She Likes Trains: Tales From The Rails
Shelley J Alongi

 

You never know the stories you’re going to hear at the train station. I guess that might be part of its allure since October 2008 when I made my first trip here post Chatsworth accident. Amazing ladies, and the bath. What kinds of tales can you hear from the rails? They’re not always about trains. Guess there’s my number one engineer and the General Code of Operating Rules t meet that requirement.

Amazing Ladies

I have adopted a saying that fits the situation nicely over the last few months. This is better than TV! I don’t have a TV right now. It went out about two years ago and I haven’t bought another one yet. I think I’m almost ready to by one but let me pay off the credit card first. It wont matter. I won’t miss anything till then, because the train station, the show, is better than TV. Robert the attorney once told me I was hard up for entertainment, in a teasing kind of way, of course, as I stopped to take stock of who was present at the foamer location. The foamer location refers to a set of benches between the bridge and the east end of the platform where young and old alike string their computer cables, Alicia is one of the computer’s names, Danny’s mom Elena hang out there, not someone I usually want to talk to for very long, she is a perpetual drain on the positive attitude supply; she doesn’t add to it. The older guys, Bret the traffic signal fixer, whatever they call him, Scott, Mark, Tim who set my alarm once, sometimes Chris who loaned me his cell phone to make a call to the cable company so they could check my modem when I still lived in Fullerton. My cell phone battery had gone out on the same day and I was without communication devices. There is, amazingly enough, still a pay phone in the archway that leads trackside from the front of the station, a device that Bruce often occupies asking Amtrak agents about late trains. Sometimes, passing the table on the right and entering the door of the Santa Fe Café you can hear him playing with the coin return and commanding the automated Amtrak train, Julie, to let him talk to an agent. “Agent” rings out, not so loud, really, but definitely noticeable in the quiet night. I guess Julie the automated agent isn’t enough for Bruce.

It is here at the set of benches where the young and old meet that Robert pronounces that I am hard up for entertainment. No, I’m just watching the show, as I used to tell Glenn. And it is a show! Tonight, it is definitely better than TV. Lights. Camera. Action.

Tonight is one of the nights when the trains are not on time. 785 does have a habit of being fashionably late. Tonight it is 784 heading for San Diego that is scheduled for a 6:15 arrival time, 25 minutes late from its scheduled 5:40 time. This is the train that occupies track 3 before Metrolink 708 on its way to Riverside pulls up to its three car marker, the place where Frank the first engineer to talk to me asked me where I was headed, the place where I talked to Glenn, where I asked him which hand operates the throttle. The throttle is a handle on the locomotive and you really do operate it with the left hand. All hail the left hand!

Now, Wednesday, I enter the Santa Fe Café and order a double cheeseburger from Wendy. I sit outside in the balmy, breezy evening, the usual strains of sixties, seventies and eighties music floating through the airwaves, the colorful characters dotting the platform, the loves of our lives, freights, occasionally satiating our desire for satisfaction. If Mick jagger can’t get any satisfaction, sometimes freight watchers are lacking in that commodity, too; long stretches of time as the sun slides lower in the sky pass when suddenly in the distance the cheerful glow of a yellow signal makes the eyes of the communicants open wide, hearts pound, pens come to the ready, hands prepare to wave, love calls. This may be the reason why Amtrak 784 is late.

It is before all this anticipation that I take my place outside at the rocky wrought iron table in my metal patio chair, wide-bottomed, sturdy, used to the elements, ready for its occupant, and wait.

A man takes a spot at the second table to the left of the door int the café. I wish I had a fuller description of him, I guess I could make it up, but the conversation makes up for where my creativity lacks in scope.

I learn the following from a liberally broadcasted one sided conversation on Nicholas’s cell phone, so any misinterpretations are strictly accidental. The names of the living and the dead have not been changed to protect the innocent or the guilty. Unless, of course, Nicholas makes up his own names. He now sits down, waiting for the late 784.

Jeff, he says, did you save my number? Expletive deleted, you didn’t? Aren’t the ladies in san Diego amazing? I could possibly get hired to work at a restaurant right on the ocean. I’m looking for a sugar mama he says, someone to buy me drinks, whatever, and then he says he can hang out with the ladies. The servers make $300 to $500 in tips on the weekends, he says.
 
“I get hammered,” he says. Plan to have July 4 off we’re going to Christmas’s house. Jaeger and the house and have the day off. Let me know if you get it off.

Nicholas doesn’t’ seem at all concerned that someone sitting near him like me might not really want to know what’s going on, though it does make for a good story, of course. The cool, balmy breeze caresses, the music plays, the purring of EMDS. Serve as a fitting backdrop to this animated discussion of things personal and really of no interest to me.

Janice and Bob show up, Bob positioning his walker in the corner of the wroght iron fence closest to the east end of the platform, that would be to the left of the trackside door to the café.

Nicholas sees the approaching figures of two young ladies dressed in wedding atire, it seems, looking for a place to take pictures. People do this here, waiting for the backdrop of a train to provide them with a unique setting for their most public intimate moment. One such couple strolls the platform at one time, stopping to indulge in a kiss or two, building up to their wedded bliss. But there is no such display now, only two ladies dressed in pink, sitting in the cold in their wedding clothes, being complimented on how pretty they look.

Two other ladies approach. The bridesmaids or brides depart the scene and Nicholas begins a round of flirting that would leave don Juan breathless.

