What is it that many people find so fascinating about trains? Probably the fascinations are as different as the mountains are diverse. Then, some people’s fascination with trains has more to do with being taken up with how some people can be so captivated by trains. It can start very early in life.
I recall the little story relayed by a grandmother who lived across the road from the railway track along Northwest Boulevard in Creston. Her daughter would come for a several-day visit bringing the two-year-old grandson along. Well, after that, when the train horn woke him up, he was wide awake and standing on his bed looking out the window calling, “Train, train train,” every night for the remainder of the visit. He would watch it until the caboose was gone. (In case you didn’t notice, there are no longer cabooses.)
The lives of many individuals, to one degree or another, were connected with the railroad in some way. One individual, when watching the train run along the track at the Creston Museum model railway, exclaimed how the railway track ran by their Prairie farm, and when the train would pass, the engineer would blow the whistle. In those days, the locomotives were all steam engines and the kids could tell by the way the whistle was blown which engineer it was. Of course, it would have been almost discourteous not to wave to the engineer or to the man in the caboose who was leaning out the window, giving a big wave.
Some people are not at all fascinated about trains. They may only take notice when they are held up at a railway crossing. In fact, they could care less except when they get woke up in the night by the loud diesel horns. I guess the reason that the horn is so loud and that they blow several times for each crossing is because too many people have been on a crossing or on the track at the wrong time. Others, who live by the railway track, when asked if the train went by they say, “Oh, was there a train? I didn’t hear it.”
The person who thought of putting a flange on wagon wheels to keep them on a track with wooden rails had quite an influence on transportation worldwide for over 200 years. I know that the fact that trains stay on the track for thousands of miles has to do with those flanged wheels; thus it is mainly mechanical, but I am still fascinated with the fact that trains of up to 100 cars or more, transporting wheat for overseas shipment from Portland, Ore., seldom derail. To help prevent derailments some railway lines have a sort of greasing device at intervals along the track. A “push button” device next to the rail pumps a shot of grease into a channel or flange-way each time a wheel passes over it. So, a bit of grease gets on the flange, lubricating the rail as it goes along. This device helps keep the train wheels from “climbing” the rail and derailing, and also cuts down some of the squealing on the curves.
There are several aspects about trains that are basically absent from highway driving. One is that the train doesn’t wave back and forth like a car going down the highway. However, there is a rare phenomenon that takes place when a certain railway car, like a large tanker, at certain speeds begins a “harmonic roll”. Rolling from side to side, they have been known to leave the track without damaging the track or derailing the car ahead or behind. I think the solution is to vary the speed of the train in areas of the line vulnerable to this kind of phenomenon.
One aspect I like about riding on trains is that I can enjoy the scenery while not having to be concerned about staying on the “highway”. Although the trains generally follow transportation routes followed by highways, they do divert at times through different landscapes. I remember once travelling from Banff to Revelstoke. Somewhere on the west side of the Rockies the train slowed down and I could distinguish individual plants. One that I will never forget was a healthy clump of the large-flowered lady’s slipper orchid. Well, I could go on.
Today there aren’t as many opportunities to ride a train, but if you make a little trip to the Creston Museum, you can watch all kinds of trains going here and there and imagine you are standing in the vestibule between two passenger cars listening to the wheels go clickity clack as the train moves over the joins in the rails. But you could miss the train unless you are there at the Creston Museum model railroad open house, where you are welcome to be, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Nov. 22. That is just three days or less away!
Ed McMackin is a biologist by profession but a naturalist and hiker by nature. He can be reached at 250-866-5747.
