Both Kay and I grew up near railroad tracks. It wasn’t something we discovered about each other right away — it just surfaced one day the way the good details always do, casually, in the middle of something else. Two kids from opposite ends of the country, one from Alhambra, California, one from Minerva, Ohio, and both of them falling asleep at night to the sound of iron wheels on iron rails.
Her grandfather was an engineer. Mine was a switchman. The distinction mattered, at least to the men who held those jobs. Engineers were up front, in the cab, running the show. Switchmen worked the ground, routing trains from one track to another at the junction points — less glamour, more mud, and a level of focus that didn’t leave much room for error.
Kay told me that her grandfather would blow the whistle when he rolled past. She didn’t say it like it was a small thing. It wasn’t. There was a whole world in that gesture — a man at the controls of something enormous, finding a way to say I see you to the people he loved waiting beside the tracks. One blast of steam, and everyone on that porch knew he was thinking of them.
The tracks in Alhambra were about five houses up from the end of our block — close enough that you could hear them through a closed window, close enough that my friends and I considered them ours. We’d lay pennies on the rails and wait. A freight train would roll over them and spit them back out flat and warm, stretched into smooth copper ovals that no longer looked like money and no longer looked like pennies. We kept them anyway.
When the freights slowed down coming through, we’d jump on. That was the real game. We’d ride until the train started picking up speed, and then it became a question of nerve — who was going to hang on longest before dropping back onto the gravel. The rule was simple: whoever jumped off first was a rotten egg.
I was a rotten egg most of the time.
My grandfather’s railroad years were in Oklahoma, which meant I only saw him at work once. I was small. He took me out on the sidecar — a low, open vehicle that maintenance crews used to move between switch points along the line. It had large handles, the kind you had to pump up and down to get the thing rolling. I remember the handles more than anything else. The effort of it. The way the whole contraption resisted before it found its rhythm and began to move.
I don’t know that I understood, at that age, what a switchman actually did. I just knew my grandfather was part of the machinery that made the trains go where they were supposed to go. That felt like enough.
Kay and I never made too much of the coincidence. But it was there — two grandchildren of railroad men, grown up and ended up together, still living a short walk from the sound of a train going somewhere in the dark.
Stories of memories 