“Have you seen that guy before?” I ask Janice sotto voche, giving verbal directions rather than pointing. I read once in a spy novel where someone gave an instruction to another person not to point but to verbally tell them where someone was located. This works here now, I could have pointed, but he was obviously enthralled with his charming and wasn’t listening though he might have noticed a hand In his direction. I notice he didn’t flirt with me; he probably knew I was more hard-hearted than Heart-Harded Hannah. Hard-hearted Hannah, the bell of Georgia, in a choral arrangement of a barber shop quartet I heard just recently. I’m only hard-hearted when my personal space is invaded, but for one engineer I’m soft-hearted as a rabbit’s fur. Anyhway, back to Nicholas and his cagey flirting.

“He’s giving her his phone number,” Janice tells me, a woman always interested in a social scene. Shes the one who went with me to show me where Glenn was in the cab.

“Maybe we can hang out, soon,” he tells the 28-year-old woman. She seems cool to the idea. Wonder if he thinks she’s amazing!

Nicholas leaves us as 784 pulls to its spot on the tracks, bell clanging, gently purring, inviting all to come aboard! Nicholas is now whisked off to his new adventures. Hope he finds an amazing lady, a sugar mama, or at least a decent paying job by the ocean.

Hit and Miss

NO trip to the train station is complete these days without at least one conversation with one engineer. Soon after Nicholas’s amazing adventure I head over to the south side of paradise to make my usual train meet. I don’t’ know what has happened to Cary today, I’m sure I must have seen him. But tonight now I await bobby, looking at my phone. Metrolink 608 it says has been stopped at Buena Park and is running fifteen minutes late.

“Are you looking for the engineers?” Curt’s voice drifts across the cool crisp air to me from the north side of paradise.

“No,” I say, knowing that theangels Express is there but focusing on not missing 608.

“They’re right behind you!”

Indeed, they are.

“I got a call today about Tuesday,” says one of them to his colleague as they make their way to the elevator. I look in their direction but we don’t talk. They don’t ask me what I’m doing there, they just go on their way. I don’t want to miss bobby’s train. I wait a few more minutes and here It comes, the bell announcing its presence.

“They stopped us at Buena park,” he says. The police were chasing a guy. They were on the railroad tracks, if they hadn’t stopped the train it would have hit them. That’s what we need, bobby with another fatality. Glenn may have racked up fatality number 8 but I still haven’t talked to him. I assume yes. But let’s not have bobby get one more. The police probably don’t want to unergo a long investigation, either.

“How was your weekend?” asks Bobby now looking out of his window at me. He sounds interested.

“I didn’t get a weekend. I worked all weekend.”

“Every weekend?”

“No, just the last two weekends. Over time.”

He releases the brakes and I wave. It is time for Bobby to go off to his own adventures.

Just How to Take A Bath

But maybe the cake this week is taken by the man who tells me just how to take a bath. The best story isn’t about the engineers, the locomotives, or the people who miss the trains. It comes this time from a railfan whom everyone talks about, because he simply talks so much. But he can tell a story. This day Monday June 13, the last day I make it to the station this week, he tells me quite a good one. It’s all about how to take a bath. I’ve never had anyone young or old describe in such detail not really how to take a bath, those hygienic motions are probably pretty standard, we all figure them out somehow, but the way in which the bath is drawn and redrawn is the point here. “I’ve never known anyone who can take three hours to take a bath,” Wally says one of his friends says to him as we head down Valencia to Commonwealth to Brookhurst and turn toward my new digs.

Yes it’s another night at the train station and once again as I’ve done several times for the past few weeks I’ve managed to swing a ride home with the station’s most talkative rail fan. He’s into cheap entertainment, he says, he is the one who drove us to try and find the distressed freight about a month ago. He’s a great describer, by the way and he’s pretty smart. He never tries to help me up or down stairs, he doesn’t try to give me directions, he just talks and tells me where to turn and we get there eventually, as Glenn says. Yes, we get there eventually and that eventual destination on some nights means my house. I’ll take any of Wally’s stories over an hour and a half wait for a bus. I don’t mind waiting so much, I usually find something to do, go sit in the doughnut shop, go to Starbucks, eat food out of my bag, read news from News Line. I find plenty to keep me occupied even if it’s just day dreaming about my number one engineer, a man with a beard and a mustache and glasses, or planning some scene for an engineer story, thinking of a question to ask, or just enjoying the fact that I’m not running and running here or there or everywhere.

So tonight, as we return down the main street in his little Honda whose model I’ve forgotten and look at businesses old and new he launches into his customary novel length explanations of everything.
 
This is how you do it, he says, you run the shower, and then clean the soap scum, run the water, sit down. When the water cools you get up and get in the shower again. Lather up like you would if you were taking a bath, rinse everything off, wash your feet and hands and everything else and then run the rag around the tub to remove any soap scum, again. Now, fill the tub again and sit down. Enjoy. Drain water. Dry off. Dress.

Three hours? Sure, if you have nothing else to do. It’s what you need to do when you have time; it’s what you do when you retire. Glenn told me once he didn’t know what he would do when he retired. Maybe he’ll take a three hour bath. I hope he won’t have the company of 22 domestic cats.

You never know the stories you’re going to hear at the train station. I guess that might be part of its allure since October, 2008, when I made my first trip here cpost Chatsworth accident. Amazing ladies, and the bath. What kinds of tales can you hear from the rails? They’re not always about trains. Guess there’s my number one engineer and the General Code of Operating rules for trains to meet that requirement!

 

 

Copyright © 2011 Shelley J Alongi
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"