I got stopped by a train the other day and sat at the crossing for a few minutes as the cars rocketed by. Several years ago, the city of Wabash approved a petition for the trains to travel through town at a higher rate of speed than they had been allowed to run previously. (I don’t think the city had much choice. Really, it was a formality to make us feel like we had some control in the matter.)

I never was one of those who got impatient waiting on trains. I’d sit, enjoyably biding my time by reading the names on the cars until the little red caboose came along, signaling the end of the train, like the punctuation at the end of a sentence.

Watching trains isn’t as much fun as it used to be. Because of the speed limit changes, the cars now whiz by in a blur and, of course, that appealing little car at the end is long gone. Now, you don’t even recognize the end of the train until the train just isn’t there any more. Very unsatisfying.

Congress should pass a law forcing railroads to, once again, conclude their trains with a caboose. It’s the least they can do if we have to be forced to twiddle our thumbs waiting on them.

Many of the old time railroads are gone, too, or merged into something else but their names will always recall the love affair we once had with trains. Songs have been written about them like, “The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe” and “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo”.

Railroad terms added to our language. For instance, most of us still want to “make the grade”.

Even the grades, stops and passes had exciting names, such as the Sandpatch Grade, Horse Shoe Curve, Spuyten Duyvil and the Blue Ridge and Cajon Pass.

Often railroad names simply informed us of their territory as railroad tracks began to criss-cross the country — the Canadian Pacific, the Erie, the Kansas City Southern. Some were so familiar to us back then, we just thought of them by their nicknames, thus, the Baltimore and Ohio was simply the B&O; the Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville was the Monon. There were also the Soo Line, the Nickel Plate Road and the Cottonbelt.

Even individual trains and engines were known affectionately by their own titles: the City of New Orleans, the California Zephyr, the Rocky Mountain Rocket, the Grand Canyon Limited, Daylight, Empire Builder and the Rebel of the Rockies.

Unfortunately, the romance has been stripped from railroads as with so much else in modern life. Compare the architecture and decoration of your historic old downtown buildings with the ugly unadorned uniformity of the newer ones. And speaking of architecture, without a doubt, some of the most beautiful structures from cities like New York to small towns such as Wabash were the train depots.

When I was a little girl, my father was a troubleshooter, and we moved a lot, back and forth across the United States. Dad preferred traveling by train, and I remember the anticipation of waiting by the track as the engine got closer and louder, steaming down the track until it whooshed to a stop in front of us. And inside, looking forward to starched white table cloths and kindly conductors and sleeping berths and the ever-changing view of America outside the windows.

I just don’t think planes and semi-trucks and buses can compare to the thrill of adventure you get from trains, whether they are pullmans filled with passengers or long lines of cars carrying the harvest of America’s grain fields or ore from the iron range.

Railroad men used to be some of the country’s most elite workers. They were envied because they were highly paid and their jobs were secure (we thought). Back in the day, I knew lots of men whose goal was to “get on with the railroad.” 

Part of the land that is now Paradise Spring Historical Park in Wabash was given to us by the railroad. The spot where log cabins commemorating our history stand now was once the train yard with its great roundhouse. I wish we’d had foresight enough to realize that the roundhouse was history, too, but most evidence of the railroad center we used to be has disappeared.

So, I just sit and watch as the trains zip by, still relishing the nostalgic names and the memories. Lots of train cars are covered with graffiti now so they are almost moving art galleries. I’m not bothered by that. Some of it is creative and colorful and beautiful. I usually can’t read the words thanks to the style of writing graffiti artists use in which one letter rolls over another. It is vandalism, I guess, when you come right down to it, but still, I rather admire the daring of the train decorators. So now we have graffiti instead of cabooses, not exactly progress, but one more sign that life moves on and the new always, eventually, overtakes the old.

• Vicki Williams is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. She can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com.