She Likes Trains: Magic Train
Shelley J Alongi

 

, maybe I’ve come full circle. I have a double cheese burger, but no icecream. I have lots of knowledge about the railroad. I know what diverging clear means. I have excitement, adventure, and the black bag. I have a magic engineer, and a magic train. It only gets better from here.

The geography of the Fullerton station is much more familiar now, four years into my journey with trains and their people. Did it start with 111 when it was 111? Or 608, 708? Maybe it was just always meant to happen, though I can hardly tell where it might lead. Maybe it will lead to the railroad café, the little niche I’ve always wanted to make for myself. Maybe I’m just conservative and adventurous enough to do this thing. What I know for now is that it leads me here on the days when work lets me out early enough to partake in the communion of the magic train. I think, for all intents and purposes, at least, today, that 608 is my magic train. It was christened Shelley’s train when I would meet it regularly. It’s still the only train I can make consistetly. It has only had two engineers in my tenure with its magic and both of them are magical in their own way. So, maybe all my adventures surround the magic train, though sometimes the trains and the people make their own magic. And, they all line up behind my number 1 engineer, approached, adopted, all those engines caressed by fingers on the doorway above the bell, eyes upward, magic pooring forth. Morning journeys there, afternoon adventures, evening sojourns all find me meeting, greeting, and waving off my magic train. Col evenings, hot, muggy heavy air, music drifting across tracks, laughter, the clink of skateboards on concrete stairs, the soft tinkle of elevator and bike bells, all kinds of people wearing baseball caps and carrying black bags, wearing heels, flip flops, the glitter of purses and nails and conversations on cell phones, even people asking me if I’m looking for something, or I’m coming to the end of this platform, or do you need the train, miss? That line is only acceptable from one participant in Shelley’s magic show: the engineer from the magic or any other train. I haven’t been asked that question lately. Mainly they’ve just looked out their windows and seen me, or said hi if they know me.

One of the nameless persons in my journey to everywhere on the magic train puts his head out the window, responding to the wave of my red nail polished hand, greets me with a monosyllable. I don’t recognize him. I approach the stationary train, waiting for its bell to silence. I’ve been sitting here now on the benches behind the safety line for that track. It’s bell sounds. Wonder who this is? I think it’s my regular, but sometimes I know by the distance of the bell. I know my engineers by the bells, this time, not the engines.

“Was that far back enough for you?” says Cary once when I say he doesn’t ring the bell as far back as Glen does.

“Why do you ring the bell so far back?” I ask Glenn, on some nameless day on a journey far away in time.

“So people know I’m coming,” he says in his own way. All my regulars are different, they all have their quirks and their responses, their routines, from the way they greet me to the distance at which they ring their bels.

Now I wait for this bell, confident in my position. Tonight I haven’t missed it. I approach, putting my hand out. Maybe he warns me away? I don’t think so. Suddenly, inexplicably, here I am back to the pre vocal days with the first engineer on this train, only this time, much closer, suddenly clamming up, speechless, similar to the second time I talked to Glenn and suddenly couldn’t think of a thing to say. There he was looking right at me, my dream come true, and the cat got my tongue, an appropriate metaphor, I think. It happened again once after Cary’s fatality on 606 two years ago now. a little hesitant. And, no one believes that I’m shy. And, yet, sometimes, I am. Wonder if he recognizes me?

“I saw one of your extras,” I tell its regular, Bobby, last Thursday, October 4.

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” I confess meekly. “He said hi to me and then I got shy and couldn’t ask his name.”

Soft, amused laughter floats down from my sweet EMD perch. It’s true. And, on some occasions I ask the names and get them. Chris is one of them. I don’t’ think this one was anyone I knew. I’ll just have to see if he cycles through here again, and get his name, and get the specs. Wonder if his wife is a teacher’s aid or has a million cats? Does he take his daughter to father daughter dances? Does he want to take his kids on a Disney cruise? Does he race trucks? Only two of these have given me their numbers. I’ve not used them. I will. The one I talk to is still the first one on this magic train, and yet, they’re all magical in their own way. Line up behind my sweet magical Glenn. Keep plying all your magic. I’ll learn all your names, someday.

Sometimes the journey over the last month is about sitting on the benches, keeping cool in the stifling heat with lots of liquid refreshment, water, and soda, mainly. It’s about day dreaming. Is there a story forming in my head? I don’t know. The only story lately is the one here, and my own step by step journey with my magic train. Napping, reading, and not waving to engineers on freights. Maybe once or twice. The engineer who rings the bell for one second as the train passes the human gold on the station platform, whether that gold is tucked away sleeping, or sitting here with the black railroad grip. Once on an evening when things start to cool, a railroad worker who visits us on occasion, admires the black bag, clearly recognizing it. It is recognized, finally. Does he have one? No, but he’s seen a few. The stylish black bag looks brand new, someone tells me today. It was replaced a year ago. I’ll have to remind her of that. But on these hot, sultry days when we swelter under a stalled high pressure system, the bag is what I depend on for sustenance, holding ganola bars and apples, soda, water bottles, napkins, sun screen, keys, cell phones, and books. It is my workaday bag, even in pleasure.

