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For the past 25 years, transportation technology has been buzzing past me in synchronized patterns over my head in jet streams, below my feet in underground tunnels, and on the ground in HOV lanes around traffic jams. The pace came to reflect my multi-dimensional baby boomer life, always racing toward a goal on a list of levels, but never stopping all of the paces at once.
The freight train crossing at Paces Ferry Road cuts through my modern life like a scene in a Robert Altman movie, stopping time rather than traffic. The flashing red lights and descending crossbars divide Vinings into two temporary worlds, at a standstill until the train has completed its passage. Time management is reserved for the future on the other side, held back behind this relic of a bygone era, linking the vision before me to memories and their lessons.
I grew up in southern Illinois in the 1950s and 60s on the east-west path of the Louisville-Nashville (L&N) freight train line across the midwest. Each afternoon we were stopped for ten minutes by the train as we came home from school. I remember boxcars painted “L&N”, “B&O”, “Illinois Central”, and “C&EI” as I counted down to the caboose. Mostly I remember the patience of waiting for long trains to pass, time to dream and imagine.
The L&N Café sat right next to the track where the train crossed Broadway. My father worked at the Post Office across the street. The café was never very popular, but it endured. I wish my father had taken me there to hear stories of the railroad life. His father, my grandfather, worked for the railroad until his death in 1939 when my father was only 11 years old. I wish I had asked him if grandpa ever talked about the railroad. I think he might have told me if just the two of us had ever gone to the L&N Café.
The image of the train instilled a feeling of adventure and excitement. Just a few steps away from the protection of the wooden crossbars was a world of steel and iron zooming by at daredevil speeds. In this last decade before interstate highways, travel by automobile was hampered by stop lights at each small town along narrow two-lane state highways. Only trains could pass through towns unrestrained, stopping our small worlds for a few moments as they aimed straight ahead to larger towns and larger financial worlds than we could imagine.
As I entered teenage years, my transistor AM radio played popular train tragedy songs, such as “Teen Angel” and “Last Kiss”, about teenage lovers killed in stalled cars on the railroad tracks. Walter Kronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley brought stories of train wrecks and injured pedestrians from around the world to my small-town living room. But it was a folk-hero television program, “The Fugitive”, that mixed the adventure, danger, and romance of the railroad. Whether we sat motionless by the railroad tracks watching boxcars zoom by, or sat motionless in front of the black-and-white TV set watching David Janssen hop trains hobo-style, the presence of the railroad aroused a combination of excitement and fear of the unknown in all of us.
As I fast-forward to present tense, the red lights cease flashing and the wooden bars are lifting at the Vinings crossing. Drivers of cars around me are oblivious to the passing train as they dial up on their cell phones. Just a few blocks away is a ten-lane beltway intersecting with a ten-lane traffic artery designed to move automobiles at a railroad pace through neighborhoods and towns. The transportation pattern overhead moves freely as jumbo jets complete final approaches to Atlanta airport runways. From my temporary standstill adjacent to all of this unrestraint, I am able to recapture the patience that came from waiting and watching. A patience that now seems like maturity tooting its whistle as it moves through a high-tech society working through its own adolescence.
Clip Art courtesy of www.rrhistorical.com
Article originally published in Vinings Gazette 23 Aug 1999
