Growing up in Sparta, as I would lay in bed at night I could hear the trains roaring by along the Illinois Central tracks a mile to the south, and my overactive genius kindergartner’s imagination convinced me that the horns sounding as they flew over their intersection with Route 4 was the claxon of the Monster Truck going street-by-street to deliver all of the overnight monsters at the homes of Sparta’s children. I was less frightened by this idea than impressed with the precision the monsters used to dispatch the horror-bringers.
So I like hearing trains at night. It’s a comforting sound as the warning wail and the shudder of the tracks echoes through the silent city.
But I’m getting damned tired of the trains in Effingham.
I like to walk. Specifically I like to walk at night, often when Emily’s gone to bed and I can grab my ancient iPod Shuffle and bask in my peaceful constitutional. Effingham can be quite the quiet small town at night, and the busy stop-free intersections that tangle up pedestrians in the daylight offer easy passage under the watch of the stars, which all twinkle brighter than expected due to the small number of streetlights present in the town’s mostly safe neighborhoods. I stroll through newer friendly neighborhoods, past Saint Anthony’s hospital and along the classic downtown dotted with cute shops and the incredibly tasty Italian subs at Joe’s Pizza. Yum.
The Rocketeer release But on the west end of downtown I have to cross the Canadian National rail line.
This is the trail made famous in Steve Goodman’s tune City of New Orleans, and while the Amtrak cars fly quickly through town several times a day, smiling and tipping their cap as they hurry to get out of our way, it’s the long, plodding CN freight line that causes me ill. I can depart from our apartment, a good three miles northwest of the crossing, and hear the horn of a train beginning to violate my future path. No problem; it’s a good half-hour before I’m scheduled to be there, and this lumbering monster will by then be long gone.
By the time that thirty minutes is up, another train is already running through.
Every train in the world, it seems, passes through The Giant Truck Stop, and thus this happens far too often. This week in particular I took walks three days in a row at different times (6:00 PM, 11 PM, 10 PM) and each night I stood – twice on the east side, once on the west – waiting for the entire train to pass through.
Each time the train waited until I was approaching the crossing to storm through, timing its appearance perfectly so that I was just far enough to be unable to run across yet close enough to have to stand and wait from engine to caboose.
Every damn night.
Now I lie in bed at night and hear the trains passing by miles away, laughing at me.
I curse them.
Admittedly, you could strike out a new route when caught west of the tracks, you could go further south through town. When stuck on the east side of the tracks, you could start back north. :-/