“Are you going on a trip?” Cary asks once, as I hold a black duffel bag with wheels, much smaller than the railroad grip.

“No,” I explain looking up to his window. “This is just one of my many bags.”

Why doesn’t he ask me about the black bag I carry slung over my shoulder, comfortable snuggled against my hip like a child.

“That’s your everyday bag,” says Dave Norris. Does Cary recognize it as such? Maybe he has one. I don’t know.

One day it hold my digital book player. We sit at the west end of the platform, tucked in out of the sun, having enjoyed a bountiful Del Taco breakfast, and gotten all my errands done for the day, including the freshening of the red nail polish. Sitting here, hands on my knees, much like I sat in one cab car once on a cool October day, waiting for the magic engineer from the magic train, same color nails, no black bag, no book, only my incredible realization that finally I was going to meet a working engineer. Forget that I went to church with a conductor and spent countless hours with his daughter before we all separated to our own lives. I didn’t know about him, what I know now. Now, he talks to me on my FaceBook page. One such exchange has me writing: “Approaching fullerton. Diverging clear.”

“Do you know what a diverging clear signal means, Shelley?”

As amatter of fact, I do.

“Train crossing over to another track. Green. Proceed ahead at track speed.”

“Right. Proud of you,” he writes.

This man, my father’s contemporary, acknowledges my hard work. Or, is it the engineer?

I asked the engineer, I say.

You cheated then.

This makes me laugh. I waited and dialed the engineer’s number with a pounding heart and sweating hands and trepidation, my delicate pleasure or sweet anxiety, I guess. I asked him what it mean, his answer came as he was making his trip to Lancaster in his truck, coming through the trials and tribulations of the blue tooth.

I’ll tell the engineer you said I cheated. He’ll just smile.

Or rip out his hair.

Somehow I think he just smiled.

I told him on voicemail. This time I didn’t’ have a hard time disconnecting. There was the blast of the public address system announcing a Sunday night Amtrak. And, I didn’t want to compete with a rumbling, glorious line of cars pulled by GP60s, or something else. I was racing against time and maybe that makes me more coherent.

So, here I am, the rr cheater, I said. Admitting my weakness to the magic train’s engineer.

Another time in the last month I have a hard time saying goodbye to his voicemail. I just wanted to tell you, I said, that I think it’s absolutely uncanny that on the Antelope Valley line, your trains are the least delayed. We’ll have to discuss that sometime.

Somhow the rr cheater sounds more dramatic.

I hope I make him smile. He deserves to smile.

The journey is about walking down the platform greeting familiar people, saying hello to new ones. It’s about conversations about cats, torn muscles, city issues, Curt’s reports on what’s going on at the station. It’s about cab fares home, Rick White losing his license and going to Oregon on a train. It’s about Sleep Master, Rick White, that is. He’s been here for years. I knew him fifteen or twenty eyars ago, heavy smoking, living in a cab, refusing passengers. I don’t know how he survived. But, now he no longer has his license. Now, Igor is number 1. Affordadble is there. They all know me. Sometimes I take rides with them. Sometimes, not. Sometimes it’s rides homewith Wally who has most enlightening conversations, one time about the art of amorous behavior, or should I say sex? It’s about rides homewith Tom the school teacher. Here we are at fall break. It’s about saying hello to Bob the ring leader someone conspicuously absent the Sunday that we spot the engineer at the bar.

And, so, what is this night, this event that sends an Amtrak engineer and his conductor to a bar? Well, walking in front of the Tuscany Club, the large engineer, the female conductor, the passengers taking cabs to Union Station. The locomotive, a P-42 idling sweetly, making humpback noises, the air compressor fan, I’m told, doing its little sound dance, no bells, no alarm bells like we hear on the freight locomotives. It’s about seeing a dropped signal. It was green. Now everything is red. What could it be?

The lateness of the hour causes Tom the schoolteacher to give me a ride home and on our way out we see this sight. It’s going to be along engineer night. Drink one for me. Make it a Diet Pepsi with a twist of lemon.

I make some comment and am accused of wantin ot get the engineer in trouble. No, not this time. Just have a good night, mr. Engineer. That’s what your magic colleague would tell you to do. Wonder if he went dead on the law? Don’t know. It’s later that I learn a truck stalled at Los Nietos crossing, the cops caught the driver who tried to get away. We know, and it’s my railroad knowledge for that day, that there was minor damage done to the BNSF locomotive. The operator of locomotive 161 on Amtrak 591 that Sunday night, Sunday October 7, a night which I had not planned to visit my favorite happy place. Tonight, I am rewarded with excitement, adventure, and double cheeseburger. But, no icecream tonight.

So, I suppose I’ve come full circle in a way. When I first came to the station it was about wanting to meet the engineers and eating double cheese burgers. It was about wanting to learn stories.

Tonight, maybe I’ve come full circle. I have a double cheese burger, but no icecream. I have lots of knowledge about the railroad. I know what diverging clear means. I have excitement, adventure, and the black bag. I have a magic engineer, and a magic train. It only gets better from here.



 

 

Copyright © 2012 Shelley J Alongi
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"