How could you not like trains?

Let me draw you a picture with words. I’m sure you’ll recognize it from those on calendars and Christmas cards. I think they call it American primitive.

It’s a village scene, cluttered with Victorian houses, street after street of them, with a horse-drawn buggy, a dog yapping behind it, and a little stone bridge over a stream. There’s a church and a town square, maybe with a bandstand. Depending on the season, the roofs and pine boughs are puffy with snow, or the houses have window boxes overflowing with flowers.

And there where the mountain rises, a locomotive emerges from a rocky tunnel, proudly trailing a plume of smoke.

Or maybe our picture has a railroad station, and depicts that moment when the train’s doors have just opened and families, arms laden with packages, are reuniting.

Or a long train is crossing a deep gorge behind the village, on a filigreed steel arch that looks entirely too delicate for the weight it bears. You can almost hear its echoing whistle.

Take the train out of the paintings, and the energy goes with it.

I like trains. I love hearing them, especially at night, and yes, we do hear them in Braelinn Village; their rumbling actually rattles pictures on the walls of our house. I even love seeing their strange configuration of head lights probing the tracks ahead of them.

Used to be that about half the fire calls we’d get on a hot summer afternoon were brushfires started alongside the tracks by sparks struck by the train’s brakes. Fingers of flame crept through the sere grasses and set the underbrush afire.

By the time firefighters in turn-out gear waded through the brush with their Indian tanks, they were almost done in by the heat.

What has made me wax romantic about trains today? I went to a special called meeting of city council last week and listened to a smart young fellow from CSX explain how his company was planning to be better neighbors in Peachtree City.

It sounded good to me, most of the changes either in the industrial park or up along Georgia Hwy. 54 where no one lives near the tracks.

“Are you going to put a heavily planted berm up there?” a councilmember asked.

“Sure, if that’s what you want,” CSX replied. Then, I forget who it was, but someone asked, “Why?”

“Because I don’t like trains,” snarled the council member, and I do not exaggerate: Her lip curled when she said it.

I was stunned. It never occurred to me that anyone could not like trains.

My dad’s fondness for trains flooded my mind, memories that had not arisen in ages. He was an office worker, a payroll clerk, for the now defunct Steelton & Highspire Railroad Co., a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel. His office sat so close to the tracks that I thought he could touch the trains as they went by.

He took me with him occasionally when he had to work on Saturday, and I watched him fill in spreadsheets, page after page after page of words or numbers, the kind of thing a computer could do in a split second today.

He loved the trains. I remember him grieving as the last of the steam engines was retired and all the engines were diesel.

Daddy’s passion for coal-fed steam engines went back to his youth, when he worked for the Railway Mail Service, which sped up delivery by sorting mail in train cars as trains moved between cities. Bags of mail were hung on a “train catcher arm” alongside the tracks, and the train slowed slightly to allow the postal workers to grab it. Until this moment, I had never realized what a dangerous job this was, to pull the bags aboard, open them, sort the mail and rebag it.

When the train passed through a destination city, the bags were heaved out and retrieved by postal workers in that city. I don’t even remember which cities, although I would suspect one was Harrisburg, where we lived from when I was born until I was in third grade.

Every morning we swept cinders off the porch and the steps. It was annoying, but I don’t believe anyone thought of the railroad yards, several blocks away, as unhealthy. Blocked from our sight by dense housing, we could hear the slow and steady chuffing as the steam engines started up, smell the smoke when the wind was right – or wrong – and of course, we could hear the whistles. It was all part of our lives, the way buses and trees and concrete porches were.

I remember when the best part of getting ready for Christmas was setting up the Lionel electric train under the Christmas tree. Trains were expensive, even then, and while Daddy did let me play with them, with supervision, he made it very clear that they were his.

He had an oil tanker and a log car, a gondola for coal, a passenger car and a caboose.

And the engine was an electric-powered "steam engine" that actually made “smoke.” The whistle was just right. There were a few ragged pine trees, a tunnel that needed a mountain, and a railroad station.

What he didn’t have was a mail car.

Or a well-planted berm.