It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry...*

Who doesn't love a train?  Well, the good folks of Kirkwood certainly do.  Many of them showed up on Thursday to take pictures and videos of The Union Pacific 844.  The 844 is one of two steam locomotives Union Pacific still operates from time to time because, as any four-year-old (or 40-year-old) will tell you, trains are cool.  Here's a link to some cool history about the UP steam locomotives.

I still have my kids' wooden train set (and they are now 18 and 22), a mixture of Brio and Thomas the Tank Engine components, covered in juice stains that don't come out even after soaking in a hot, sudsy tub of water for hours.  I can still see my son, at about four or five years old, standing over the train table at various area toy stores, seriously intent on building a train track configuration like no other.  Today is his 18th birthday, so those particular train memories are now bittersweet. 

The UP steam locomotive stuck around for a 15-minute Whistle Stop in Kirkwood before chugging on to its downtown St. Louis destination at S. Ewing and Papin streets.  People of all ages apparently like trains so much that many people made a day of it, bringing lawn chairs and picnic baskets with them and staying put until the 844 arrived, despite the incessant chittering drone of our almost-two-week-old cicadas, a sound only a train could drown out.

Who doesn't love the lonesome sound of a train?  About 40 trains whistle past my office everyday in downtown Kirkwood, but I never mind (and they can get pretty loud).  The 844 has a different kind of sound from those, of course.  It's a sound that evokes a longing to travel and explore, to move on.  It's a sound American songwriters have been trying to describe for more than a hundred years.  It is music to our ears.

Trains represent the American spirit and embody our common mythology.  Songwriters know this.   Just a quick Wikipedia search resulted in the names of literally hundreds of train songs, but here are just a few you might recognize:  "Downbound Train" (Bruce Springsteen), "Across the Track Blues" (Duke Ellington), "Brakeman's Blues" (Jimmie Rodgers), "Folsom Prison Blues" (Johnny Cash), and my personal favorite, which is also the title of this post.  Here's a line from that last one:

"Don't the moon look good, mama, Shinin' through the trees? Don't the brakeman look good, mama, Flagging down the Double E? Don't the sun look good goin' down over the sea?"* 

But don't take my word for it.  Check out the photos here, and the next time you're in Kirkwood, bring a chair and a picnic basket, park yourself on the Memorial Walkway that winds along the tracks, pull up some train songs on your iPod, and sit back and enjoy the trains. 

*Words and Music by Bob Dylan