Night Train All Lit Up

 

This morning I had a one-on-one meeting with my boss, and we spent the first few minutes talking about sports, not just the two bad football games this weekend. Then suddenly the light right above me burned out. I walked with my colleague at lunch, and in the afternoon I participated in a roundtable discussion with some graduate students and a faculty member about travel and reimbursement questions. That was about as exciting as my day got, but there is something I forgot to mention about yesterday:

As I walked to my car to head out to band practice, I thought I heard a train coming. I stopped for a moment and listened, but then it seemed like the sound was going away from me, so I figured I'd just missed the train. But then it seemed like it was getting louder, so I turned off my radio and rolled my windows down a bit to hear the train whistle, if it blew. As I got to the intersection of our little street and the main street in our neighborhood, I was facing the train tracks. Then I saw the train coming, and it was lit up! Not like the Holiday Train, of course, but more lit up than I've ever seen a train at night. Even the cars had lights on them. I would have liked to make a video, but it probably wouldn't have turned out. Nobody was behind me, so I idled there for a little bit, just watching the train and listening to its whistle as it approached the intersection. Trains used to pass by frequently, but suddenly it seemed like the number going by decreased a lot, and then they only came at night. Of course, this was a night train, which was why it was so fun to see it all lit up. I just happened to be in a spot to see it, rather than just hearing it from my house, late at night, which is what usually happens. Why are there fewer trains now? Something to do with the economy? And this was a short train too, so I wasn't late for band practice because of stopping to watch it, since there wasn't much of it to watch. My neighbor says you can judge how good the economy is by how long the trains are. I wonder if that's true?

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