She Likes Trains: Steel Tangled Steel tangled might refer to all the branch lines of all the railroads ever conceived of, built, torn up, re-laid, and now in existence. Steel tangled, rails, trains, and people; all our lives caught up by rails, by food, stories, and this week is no exception. It is a light week but eventful nonetheless and perhaps a little enlightening for this middle aged adolescent star struck love sick railfan. A new restaurant, an especially fragrant train, squeaky brakes, a guy trying to keep me from going down the stairs, my acquisition of a Union pacific Systems operations guide, lovely trains and great southern California weather, just another week outside, enjoying the Fullerton train station�s offerings to a life that has become in middle age quite routine. But it�s all so different. The biggest thing I learn this week isn�t about trains; it�s about me. I don�t discover this revelation till Saturday morning early when I�m finishing laundry. On the day the world is supposed to end, it is quiet. The last person has taken their clothes from the dryer, the air is gently crisp, no dishes clatter in kitchens that line the concrete walkway with poor drainage. My Stockinger feet swirl through water gathered in the dips of the concrete path between the apartments, separated by a planter, curving through rock walls and ending in a pile of bushes whose names I hardly know, normal southern California plants I suppose, small pointed narrow leaves, brown from lack of watering or late spring, greeting the morning with their presence. On the right is the step up to the beginning of the stairs leading to my front door, and it is here, four days after my latest trip to the train station in Fullerton that I realize what the theme is for the last two weeks. It�s not an engineer, though bobby tells me a bunch of girls together at a father daughter dance constitutes drama. It�s not trying to learn the stories of those who run the trains or those who frequent the platform. The story, it seems, is about me. It is here as I climb the stairs and prepare to put away my laundry at 3:00 in the morning that I discover that this week it�s all about being outdoors. Outdoors? Haven�t� I been outdoors for two years, sitting on the benches, perching on my wall, standing by the tracks rapped in mauve or blue or green, holding red pokadotted umbrellas, being reprimanded by engineers for standing in the rain, wearing red knit hats? Yes, but now I realize as I come inside to the quiet, my room mate�s computer not babbling in the distance, that this is the theme. My life has changed so much! I am the one who used to come home from work or school or some other event and plop down in front of my computer whether rain or shine and spend hours typing, researching, reading. Don�t get me wrong I love reading. I�ve gone through a couple of books today and elminated them from my list since they were so boring. I�m about to renew my subscription to Bookshare, the electronic library for blind readers. I love researching. Talking to anyone who does what I�m interested in brings me waves of sweet anguish and delight. I�m typing now but there is a difference now. Now I research the things I enjoy: trains. I search for the primary source material, engineers. I call the museum and get the specs on locomotive 98, I write what I want, and most of all, I�m outside. I�m outside enjoying our southern California weather, even if it is a bit chilly this week. I am, as I used to tell Glenn, just watching the show. And believe me, people, in the words of Walt Disney, are the show. You don�t have to pay to see that show; it�s all around you. I watch my room mate sitting in his room for hours on end in front of the computer, perhaps much like some in front of a television, and I think: I used to do that! How can you enjoy our beautiful weather if you are in front of the computer on the desk. I don�t notice that his window is ever open. I leave my bedroom window open to get air and to help dissipate the fragrance of cats and sand, but mainly to stay connected with the outside. It is this connection to the outdoors that trains have helped me reestablish. Years ago when I first discovered books my mother put them away and bought me a pair of roller skates. Go outside and play, she said. Now I�m glad she did. The establishment of the Internet, more books, a full time job, classes, meetings, all help keep me in doors. It is now, however, that I�ve discovered the railroad in all of its tainted glory and steel tangled applications that the two have combined themselves, keeping me outdoors to experience and indoors to write down all the memories. In this day and age we can compose outside, but it is inside where I do my best composing, and so now finally the two boundaries have established themselves. I prefer my early hours, I tell my room mate. I can get up, go to work, do my job, get out, and go do something else. Someday my job drives me crazy. This week and last it hasn�t done that. But when I get earlier shifts I can still go outside and enjoy my trains. I can have the best of both worlds it seems. Besides when I�m outside there�s lots of free entertainment. Bike bells, curt coming along telling us a guy last Friday that he pointed out to the police for stealing a bike is back. Curt is paranoid sometimes. He thinks people are looking at him, or after him. Everyone at the station has something going on. In fact it is this week that we see Steve, the guy who was supposed to have a surgery on his bad leg. He is quite inebriated, three sheets to the wind, as he gets off bus number 43, saying he got a little money and now he stays in his motel. Sure, Curt tells me as I go to call a taxi after missing a bus by a minute, he hangs out in the motels and drinks. What happened to the surgery? I don�t� know. We know what happened to someone�s money. I miss a bus because I stop to give someone quarters to use the pay phone. That trip costs me $20.00. Oh well. At least I had the $20.00 to pay for the cab. On that particular night, Monday, I didn�t feel like waiting an hour and a half for the next connection. I had to be up