Treasures New & Old; "From Glory to Rust"

A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a long e.mail with a link to a video of dozens of old abandoned steam engines. He is a train enthusiast and thought maybe I am, too.

I watched this parade to the end. These sad remnants of past glories were photographed in their pitiful situs and present humiliation. Sic transit gloria mundi—thus passes away worldly glory, or something like that.

Well, in those 15 minutes of the video, I learned more about rusty metal than I ever thought possible.

I fear that for me trains have about the same mystique that automobiles have: Trains may, if all goes well, take one from place to place, as needed.

Airplanes are in the same category; again, if all goes well, they get you there.

Now ships may be in another category altogether, but in the end, what really matters is the people you are with when you get there.

About those huge, numerous, rusting engines, why does no one reclaim all that material in the many abandoned trains that are just standing there?

Couldn’t the metal be reclaimed? Surely the original steel was of a good grade.

Railroad engines and cars contain some wood and it hasn’t all been soaked in rain and snow.

The plastic could be melted down, couldn’t it, and re-extruded or molded? We are terribly wasteful, not to mention the many eyesores that could be removed from sylvan dells and vast panoramas of space.

We waste space and ruin scenery as well as manufactured material.

It’s not that I don’t like trains or am entirely indifferent to them as entities with intrinsic interest apart from getting where I want to go.

I’ve had train rides in several countries: in Central America, South America, Egypt, Italy, France, India, and maybe Russia (i. e., how did we get from Latvia back to Moscow?).

Some trips were more pleasurable than others, but as to a romantic aspect to trains as a class, I have not been bitten by that particular bug.

I can understand that bug, though, because I do like ocean voyages, that sense of being on an adventure in a separate world without the usual daily cares and responsibilities and with the splash of the ever-audible wake.

The sea does have a mystique: all that history!

Of voyages I have had three long ones, each one a matter of weeks. I never get seasick but heartily and happily enjoy every meal.

On the other hand, a cruise just wouldn’t do the job. How tame!

Train travel is extremely expensive in the USA, and yet there are no guarantees of convenience, comfort, or prompt arrival.

Once I had to ride hours and hours through Washington and Oregon, at night, in driving rain, on a rattletrap bus to circumvent an area which had been subjected to many days of torrential rains leading to landslides. Some were possible or likely; some had already roared down a mountainside.

Another time, in California, the train had to be past a certain point by a certain time of night because after that, the tracks were closed for repairs in a tunnel.

Our train was late so, off we all went onto another rattletrap bus that churned my brain.

One Christmas trip home from California was disrupted in Portland when the switches on the tracks west of Cut Bank froze solid.

Another time I took Amtrak from New York City to Havre. It was the dead of winter and I learned how beautiful a landscape all in black and grey can be.

A long train trip in southern Mexico could have been exciting.

That ended at a concrete barrier, on the other side of which was a small river.

Beyond that was a genuine jungle in which a revolution was being conducted, four reasons why the train couldn’t go any farther.

We didn’t see any fighting, though.

In the video that started all this rumination, some of the engines were so old that their smokestacks were funnel-shaped. Those were generations outdated before the turn of the past century.

At the station in Havre, an old steam engine, but not as old as that, is parked and kept oiled and seemingly ready to roll at any minute. It is a magnet for small boys, even though it never moves.

Now I’m going to worry about all those ugly old engines cluttering up the countryside and turning to rust.

Somebody should do something!