Metrolink111: Not Quite Throwing The Switch Friday March 27 is a balmy night at the fullerton train station. Four weeks ago today I introduced Chris from work to the train station and tonight he has a friend who is visiting him from Maryland and he has decided to drive us down to the station and experience the trains with us. Three of us traipse into the Santa Fe Café after the somewhat raucous ride from work in Billy’s rented car and order three cheeseburgers. We squeeze our way to a table on the patio, I am locked into the corner where the two parts of the wrought iron fence meet, a plant of nondescript origin sitting there behind me. I make room for my red bag in the corner as a warm wind blows across the station, Francis, Chris’s dog sits at my feet, and the cheeseburger is yummy! Sitting at the table I wave to Bob and later to Curt, all the while eating, carrying on conversation with Billy and Chris and waiting for trains. The Amtrak with its blue and gray Diesel locomotive (it’s not blue and red or silver today) sits there, waiting, unlike the Metrolink trains which zoom in and out and hasten to their next stops. The Amtrak is distinctive to me because it can be noticed by the odor which emanates from one of its cars, probably because of the holding tanks for the waste. Metrolink comes in and out, and for a while people mill about the place, some trying to pet Chris’s dog and being gently warned by Billy that Francis is in harness please don’t pet him. “He’s working” says an older woman at a table near us. Older couples and various people sit at the tables, on the planters, on the benches, some perhaps waiting for train number 4, the southwest chief a train I will be taking to Chicago in June to connect to the Wolverine to Detroit when I arrive there on July 2. “The same train comes at 6:30 in the morning,” Jose tells me later, when he arrives to help his wife close up the café. “A bunch of guys sit there and watch it and then they leave.” It’s all a part of the mystique of the Fullerton train station, I suppose. Chris decides to go to the bridge and while he makes his way there, stopping at the tracks to join some other onlookers, Billy fusses with his camera, taking pictures of trains and Chris and trying to get it all right, experimenting with the flash, turning it on and off, adjusting the lenses, whatever he needs to do to strike a perfect balance. I’m not sure he quite achieves this but he sure gives it his best shot. Soon Billy goes to the bridge with Chris after taking another set of pictures and I stay on the patio. I find I don’t enjoy the trains from the bridge as much as I do the planter or the benches so I stay there and pull out my book on the Santa Fe railroad. I sit there twenty minutes, wave at curt who comes and tells me that there will be punk rock bands coming to the station on April 17. Yes, I know, I say, Jose tells me the same thing. “IT gets wild here on a Friday night,” Curt says. “I thought the city closed them down.” “I don’t’ know,” I say, staying out of the discussion, only listening and observing. “I’ve seen kids break bottles here and fight and hit,” he says. Jose has his own opinion of the punk rock bands. “It gets wild here on Friday,” he says. “A bunch of drunks.” Jose is sick tonight he is not here when we arrive, but Anna is here and I learn that they have three children, not one child. The Sunday I go to the station to read the book and that I purchase the wooden whistle I learn that he is not there that day because he is celebrating his child’s first birthday. Tonight at the station I learn that they have two other children, 3 and 6. Adriel who is three years old and double jointed and Andrew who is six years old, and Anna tells me as she takes our order that Jose is sick today and that he goes home later on but comes back to help Anna close. I tell Jose I’m going to go down tomorrow, Saturday, and help with the café. Anything, I say. Chairs, stocking, dishes, anything, I’ll help out. He has a lot of responsibility and sometimes he’s the only one there to do the work. I say I don’t’ mind volunteering since I have experience in the food prep business, and that I’d love to help. I can be close to the trains that way. It’s a little different than eating at the airport. The airport is nice but I find as I think I may have said earlier, that I prefer the train station. The crowd thins out as the southwest Chief takes its leave to yet another trip down the rails to Chicago. “I thought Larry would show up tonight,” says a man to Bob sitting two tables behind me. The man says that he’s celebrating a fiftieth birthday. I don’t hear all their conversation but then I hear him say that he’ll see bob tomorrow and Bob says something like “okay Norm” and then it hits me. “Hey, bob,” I say as Norm takes his departure. “Is that the engineer? The freight engineer?” Norm runs freight for BNSF. “Does he ever go through here?” I ask. He works in L.A. I’m told and so now I know who the freight engineer is that I’ve been hearing about. So now I do know of an engineer that goes to the Fullerton station. As the engineer takes his leave I wave and say goodbye though I’m sure he knows nothing about me. Maybe I’ll see him tomorrow at the station. I’m planning on going back there. Sitting at the patio I decide to go find Chris