Daddy, What's A Train?

Daddy what's a train?
Is it something I can ride?
Does it carry lots of grown up folks?
And little kids inside?
Is it bigger than our house?
How can I explain?
When my little boy asks me,
Daddy, whats a train?

That's a verse from a folk song by the great Utah Philips. My Dad called on Sunday to see if me and the honyocks wanted to see a live steam engine.

Train nostalgia is kind of like steamboat nostalgia, except steamboat fans don't tell you that all your rush-hour nightmares could be solved if only we had a good light ship system.

I saw a steam engine on the move once. Union Pacific had a couple of restored passenger cars full of VIPs they were pulling behind one, and I happened along a stretch of highway clogged with people waiting to see it. I pulled over and waited, and it was worth it. It was a powerful thing to see as a guy who drives a car, I can only imagine the religious significance it had for people who got around on horses.

They had a line of kids and their parents waiting to check this puppy out. It was at Union Station, a tax-subsidized white elephant in Kansas City. If you waited long enough, they'd hoist you into the engineer's cabin and let you pull the rope for the whistle:

They blew the whistle to make the kids happy. It made them cry. It also made them hold their ears.



There was other fun stuff at Union Station, including restored railroad cars with living fossils who can regale you with stories of how it was to travel first class in the Pullman car days. It absolutely enthralls children.



But there's more. The train behind the steam engine was, if I understood correctly, a Mardi Gras theme 'Spirit of Louisiana' from Canada. Who decided to let Canadians manage a Mardi Gras thing obviously didn't take adequate notice of what Canadians do with bacon. Only in Canada can delicious crispy bacon be made into a Daisy canned ham. Not to mention CorelDraw and socialized medicine.



Yes, I click a lot of pictures. Em has dubbed me a 'shutterbug.' I think I'm compensating for years of sharing a camera with someone who got on my case for taking extraneous shots. If we were talking about film, where there is material and process costs, I can see it. But with digital media, where I can burn a CD for less than I can mail a bill, a picture costs nothing. Yes, a digital camera eats batteries, but with rechargeables even that expense is practically nill.

I have a friend who's a professional photographer cum photo editor. She takes amazing pictures, and I'm sure part of that is her education. Part of it is her equipment, cameras with huge lenses as big as her thigh. But mainly, she clicks a lot. I've known her to use six or eight rolls of film in a half hour. Statistics would tell you that there's bound to be a few good ones in a batch that large.

I've never had the confidence or the budget to snap that much with film, but with a digital, why not? I bought a 1 GB card for my camera because it was on sale for less than a 256 MB. And with 4 megapixel camera, a gig of card is enough for a week at Disneyland.

Oh, but back to the train thing: There was also the museum stuff they have all the time, including a huge room of N-guage trains that the aforementioned batteries failed me for. Miles of track for a train small enough to cruise into a prescription vial, pretty impressive. They also have a handcar and caboose and locomotive you can get in, including a modern computerized version that Mo ran to almost sure derailment.

And a diesel with an analog, 1970s sort of cockpit.


I hope Kansas City never gets light rail, I just want to put my heresy out front. I like trains as much as the next guy as long as the next guy isn't my nephew Marshall. But moving 100 tons of steel that happens to have a few commuters standing on it is about as 'green' as an oilspill. I even like subways, but until you convince another ten million people from New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to move into the KC metro, it would be better if we each had our own Hummer H1s.

Oh, but back to our little field trip. Naturally, after a while, the kids got used to the sound...