night train in the distance

[fflo]

I love hearing the train in the middle of the night.

The 2 a.m. just passed through; it seemed especially long tonight. I forget where I was when I first heard as an adult a train in the distance at night, but it took me back big time, and I took note. Later my brother suggested the "original" for me mighta been the Rock Island, whose tracks ran near the apt we lived in while the tornado damage to our place was fixed---when I was just turning 4.

I do remember my Uncle Ed, my mother's favorite uncle, telling a story of the train going past their little South Dakota town with an effigy of the Kaiser hanging off (and being burned?), & how everybody ran down to the tracks to meet it & celebrate the end of the war. Hearing of it I felt some sense of history but mostly lots of romance about that train, and everybody hearing it go by at night. The horn, which Rob sez happens when there's an "at-grade crossing," sounds so rich & deep on a summer night like this. When the H-bomb & I were back in Manhattan, I did used to hear it again sometimes. Low rent side of town & all.

There are two people sleeping in the study. It's good to have them here. It's the second night in a row I've heard the 2 a.m. go rattle-roll-rumbling through.

In my ideal vision of where I'd most love to live, hearing that train in the distance is in the Top Ten most desired traits.

A willow, a birch, and a cottonwood are three others.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I used to hear night trains in the distance when I lived in Portage, Michigan, where I grew up just outside Kalamazoo. Trains going south out of the city passed about 2 miles from my home, but I could hear them on the hot summer nights with the bedroom window open--knowing which bedroom, this would have been when I was a teenager--two and a quarter Jupiter years ago. I could count the time in Jovian years easier than Earth years because I know Jupiter rose with the Pleiades out that window.

What amazed me was the dissonant chord the train's horn blew. I've heard since that every locomotive's horn is different--it's own combination of notes. A trainman can tell which locomotive is coming just by the sound. And the notes are not familiar major triads, but unique random combnations. Designed to be grating, startling alerts to anyone on the tracks in the middle of the night, they sound uneasy, haunting, not-quite chords from a mile away. To me, it makes them sound farther away. Like a train that's come through Chicago, from across the plains, beyond the mountains and the deserts...

Crap, I read LJ's from farther away than that every day. Those places hardly seems so far away anymore. The internet makes the world too small for such a faraway sound.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

That stuff about the various sounds of the whistles---fascinating. But, yeah, the far away. Sounds so very far away.

Good to know there's another out there with a similarly historied relationship to the sounds.