early for work so I could do it all again. I take a cab home twice this week, both Sunday and Monday. Sunday is an unplanned trip to the station for me. It is a good trip. Somehow I end up calling out of work that day and claiming sick pay. I�m not sick, I just don�t want to go to work so I call out personal. I get points but oh well. Better points than insanity. Besides last weekend has been especially socially active, an NFB meeting, a trip to my storage unit to grab some items and take some back to the unit, a surprise party for Linda, my father�s wife. By the time I get home that night am ready for another day off. Yes my weekend is over, but I decide it�s not so it is on Sunday that I end up at the Fullerton station this week. �I talked to my engineer,� I tell Dave sitting down at the east end of the platform. Kathy who has two weeks left till retirement comes up wit Tom the schoolteacher holding bags of burgers and fries. There is a new restaurant in town, it seems, right where, it turns out, I�ve been on that same day. I go to Fullerton to get money and walk right past it on my way to Del Taco. Snuggled between Big Lots and the Del Taco, it is crowded with after church goers. The public address system rings with numbers and I wonder what is going on. It is here at the station that I find out it is the location of a new restaurant Five Guys Burgers and Fries. They have a very standard menu and Dave and I wonder later just how long it will be in business. There is a Burger King across the street, you can get burgers at Del Taco. Perhaps in a college town, with so many people being in so many places it will last a while. I notice that about two years after a famous chain Mexican restaurant showed up across the street from my favorite one, that my favorite one disappeared. It makes me wonder just how long this new burger placed will be here. In the same location where the new restaurant stands now there once was a flower shop. I don�t know. I will go and try the place, of course, the next time I�m in Fullerton, but we both wonder how long it will be there. I love hamburgers. I�m always in search for a good one. Tonight sitting on the wrought iron metal bench, not eating because I�ve finished my Del Taco dinner, enjoying tonight�s biting, chilly wind, I know I�ll go try it. I�m lucky now I live across the street from a Carls Junior. There is a Mexican restaurant I am going to try next week during ny five day vacation. I don�t live near a Smart an final, though there is one down a few streets, but I do live near a fairly good hamburger. Life, sometimes, is all about trade offs. I�ll take it. By the way, in usual critical Dave fashion, he doesn�t like the fries. I�ll take my French fries any way I can get them. �Well,� Dave now says in regard to me talking to the engineer. �At least that�s better than nothing.� Five minutes with Glenn is the best, even if I have trouble hearing him sometimes or he has trouble hearing me. �I think it�s easier to talk to him if he�s in the cab,� I tell Dave. This is ironic given the clatter of the engines. I explain that the conversation this time was fraught with peril due to the foibles of cell phone technology. �Are you on a speaker phone?� I ask Glenn on Friday may 13 when I talk to him, something I forgot to put in my essay. �No I�m not on a speaker phone,� he says. Ok well it�s just the break room, my phone, or whatever. You can read all about it in �Sweet Engineer Confusion.� I love talking to Glenn; every opportunity is gold. I have to have Dave decipher what Glenn says to me, though. The F7s, Dave tells me, were only about 1500 horse power. I told him that they would take the F7s off and put on the 5900s, according to Glenn�s nomenclature. It made sense to Dave the forty year train watching fan. The horsepower was similar between the F7s and the Alco 98. The 5900s produced by EMD were double that, at least, reducing the number of locomotives needed on one trip. When Glenn was running Amtrak trains that locomotive was about forty years old. Now it�s about seventy years old and still running. I don�t� know if it has the original parts but it�s still running. This week we see all kinds of cars, UPS, J.B. Hunt, Costco, auto wracks, trailors, freights come through slowly, some fast as lightning train style, as fast as one can go with a bad section of rail here. Everyone wonders how long it will be before the dip in the tracks is fixed here. We all wonder if someone will have to die before they fix it. �When one of the companies has to pay out a bunch of money for a lawsuit they will fix it,� Dave says. The bad section of rail doesn�t seem to stop the freights from flying through here at top speed, sometimes. Who is to say. One always hopes in the interest of train safety that they don�t wait that long. Some ask if the engineers know about it. I don�t� know the answer to that eater. I do know that on the text updates this week a lot of trains are delayed because of track maintenance. Sometimes it�s freight congestion that holds up the trains, sometimes it�s ill passengers, sometimes it�s track maintenance. We even have a few signal problems this week somewhere on the Antelope Valley and the San Bernardino lines. Glenn�s train, the afternoon one to Los Angeles has its own troubles but for the most part all is quiet. No one is hit on the tracks this week. That was two weeks ago. Another train hits a car parked on the tracks between Santa Ana and Tustin, the same place where Bobby and Cary�s trains have encountered fatalities this year. I don�t� know who the engineer on 684 is but I bet I�ll meet him some day. This week I�ve tried to meet once again the engineer on 708 but no luck. Maybe I�ll try next week. I have early shifts Monday through Thursday and then if my schedule cooperates I get five days off. Meeting the 708 engineer has always proved a little difficult because of my schedule, but someday I�ll do that again. Bobby has been plagued with MPIs until Monday. On a Friday he takes off work to go with his daughter to a father daughter dance. A bunch of girls together is a source of drama he says, his lovely EMD now idling, making me happy. I believe him. I nod vigorously eliciting gails of laughter fromn Glenn�s replacement. Glenn doesn�t know how to respond to me, but Bobby just laughs, usually a safe response. We both understand drama. He tells me that he�ll have this engine on Wednesday and friday and that they switch equipment with Cary�s train, 606. You see, if I give my engineers time they give me what I want. I just have to be a patient adolescent railfan. Time is generally good to me. An so are my engineers. �Ok another idiot hit on the tracks today� I text Glenn when the fatality happens on train 684. �Now I think I know why you get p----d off.