She Likes Trains: Silent, Train Night Tonight, Christmas Eve, is a silent, train night. NO Metrolink train runs today. Amtrak is operating on a limited schedule. I see four freights, one plays Jingle Bells on the horn, making anyone here besides me smile. It is the culmination of a long, messy week, but a good one. Everyone is safe and sound. The rain has stopped, and we’re ready for the next adventure. But this week, my men of the railroad, delayed, stuck on flooded tracks, twelve minutes out of Burbank as in the case of Glenn on the Antelope Valley line, all work very hard and deserve their pay checks. These guys are gold, but Glenn is still the best. His favorite Christmas carol is “Silent Night” and he asks me what I get my cats for Christmas. He’s my love on the rails, and to all my engineers I say have a merry Christmas and to all a good silent, train night. "Merry Christmas to you and your family. What did you get your cats?" The text message from my number one engineer shines on my screen in the cold crisp evening, Thursday December 23. I wait for a bus, erasing text messages, reading through some of the older Metrolink updates. I am on my way home after five solid days of rain and two trips to the train station. It has been a messy week, literally, for trains and people. The cats, the subject of Glenn's question, have probably been the driest and least stressed. We haven't seen rain like this in southern California for over a decade I’m told by news media. There are probably people who hope we don't see this kind of weather again for a long time, if ever. The Pineapple Express, bringing wind and rain from Hawaii and now proceeding on to the Rockies has left its mark: late trains, tired engineers, and wet people. I've worn tennies to work most days because I've decided that I should, rather than fight with two street crossings in order to save myself walk time, just walk and argue with one street crossing. The Fullerton Engineer girl, the one who stays out in the rain, is at work again, this time, holding an umbrella, wearing a blue rain slicker with a hat, and mostly surviving. It's amazing how well that rain slicker really keeps what needs to be dry, dry; things like my cell phone and my bus pass. The cell phone has been my connection with trains this week, literally. On Monday, as rain pounds the windows and wind slams it against the sheets of pane glass, and whips the palm frons and swirls water down the storm drain and creates a huge puddle on Brookhurst and Lincoln for me to walk through, I sit at home in front of my laptop deciding to do something on a whim: re sign up for Twitter. God only knows what has happened to my old account and I was using an old version of Twitter it tells me so what the heck I'll just sign up again! I remember when Andy used to be at the Fullerton station teasing me mercilessly about Glenn that he would often get updates on his phone about the status of Metrolink trains. Today during one of the three rainstorms that are pounding us I decide I'll find Metrolink, our commuter rail system, and sign up to follow it. I don't really want anyone following me on Twitter, one social media network is enough for me, I think. Maybe it's more than enough for my phone! I have the Robb Sanchez texting plan, I call it the All You Can Eat plan, and it's a good thing because now I get a lot of text messages! I erase that Inbox a lot these days. I am successful in signing up and setting up my phone to receive texts from Twitter. Little do I know that it will be my lifeline to all my engineers this week? My schedule this week only on two days allows me to go to the station for any good amount of quality train watching time. By the time I get there on Thursday I have lots to talk about with my engineers. Tuesday and Wednesday are wet, full of flooding, mechanical breakdowns and late trains. Amtrak, though it is not a part of my Twitter updates yet, is even delayed and suspends service to San Diego due to severe weather and flooding. And in all of this, even petulant, sweet, magical Glenn has troubles; not as severe, but troubles, nonetheless. He survives. He survives and answers a question when I ask him what his favorite Christmas carol is. “Silent Night” he texts to me as I sit on a deserted platform on Friday, Christmas Eve, watching several freights. Silent Night, silent, train night. It has been a week I won’t forget. But before that, there is the other adventure. After signing up to receive my updates from Twitter I head out to the Southern California Train Travel Group Christmas party. This is the same party last year when I had Janice deliver my Christmas card to Glenn on the platform because I couldn’t make his train. Has it been a year already? Well, this year things are a bit different. Rain pounds the buses, creates slower traffic conditions, and makes us all bring out umbrellas, blue rain slickers, and red gloves. No, not engineer gloves. These are read almost mittens, just like Dave Norris says I need. My number one engineer who hasn't met me for coffee in L.A. yet has given me so much more! "Fifteen months after meeting him, drawn to finally meet him on the sheer astonishment of his name, I text, sometimes he texts back, I call, sometimes he calls back, and he satiates my absolutely consuming desire to know about trains. Am I obsessed with trains or the engineer? Well, whatever it is, I'll take it. I know his wife's name, though I don’t' know the names of her 22 cats. Someday I’ll ask him to tell me all the cat’s names. But before I do, I have to buy my cats something for Christmas. “Food, litter, my blankets. Very practical” I text back to Glenn on the night that he asks me that question. Lest you think