I was jealous of the adventure.
 
There used to be strange forgotten pockets of empty wilderness throughout the neighbourhood, neither park nor property, Potter's Fields.
 
It felt like you could build a lean-to and a fire and live awhile, if you had to, among the ghosts of old rail-riders and vagabonds.
 
Somehow that was comforting.
 
Now most of that is gone to new construction and surveillance cameras, but still there remain some scraps of the land that was there before they built the railway, or so I like to think.
 
The cowboys and Hutterites that came to buy cattle at the MacLean auction are gone, but there are still a few ancient trainmen living out the last of their days reading Louis L'Amour novels and eating out of cans in apartments not-yet made into lofts for the new generation of Inglewooders, website designers, and so on.
 
There was one such fellow that lived on the other side of a wall from me, and I could hear him at night through the ducts intoning aloud:  tick... tock... tick... tock.
 
I worked for some time in an old warehouse by the tracks, made of tin and horsehair and beams from giant trees, the likes of which you won't find today.
 
After work, I could head back to my house by following the tracks, smelling the old creosote, and trying to match my stride to the rhythm of ties and gravel, never really got the hang of it, and I'd pause under the bridge to listen to the dragons above, roaring and sending swirls of ice-fog in their wake.
 
I haven't lived next to the trains for some years now, but whenever I come across train tracks, I can't help but trudge down them awhile.
 
But now, instead of feeling like they lead away into some distant and different world, I feel like I'm on my way home.
 
Judd Palmer.