� Well, for here and for now, there are no fatalities. There are squeaky brakes, a fragrant train leading to a discussion of when trains get serviced. This crew says let them do it, another crew says the exact same thing. It got trains in trouble at one time people leaving locomotives to be serviced in the next servicing point. They would be stranded out on the tracks. �Poor engineer� says one train fan this week in regard to the servicing misadventures. Well, points out Dave, 4 was late from L.A. due to having to switch equipment. Indeed 4 is late a few times this week but surprisingly enough, 785 is on time. Shirley still working on 785 has a problem with an accidental spill onto the table from my leaking cup. She snaps about it; we clean up the mess and go on. I don�t talk to her lately, sometimes because I�m not there, and sometimes because she gets off her train in L.A. The station is a very human place. Who says they�ve taken the human part out of railroading? Not at Fullerton, it still is very much a part of the picture. Part of the picture this week is a very uninformed example of the human element. Monday coming over the bridge, a man puts his hand out to stop me from taking the stairs. I am a nice person. I had a man once say that ten years after he met me he would wish he had married me because of the nice things I do for people. I am nice until my personal space is invaded. There was no danger. I turned and shoved him away from me. �If you f--- fall it�s not my fault,� he says. �I�ve been climbing these stairs for two years. Have you?� He slinks back into the shadow of the elevator that four people have asked me if I want today. It�s a very good thing there is a steel cage from the bridge railing to the metal top, it is a steel cage that surrounds the bridge so that no one will fall onto the tracks. I can imagine that a lost item in the path of a heavily weighted multi tonned freight train would create some tork you wouldn�t want to experience, something like a tornado driving a straw through a telephone pole. The engineers of the bridge were smart in designing the bridge in such a manner. The man is lucky that steel cage is there. That�s all I can or want to say about it. Sometimes the nerve of people is amazing. Don�t defend him, he was uninvited and unwelcome. In my middle age I have no qualms about expressing my dislike in such situations. It makes me angry even writing about the incident. Luckily that doesn�t happen often. Most people have given up asking me if I�m taking the stairs. If they can�t tell I�m taking stairs they need a mental check, not a vision check. Anyone who watches anyone else take the stairs and then asks if that�s their intension needs a mental examination, not a vision test. This man obviously needed a mental examination and a refresher course in personal space issues and social etiquette. Yes, there is a risk in going outside to experience things. You find the show, the people, and experience them in all their splendor. Most of the time the experience is a good one but once in a while there is one to remember. I hope he never forgets. Two train fans walk toward each other on the north side of the tracks, one who has watched trains for forty years and one who knows an engineer who has run trains forty years. It seems we have been in search of each other and now are finally meeting. Dave seeks me out after I go to the caf� and order a cheeseburger and then head down to the east end. He sits closer to the caf� and is in search of me it seems. We are both in search of each other. He has told me on Sunday that he has a Union pacific systems operations guide for me. He now hands me the three inch bound soft cover manual with three holes punched for storage in a notebook. He dog ears the pages with the signal charts. This is my first printed operations guide, another primary source. I guess the academic is still alive in me. The manual has train consists, signal charts, information about rest and meal periods. It is a source of information I have craved. If I am patient in my railroad journey I always find what I want. I found the engineer didn�t I? Well, Janice helped me find him, he just opened his mouth and poored forth his golden knowledge. In a week I am going to take a class from the museum on how to run a train. I don�t want to run the train, I just want to know how to run it. Now I take my book and continue my journey, sitting down on the wall where the railfans are gathered. There isn�t much that happens, no real drama, just the gentle passage of time on a balmy evening, a departure from the chill that has permeated our nights. The rest of the week I will not return to the station. Tuesday we have a rainstorm and I am so tired from all my nocturnal prowlings that I go home from work and call it a night. Wednesday and Thursday and Friday I work over time, and Saturday I get caught up on household chores and hang out with kitties. Next week and the following as I enjoy my five day vacation I�ll go back to the station, maybe take a train ride or two and get even more steel tangled. Steel tangled might refer to all the branch lines of all the railroads ever conceived of, built, torn up, re-laid, and now in existence. Steel tangled, rails, trains, and people; all our lives caught up by rails, by food, stories, and this week is no exception. It is a light week but eventful nonetheless and perhaps a little enlightening for this middle aged adolescent star struck love sick railfan.
Copyright © 2011 Shelley J Alongi |