Glenn has suddenly begun texting me, let me just say that, no, he hasn’t, I’m the one who wished him a merry Christmas. “Merry Christmas to you, the cats, dogs, birds, and all your people” I write to him in a jovial mood. I like wishing Glenn happy holidays, he usually responds back. If he doesn’t respond too many of my other messages, he does respond to those. IN fact I’m very surprised when he responds to my inquiry about what his favorite Christmas carol is. I don’t know if he’s running the train, the Antelope Valley line operates on Christmas Eve but I don’t know if that affects his schedule because I don’t know yet which trains are running on that line and how the hours are modified. At 8:00 when I text the question, I am surprised to get a return message. Silent Night’ he texts back, simply. It makes me cry. Such a reaction to one question? The combination of a difficult but rewarding year, a deserted platform with gentle silence between trains with the sounds of Miguel’s music blaring from the patio speakers as he cleans the café and closes up shop for the night lends a translucent quality to this moment. Listening to the music makes me laugh a little. Arriving earlier at the station I see no one on the patio, the music is blaring, the door is open, but no one stands at the counter. Is the café open? Was there a sign? “Hey! Is anybody back there?” Miguel comes back to the counter; he has been cleaning the grill. I’m laughing, he says I scared him. Will he sell me two Diet Pepsis? Yes, he will. He does and goes back to his cleaning. I make my way down the platform, no one is here. It is going to be a quiet night; kind of like January 1, the New Year’s Day when I called Glenn and woke him. I swear I woke him; I’ll swear to it the rest of my life. Now, that same engineer, twelve months later, answers my question and I hold my phone, caressing it as if he might be there. He is with me here on these bricks even if he might be safe and warm at home. The engineer I went out of my way to meet and who left me heartbroken on the platform with his defection to Lancaster has answered a simple question, and not only that, but I am here to get the answer, and it really has been a good year! I’m not even sure what prompts me to ask the question. I suppose it’s not a question that gets asked often. I don’t’ think I’ve asked anyone else this question. The answer Silent Night” is a simple one. It is a quiet gentle carol containing the whole Christmas story, peaceful, very melodic, and my engineer’s favorite Christmas carol. I’m not sure I’ve even heard the song this year and as I write this, Christmas gently winds its way along, passing into the annals of history, but not before revealing my engineer’s favorite Christmas carol. Do you think he just wrote that answer to get me off his case? No, I don’t think he did. I think that really is his favorite carol. “Thank you. Good night” I text him, and sit, enjoying the silent, train night. Getting to this moment has been a bit harrowing, perhaps not for me, but at least for three men of the railroad: Glenn, bobby, and Cary, and a hundred other men and women I haven’t met yet. Monday afternoon as we are saturated and I make my way to the Fullerton train station for the party through puddles and continual soaking rain dressed in a Christmas red and green sweater, my blue pokadotteed umbrella, and new slacks, all covered by that now famous blue rain slicker, the San Bernardino line of the Metrolink system is slammed with delays and rain, and even a few cancellations. My phone chimes every five minutes or so with a new update. The bus makes its way along, the rhythmic squeak of the windshield wipers aiding progress, people struggle in and out with rain gear and strollers, children, bags, finally arriving to the place where I make my second connection, a connection I’ve just missed by a minute. I wait for the next bus, finding the dock with assistance because this part of the trip is never quite predictable or maybe it’s just everything requiring more concentration. By the time I get to the station and make my way to the Spaghetti Factory, the rain is slashing, mixing up sound cues, but manageable. I feel for my safety line, the one the Amtrak agent on any day of the week insists is yellow. It’s not yellow. Maybe in theory it should be, but it’s not. It’s the coble stoned, striped safety tile that does have merit in some cases. Today is one of those days when the safety line is useful. What is even more helpful than the safety line from my train ravaged perspective now, though, is the slowly approaching freight train. I’m not sure what color his light is, it’s probably red; he slowly finds his mark, if he has one, but the sound is enough to serve as an adequate guide. In many cases my own personal preference is not to cross any type of street near a railroad crossing when a train is near even if the two forms of transit do not meet. The sound cues I must rely on without knowing it are affected by the superseding sound wall produced by those glorious tons and so I prefer to let them pass before I continue my trek to any destination. No destination is worth missing because I missed an important cue due to a train’s overwhelming sound cue; that wouldn’t be fair to the engineer, especially since the engineer doesn’t know and doesn’t really need to know. IN this case, no street, no railroad crossing, only parallel tracks, benches, dips, planters, people, all easily navigable require more concentration to get to the place of merriment. The approaching freight train solves my problem. I remember being here one time and not having an idea of where the tracks were. Now more familiar with the tracks and the trains that