It’s good to see the trains again.
As a jazz saxophonist who loves to practice his horn in his car parked by a set of railroad tracks out in the countryside, I noticed last year that something was missing. Used to be, I could count on seeing the distant semaphore light turn green and watching as the white pinpoint of a headlamp miles down the tracks brightened, drawing closer until I could hear the rumble and then the roar of the locomotive and the clatter of freight cars rushing past. I enjoyed that experience at least once, and normally two or three times, during most practice sessions.
But as the bottom dropped out of the economy and Detroit’s auto industry languished, the giant spigots that sent the trains hurtling along the pipeline between Lansing and Grand Rapids closed to a trickle. Those hundred-car, three-locomotive strings I was so used to became, just like that, a thing of yesterday.
Until lately. It gives me much pleasure to say that the trains are returning.
I still don’t see them with the frequency I used to, but I am noticing that there are more of them, and they are growing longer. Two days ago, parked by the tracks in Alto, I paused in my practice to watch as a train boomed by in front of me…and kept on booming. It was one of those hundred-car affairs, just like in the good old days, which really aren’t old at all but certainly were enjoyable.
Now those days seem to be on the way back. It may be a modest return, but the spigots are reopening. It’s heartwarming to think, as I sit by my beloved tracks working out my saxophone chops, that I’m once again likely to hear the sound of another horn, far off in the distance and growing closer, and to feel the powerful, exhilarating, reassuring rhythm of a train rushing by.
