Trains

I'm going train chasing this weekend. I'm going to fill my Jeep up with gas and drive to the middle of nowhere (almost literally) and drive through more nowhere at semi-unsafe speeds in such a manner as is required to see the same train multiple times. This process will take several hours.

I would guess that 99% of the people I've ever explained this process to don't understand it at first. Why would I want to see the same train more than once? Even understanding that this train is a special train, what could be so distinctive about it that would justify the time and money? If they know me, they will accept that it's just something I would do. If they don't, they think I'm weird, though they're too nice to say so.

Some people who know me would surely say that I've never hidden my love of trains, but it is nevertheless true that I'm much more open these days about the fact that I like trains than I used to be. When I was in elementary school, if I broadcast my interest in railroads I was, as was anyone who dared to like anything that wasn't universally liked, treated with scorn and derision (on a good day). Elementary school is not kind to individuals. Even in high school, though it was generally-understood that I was into that sort of thing, liking trains put me on a plane less with the eccentrics and more with the weirdos.

In fairness to everyone who ever judged me, and notwithstanding that they had no other train people as a frame of reference, train people are weird people. When I do hardcore railfan things, I feel like King of the Nerds. I have a stable relationship with a pretty girl, friends who aren't into trains, and the ability to talk about subjects that don't entail long digressions into the minutiae of Automatic Block Signaling, superheaters or the relative merits of 24RL brakes vis-à-vis 6BL.

I am often asked how I got into trains, born as I was at a time when the railroads were somewhat in retrograde and generally-expected to die out in most meaningful senses completely before too long. The answer to that is that I don't know. The family legend has it that I, as an infant, was riding in my car seat when our big old Oldsmobile was caught at a crossing by a train. As it passed, so the story goes, I perked up and watched intently until the caboose (this would have been 1983, so the train might have had one) passed, the gates rose and we drove on.

The rest is history.

My dad was not a train nut in the sense I am. He was a red-blooded American Rust Belt male, though, and had the inherent love and maybe awe for Big Things That Move that seems almost-entirely absent from my generation. He was also a good father and he nurtured my interest. Everything train-related that came our way, we did. We went to the little tourist railroad in Flint, we rode the Amtrak for no real reason, we rode the big steam locomotives that came every summer to Michigan.

And then he died.

It's probably fair to say that when I chase trains today I am chasing my dad. In a manner of speaking. I was at a particularly vulnerable age when I lost him; too old to forget easily and too young to have ever had a grownup relationship with him. After he died I took the things that we had in common (trains, the Detroit Tigers) and made them sacred. When the Sun shines on my face in the bleachers in Detroit, and most of all when I drive too fast down some no-name road in Osceola County with the windows down and a steam whistle on the wind, that's as close as I get.