Readers and writers blog

A railroad runs within two blocks of our house, and when I hear those long freights rumbling through late at night, it puts me right to sleep.

Railroads always have had a soporific effect on me.

Of course, it’s now all Conrail where we live. The closest Amtrak passenger service is across the Hudson River. But it always was the freights that put me to sleep.

When I was a kid in Rochester, N.H., the Sanford and Eastern tracks ran within a hundred yards of our house. Those diesels ran past at all hours of the night, and like John Steinbeck, I used to listen to them and drift off fantasizing about jumping one of them, just to see where it would go. Unlike Steinbeck, I never did — but I read most of his books.

My first memory of trains is magical, with strains of excitement, suspense and jealousy — as much as those feelings can occur within a 5-year-old.

It was 1945, and the first trainload of soldiers was returning from World War II. We lived in Silver Lake, a hamlet of Madison, N.H., where our house was at the top of the lake and the railroad tracks ran along the west side. It was night when that first train came steaming north, and the lights from the passenger windows shimmered in the water, swimming along with the train like an electric eel.

The closest image I’ve experienced since was the lights from the enormous passenger ship coming out of the fog in the Fellini film “Amarcord.”

I shared the excitement of those people awaiting the train, but on it I knew there was a soldier I didn’t want to see. The war years must have been difficult for women in a peculiar way. They longed for the men who went, but they also cherished the ones left behind, even the boys, perhaps because they didn’t want any of them to have to go, too. My ‘girlfriend’ in those days was a young friend of my mother whose husband had served through the entire war. (My father didn’t go — he had a deferment — but a few years later, he died for his company, the local electric utility.)

I didn’t want to see that soldier, but his wife introduced me to him as her ‘boyfriend,’ and he laughed and hugged me, and that was the end of my jealousy. Now he was my friend, too.

When I was in high school, I took a train trip from Rochester, N.H., to Dallas, Texas, for a Key Club convention. One morning somewhere in the Midwest, the train stopped near a farm — they must have put our section off on a sidetrack — and we were led into the farmhouse for a huge breakfast of pancakes, sausage, bacon, eggs and milk served by a grandmotherly woman. Stuffed and stunned, we then got back on the train and proceeded southwest.

When I worked the overnight desk at a wire service in Boston in the 1960s, I commuted to the office on the MBTA trains, which went overland into the city and then underground. Our office was on an upper floor of a building that long since has given way to Government Center, and on the first floor was the Boston Tavern. Our shift ended at 7 a.m., and after a hectic night of writing for hourly deadlines, we young journalists didn’t even have to leave the building to gather for drinks. When the government employees showed up around 8 a.m. for their prework bracers, we just joined the crowd.

Many’s the morning I woke up at the roundhouse in Newton, having slept through my stop.

Mothers with their babes asleep,
Rocking to the gentle beat,
And the rhythm of the rails is all they dream.*

You know, those overland trips back to Kenmore Square were always pleasant, despite the blossoming hangovers.

As I’m sure many of you know, or have been told, people used to get dressed up to go on the train. Of course, they also used to dress up to go to the movies.

While those sartorial habits may not resurge, perhaps the trains will. With the price of gasoline rising and the environmental damage wrought by automobiles increasing, maybe we’ll depend more on the efficiency of train travel.

Or maybe that would make too much sense.

– Sid Leavitt

* From Steve Goodman’s song “City of New Orleans,” 1972.