Living With Gramps - A Trip To The Train Station

My grandfather always loved trains. His fondest childhood memory was when he woke Christmas morning to find a toy train circling a track on the living room floor. His father worked at a crossing, his brother worked at a crossing, and he worked at a crossing. He was the one who had to lower the bar to block road traffic when a train had to go through. It was also his job to signal a train to stop when dispatch needed to talk to the conductor. He told me multiple times that he had to do this once and the conductor was not pleased. He never said anything to my grandfather, but went straight to the board to contact dispatch meanwhile giving a look that my grandfather interpreted as “Who is this dumb kid and why is he stopping my train?”

Another time, shortly after his father died unexpectedly, a train rolled past while he was distracted with grief and he realized he had not put the bar down. No traffic was around, but he put it down in a hurry so that no one riding the back of the train could see that it was still up and report him. He told these stories to me with a bit of a smirk as if he got away with something that nobody knew about.

Out of nostalgia he drafted me every other month to drive him to the train station to watch the trains go by. There used to be a museum, but it was cleaned out a couple years before I got here. He pointed out the different kinds of trains going by. “That one is an Acela.”

He was very interested in the wires and how the folding arm on top of the trains kept their connection. “They’re all electric now. They don’t use steam or diesel anymore,” he said. “See those two wires? One hangs from the other.”

Dan: “Yeah.”

Gramps: “They do that because it’s impossible to make a wire perfectly straight. There’s always some sag, so they hang the lower wire from the first so that one can be straight.”

Dan: “That means the connectors must be different lengths.”

Gramps: “Right.”

I looked carefully at the two cables. The top one sagged substantially between the poles. The lower one sagged too between each of the connectors it hung from – but only a tiny bit. There were many more connectors than poles. It was obvious to me that the lower wire would sag just as much as the wire above it if it were attached in as few points, so why not just have one wire with more poles to keep it straighter? I reasoned that it could only be because poles were so much more expensive than the connectors. At first, I marveled at the precision necessary to make connectors of just the right length and attach them in just the right places, but then I realized they could be moved. They were only attached by loops – hanging by loop from the wire above and the wire below sitting in the lower loops. I realized that once they were on, one could slide them around until the lower wire was as straight as possible. I pointed this out to gramps, but he didn’t like my idea.

“No, you can’t move them around! You don’t understand anything!” I gave him multiple chances to explain better, but he could not. He also vehemently denied that there was any sag in the lower wire, but I could see it with my own eyes!

That was the first visit. Every time after that, he pointed out the two wires again, following up by saying, “but you don’t care about that. You don’t want to learn about that.”

A typical trip consists of parking, inching our way up to the platform for ten minutes, waiting anywhere from zero to thirty minutes for a train to go by while he makes smalltalk about some tracks being more worn than others, then inching back to the car for ten minutes, and then driving home, after which he is always exhausted and takes a nap. Sometimes I do too.

However, he always thinks it worth it just to watch a train move. It brings him such joy. I can’t blame him. Not much brings out the little boy in me like being less than thirty feet from several dozen tons of steel rushing by at 140 mph. “If you stand too close to the edge, the low air pressure can suck you right into the train,” he told me. Now, that’s what I like to learn about.