frequent them, I listen for its throbbing locomotives, silently thanking the dispatch who has chosen this moment to bring freight to my rescue. Here he is, another nameless Prince Charming, probably looking out at a rain soaked crazy lady. Maybe he thinks, as did one engineer, “She gets around good.” Maybe he thinks, like another engineer, that “you’re crazy.” I wonder if he wonders how much I know about the railroad. Whatever my nameless assistant thinks, it is time to get on with the business at hand: a Christmas party that’s really not a Christmas party, it’s a bunch of rail fans getting together to eat and look at train papers. And now I guess, there I am getting texts to my phone about train delays. “Am I getting to be like Bruce?” I ask Janice Marsh on Tuesday when I call to report that Cary’s train is an hour late to Fullerton. “You’re getting that way,” she says. But I don’t want to know if the trains are on time. I only want to know if my men of the railroad are on time. Sometimes they are, and sometimes, this week, they aren’t. Cary opens his window on Thursday, obviously happy to see me. “What a week,” I say to him. “Yeah!” He is very dramatic. Tonight I’m not dressed in rain gear. Tonight I just have the red Christmas sweater and my tennis. There aren’t many people here tonight. Curt is here, he says he will come down on Christmas Eve, but on that night I don’t see him. He may have been a late arrival. After sitting for a while I make my way home since I work Christmas and get ready for bed. I never encounter Scooter Boy on Christmas Eve. There went our plan to sing carols. No matter. I learned Glenn’s favorite carol. I can sing that in my head to anyone who will listen and maybe to someone who won’t. It’s a beautiful carol. But tonight, Thursday, on the way over to track 3 a man tries to show me the exit and grabs my hand; I respond in my usual way. I really hate having my personal space invaded without permission. They leave me alone, but now, across the tracks I can hear his little boy saying “She’s going to bump into the gate. She’s blind.” He is very dramatic; his little shrill voice rings out in the clear crisp air. I make my way to the Do Not Enter sign that still sits at the end of the fence dividing the extended platform from the existing one. I wait for Cary. “We had problems,” he now says. “I’ll say. You must have gotten home late!” If he was an hour out of San Juan Capistrano at 8:00 or so he definitely got home with less than eight hours between ending time and report time. Rules state that train crews get eight hours between ending and reporting. They’re supposed to use those eight hours for rest. As a consequent of having mechanical problems and being so late, Cary gets Wednesday off. The updates to my phone on Tuesday say that train 606 will be coupled to train 608, but that doesn’t happen. They have mechanical trouble and get home late. Maybe Cary could stay inside where it was warm on Wednesday. It was a nasty day to be doing anything, especially since the tracks in Orange County were closed after Laguna. It was Bobby who got to take his train to Laguna. Cary got to stay at home and be warm. Meanwhile back in the Antelope Valley line, Glenn was plagued with delays, but not anything like the San Bernardino or Orange County lines. I bet he was glad he wasn’t in Orange County. I’ll have to ask him if he’s ever had to miss work due to getting off work so late. Turn off that alarm little Lancaster Baby! It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes it does. Cary gets the highball. “It’s good to see you,” he says and I know he means it. He’s a nice guy. All my engineers are the gold standard! “Shelley!” Bobby says my name out his window. Curt and Diesel Dave stand on this side of the platform, threatening to sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” but when Bobby pulls 608 to the 6 car marker, they disappear. “We can’t ruin Shelley’s moment,” says Curt conspiratorially. It reminds me of when Andy said to me “I don’t want to interrupt your love talk” when I asked him if he was going to talk to Glenn with me. “How was it last night?” “It was a mess!” confesses the stock broker engineer. “Did you get home late?” “I got home earlier than I would have,” says Bobby, whose last name I now know. I tell Glenn on Friday, “You once asked me what Bobby’s last name was.” I tell him. I’ll not write it here. “What have you got planned for Christmas?” one of my engineers asks me. I think it was Cary or Bobby, or maybe both of them. “Working,” I say. They understand that. My railroad engineers seem to be the people who most understand my willingness to work. They don’t say “sorry you have to work” they just accept it. Maybe I’m so attracted to them because they just let me work and don’t bother me about it. Or maybe they just want someone to work as hard as they do. Tonight, Christmas Eve, is a silent, train night. NO Metro link train runs today. Amtrak is operating a limited schedule. I see four freights; one plays Jingle Bells on the horn, making anyone here besides me, smile. It is the culmination of a long, messy week, but a good one. Everyone is safe and sound. The rain has stopped, and we’re ready for the next adventure. This week, my men of the railroad, delayed, stuck behind flooded tracks, twelve minutes out of Burbank as in the case of Glenn on the Antelope Valley line, all work very hard and deserve their pay checks. These guys are gold, but Glenn is still the best. His favorite Christmas carol is “Silent Night” and he asks me what I get my cats for Christmas. He’s my love on the rails, and to all my engineers I say Merry Christmas and to All a Good Silent Train Night.
Copyright © 2010 Shelley Alongi |