The Spaces In Between

Contributed by Matthew Hartwell on 29/09/08

The railroad used to pass through the heart of town, but that isn’t where the story, like so many others starts. It’s where it ends. The nature of sprawl has forced it further and further to the outskirts, reducing the value of the property surrounding it. Primarily hardware stores owned by guys with monosyllabic first names, low-income housing and diners caked in the film of cigarette smoke make up the patch around the station. At night, the streets are quiet. People stay inside.
It’s not a great neighborhood.

I’ve figured this out in the first few minutes of standing here, as the litter blows by, echoing the sentiments of a long-gone tumbleweed.

Without a railroad, this city never would have existed. Nobody would have thought to put anything in this empty stretch of the continent but cattle. It’s not even a decent area for crops, the soil’s too thin. But it was right at the center of four real cities. Cities with harbors, cities with futures. Cities with things these other centers of civilization needed.

So railroads were built. Metal and steel arteries connecting parts of the country in ways rivers never would have bothered. Running uphill, cutting through mountains, taking the most direct route, meandering only when it was cheaper or easier to do so.

Like most things, it’s cargo first, people second. People only want to go somewhere when there’s something worth getting there. Passenger tickets weren’t how a train made money. Somewhere along the line, it was suddenly classy to take the train. It stopped being an adventure, and so real nice cars were built, luxuriously furnished for people who wanted to go somewhere without leaving a room. This would be well before people started dressing up to go to the airports, which was already a dated practice before I was born.

I forced myself to ride the rails once, from New York to Pittsburgh. All the excitement of flying coach, but with leg room, and enough free seats you can escape the woman next to you who you’ve somehow accidentally convinced you’re interested in the backstory of her World of Warcraft character. She’s a Tauren. Even in the fairly open-ended realm of literary fantasy, I’m fairly sure that’s made up. Cow-people, she let’s me know. Why? Do the Greeks still own the copyright on Minotaurs?

The main disadvantage the railroad faced was its time-commitment. You got power outlets and snack bars and slightly less risk of plummeting to your death (there were still bridges, after all), but you had to trade time in hour increments. American trains aren’t built for fast commutes. We have too much country, and we spread our cities out in case of natural disaster, unlike Europe, who loves to put their eggs in one easily wiped-out-by-an-alien-armada-or-supervirus basket. Nine hours instead of a six hour drive or two hour flight. I hadn’t yet realized that such a time spent traveling can be liberating as well as crippling. This was before I decided to get back on. Before I had heard about the ghost train.

“Ghost train,” someone had said, and I immediately pictured Trainasaurus Wrecks, King of All Trains, riding a track made of bone, slicked with oil and blood, eating other trains and spreading terror throughout the land-locked shipping community. This was, sadly, not what was meant, though it didn’t stop me from doodling the Conductor’s Bane in the margins of my notebook. Trains and horror have long been interlinked, and it only seemed natural to assume anything in the supernatural realm of locomotives was going to lean towards the horror bent. Even when the train was considered a cultured endeavor, Murder happened on the Orient Express. Later on, Jamie Leigh Curtis, while still hot, found herself staving off death on the tracks.

This was an innocent ghost, though, like the headless engineer holding the lamp to warn of trouble ahead. The ghost of the railroad itself. Coursing at night through the heart of a nation it built and was almost forgotten by.

Kids still remember trains. Most will never see one outside of waiting at a crossing for it to go by, but they play with their Brio sets, and laugh at Thomas, and wait for the Polar Express. It has more charm to it than talking airplanes, which, I feel, should be more focused on where they’re flying.

Trains in media haven’t always been harbingers of doom. They often seem to bring trouble, though. Bad Day At Black Rock starts off on the wrong foot for Black Rock when the train stops for the first time in several years. Once Upon A Time In The West opens with a single passenger arriving via steam chariot, like a gunslinging angel of death. It ends with the railroad too, though it’s now seen as a sign of hope and progress. Connecting the country from ocean to ocean, replaced by flights from JFK to LAX.

Old media loves the railroad too. America’s folk-history is intertwined with the railroad, and John Henry himself laid rails connected to the one I’m standing by, even if he never really did.

The problem with a train, is that it can only go where tracks have been built. A car can drive off road. A plane can go off-course, wherever you point it. Without tracks, the train just sits there.

That’s the ghost train’s problem, it has to transfer through city after city to reach the coast anymore. As pieces of railway get removed, it loses routes. It’s slowly being stranded.

But, standing here at night, if you listen closely by the tracks, you can hear the whistle blowing, as the train comes down the line. And if you’ve got a ticket, and you’re waiting right on time, you can ride the ghost train, or at least that’s what I’m told.