95 Cars

I had the great opportunity this evening to wait for a 95 car train to cross an intersection.  I pulled up to the crossing just as the lights and arms started to come down. My initial thoughts included a brief regret for not being 30 seconds earlier and slight annoyance for being stuck. I'm happy to say that those thoughts quickly passed and gave way to awe, memories and counting.

If you can get past the whole "sitting still when you have somewhere to go" thing it isn't hard to be impressed by a train.  Tonight's diesel powered behemoth carried 95 cars of shipping containers, unusually sized tanks and slightly perforated cars whose contents I can never quite discern. One of the commercials on the radio boasts the tons and tons of freight hauled per mile on a single gallon of fuel. I don't have any weight estimates for this train but those gallons where sure getting their work in tonight.

It is pretty unusual for me to get stopped by a train these days.  My usual routes don't require much interaction with crossings.  When I was a kid the opposite was true. We crossed the same tracks I stopped at tonight countless times. On the way to baseball games or to Nino's Pizza Plus after baseball games, those tracks were crossed regularly and we sat and waited almost as much as we crossed.

I'm not sure if I've ever actually counted the cars on a train from start to finish. It seems odd to think that, but I don't remember that as being part of our railroad routines.  Instead we'd just sit, or hope that the train wasn't slowing down and we'd definitely try to discern if it was. But tonight even when the brakes briefly squealed I just counted while the rhythmic metronome of wheel on rail washed over me as the lights flashed and I sat.