trains
Trivia question of the day:
What percentage of Americans live within earshot of a train?
I have never in my life until now done so, but now I do, and I kind of dig it. Martha's hovel in Chico last year was quite near the tracks next to Chico State, and as I lay in her guest bedroom I could hear that lonely sound for the first time since childhood, when I visited my uncle Temple who worked for the Wabash Railroad. He sensibly lived a few hundred yards from the tracks, and I remember that to go to work he would walk out back, past the barn, across the creek and the cornfield, and the train would slow down and pick him up.
That train sound really gives a place a sense of place-ness, eh?
Come to think of it, where the heck was that Chico train going? Chico is not on the way to anywhere that I know of!
Now here in Reno, there's not much doubt where the train is going -- it's taking LOTS of stuff to or from the Port of Oakland and the Central Valley to the wide world of the East, over the Truckee Pass. Think now, picture cruising down the big incline on I-80 from Truckee to Reno with yourself on the north side of the valley and the train tracks and its snow sheds on the south side (and my beautiful Truckee River in between!). It looks pretty skecthy up there, but it's a big time train route, the only way across the Sierras from Bakersfield to somewhere way the hell north. I've seen tanker trains, grain bin trains, freight trains, even passenger trains, and they all go right through my neighborhood, between Second Street and Fourth Street.
More to the point, they go right through the middle of casino-land; Harrah's, CalNeva, and Fitzgerald's on the south side, Eldorado, Silver Legacy, and Circus Circus on the north. So here you have your casino clientele, possibly the most drunken, heedless, oblivious, crazed population of humans to be found anywhere outside an institution, and blasting straight through them, between their last drink and bet and their next, you have an 80 car train headed from Oakland to Chicago. Those engineers hit that horn about 1/2 mile from the casinos, and they sit on it for the whole time they are passing through. Oh yes, you know when the train is coming through.
Under the guise of saving us all from this dangerous combination, the lust for casino lebensraum has motivated the biggest construction boondoggle Reno has seen for quite a while, the ReTRAC project, which is simply a big-assed trench for the trains to run in.
Now of course it's a project for the betterment of us all, but in my heart I know that the downtown casinos are the necessary and sufficient reason for the whole thing. I'm sure that after it's done they will snarf up that 50 yard gap instantly and fill it with parking garages and slot machines.
A sensible project that will speed the gentrification of my neighborhood (and do wonders for my property value), but I will miss the lonely sound of that train coming through.
What percentage of Americans live within earshot of a train?
I have never in my life until now done so, but now I do, and I kind of dig it. Martha's hovel in Chico last year was quite near the tracks next to Chico State, and as I lay in her guest bedroom I could hear that lonely sound for the first time since childhood, when I visited my uncle Temple who worked for the Wabash Railroad. He sensibly lived a few hundred yards from the tracks, and I remember that to go to work he would walk out back, past the barn, across the creek and the cornfield, and the train would slow down and pick him up.
That train sound really gives a place a sense of place-ness, eh?
Come to think of it, where the heck was that Chico train going? Chico is not on the way to anywhere that I know of!
Now here in Reno, there's not much doubt where the train is going -- it's taking LOTS of stuff to or from the Port of Oakland and the Central Valley to the wide world of the East, over the Truckee Pass. Think now, picture cruising down the big incline on I-80 from Truckee to Reno with yourself on the north side of the valley and the train tracks and its snow sheds on the south side (and my beautiful Truckee River in between!). It looks pretty skecthy up there, but it's a big time train route, the only way across the Sierras from Bakersfield to somewhere way the hell north. I've seen tanker trains, grain bin trains, freight trains, even passenger trains, and they all go right through my neighborhood, between Second Street and Fourth Street.
More to the point, they go right through the middle of casino-land; Harrah's, CalNeva, and Fitzgerald's on the south side, Eldorado, Silver Legacy, and Circus Circus on the north. So here you have your casino clientele, possibly the most drunken, heedless, oblivious, crazed population of humans to be found anywhere outside an institution, and blasting straight through them, between their last drink and bet and their next, you have an 80 car train headed from Oakland to Chicago. Those engineers hit that horn about 1/2 mile from the casinos, and they sit on it for the whole time they are passing through. Oh yes, you know when the train is coming through.
Under the guise of saving us all from this dangerous combination, the lust for casino lebensraum has motivated the biggest construction boondoggle Reno has seen for quite a while, the ReTRAC project, which is simply a big-assed trench for the trains to run in.
Now of course it's a project for the betterment of us all, but in my heart I know that the downtown casinos are the necessary and sufficient reason for the whole thing. I'm sure that after it's done they will snarf up that 50 yard gap instantly and fill it with parking garages and slot machines.
A sensible project that will speed the gentrification of my neighborhood (and do wonders for my property value), but I will miss the lonely sound of that train coming through.