wooo woooo

<> I love trains. Not the model ones (although they are kind of cool, too); the big honking trains that carry freight and delay traffic across this nation of ours. I don’t love them as some kind of metaphor for life, or for the idea of traveling to exotic locales, or their (supposed) air of mystery a’ la the Orient Express, I just like them. A simple pleasure, if you will. I especially love trying to count all of the cars as I watch them clitter-clack across the tracks. One time in Daytona, I counted almost two hundred cars on one train. Rather than being annoyed at the delay, (which was not utterly insignificant) I was mildly thrilled. One hundred ninety-eight cars! I remember thinking, It’ll probably be a long time before I see that many on one train again.
Right now, the hamster in your reader’s brain is running rapidly on his squeaky wheel. You are thinking He must have just seen an even bigger train, otherwise why is he mentioning it. Close, but not quite. It was actually a smallish train, only thirty-eight cars, but it was the circumstances that spurred me to write about it. You see, this most recent train stopped. Just stopped dead on the tracks. I had been watching it whiz by as I approached the other cars halted at the crossing. When the last train car (although, since I cannot with all veracity name it a caboose, I shall not call it as such) eked past the edge of the crossing, the train stopped. This, of course, kept the crossing activated and immediately and visibly spiked the irritation level of everyone (except me) waiting at the crossing. People began flipping their cars into impromptu U-turns, unwilling to be delayed even a second on their way to whatever destination had called them out. I watched with increasing curiosity as a worker leapt from one of the cars, and walked around the base of the train, communicating to what I can only assume was the conductor hanging out the window of the last car. After some minutes, the train began moving again in the opposite direction. Yes, the last car became the first, and the train went back the way it came. On second thought, maybe trains can be a metaphor for life.