and Billy but get waylaid by two guys sitting on the planter who tell me to watch out because I’m going to run into a lamp. “I think the lamp will live,” I say. “It will live?” the man is surprised. “Well, if she’s not going to worry about it,” he says, “I’m not going to worry about it.” I take my place on the bench while Chris and Billy do their thing and then come and find me. Curt keeps coming by and saying “It looks like your friends ditched you.” “no, they didn’t,” I say. “They’re here. Besides,” I say one time when I am still back on the patio, “Billy left his phone here. He’s not going to leave without that.” Chris and Billy show up and they tell me that they got pictures of Chris by an old fashioned throw switch, something I have not yet discovered at the Fullerton train station. At the end of the platform there is a gate and a fence with two old cabooses. Leading to the fence are two rails and then by those rails is an old switch with the pedals and the handle to throw the switch which steers a car onto a different track. I investigate, the actual tracks being about thirty feet from us, maybe fifteen feet from us. I have to admit standing in the gravel track bed, not in any danger, but close, makes me a bit nervous. We draw a map for me in the road bed, explaining where the tracks are and that helps. But Chris decides to sit on the track, the actual track. I’m really anxious. A man comes by and says that what he’s doing is dangerous and highly illegal. Chris is very relaxed. I know that the train is not coming, there is a flashing yellow light, and an Amtrak train is due to arrive at 9:05 in the evening, the southbound Pacific surf liner to San Diego, but still, for me, staying off the tracks is a priority. I don’t need to be on them to experience their relaxing power. Standing on the railroad ties with the switch at my feet makes me a little bit nervous but at least the rails I’m on aren’t the actual tracks that the train is going to be traveling into the station. The tracks fork, the ones with the switch go one way, track 1 which is the one I sit by forks off to the right, going through the station then curving out again. The rails steer the train, and so we’re in no danger, but still I don’t like it. We come out of the roadbed and wait as the Amtrak train comes by us, stopping two hundred fee to our right, then passing us again as it takes off for San Diego. The engineer blows the whistle. The whistle sounds a little wimpy tonight. I want to be standing on that roadbed when a freight comes through but I’m a bit nervous. But one thing has been accomplished. I’ve felt and touched an old fashioned switch. This is the way it used to be done I suppose. We talk about the Chatsworth accident and how Rob when he missed that red-light went over a switch and broke it, I’m only repeating what has been written a million times, but standing there at the station by the railroad tracks I wondered what made me an expert. An engineer had his ashes scattered on these tracks, and maybe he walked on the same tracks once or twice and maybe he was in awe of the old fashioned switches the first time he ever saw one. I don’t know. I do remember an excerpt from a text message he sent to his teenage friend explaining that he understood when his friend said he was excited about getting into the cab and operating the locomotive, no matter how illegal it was or who said the person should not be there. He said that he understood this feeling because he could remember how he felt the first time he climbed up into that cab. That was an extremely telling excerpt. I’m sure he could have been excited about switches. That’s my opinion, I only know that tonight as I’m standing in the track bed walking on the railroad ties, I’m a little in awe myself because six months ago when I came home from work after putting in an eleven hour day and lay on my couch watching the footage from the Chatsworth accident I didn’t know this was going to be happening to me. I didn’t know that six months later I’d be standing in our very own road bed touching and walking near a railroad switch. Why would I have cared about that? It shows the extreme way in which my life is affected some days. It is what for me keeps life interesting. It isn’t till after I’ve come home and settled in for the evening that I can fully visualize the layout of the switch, but now I know something about switches. Trains operate these days using automated switches but there is obviously still switching equipment. The switch at Fullerton probably doesn’t work, or maybe it does, I don’t know. I only know I got to play with one. I didn’t switch the switch, of course, but it was there for my exploration and so I had one of the questions answered that I had asked months earlier. Remember I wanted to know what a switching mechanism looks like? Now I have an idea of at least how the one at Fullerton looks. Tonight at the station I’m pleasantly surprised by several things, the almost meeting of an engineer, the discovery of a switch, and the beautiful, balmy evening that greets us as we watch people catch trains. I’m looking forward to spending more time there and discovering even more about this little place called the fullerton train station, former home of the Santa Fe Railroad.
Copyright © 2009 Shelley J Alongi |