It was another warm night where I live in Reno. People move outside when it isn’t cold. We look at the stars, sit by fires, tell stories and howl at the moon. Sitting by the fire my dad and I listened to the neighborhood coyotes swap calls with the neighbors and the neighbors dogs.
He told me about taking a trip by train with his brothers when he was a kid from New Orleans to Cincinatti. He remembered the smell of smoke from cigars and cigarettes being smoked by the passengers and looking out at the cities and countryside passing by from the gap between the cars as they headed north and the soot from the diesel engine plastered his face.
That made me think about trains, and how every kid plays with trains, reads books about trains, and knows a train when he sees one from a very early age. So here are a few links about trains.
How Trains Work
The first trains were Steam Locomotives and required a lot of coal to power large boilers to heat water until it became steam. Steam takes up a lot more space than water and that expansion pushes large pistions which pushes rods which pushes the wheels around in circles. Here’s how Steam Locomotive work.
Now most trains are Diesel-Electric Hybrids in which a very large Diesel Locomotive generates electricity and the wheels are driven by large electric motors that are powered by the diesel engine. Here’s how Diesel-Electric Hybrids work and below is part one of the Dirty Job Episode on how trains are built.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK1qI7dvs94[/youtube]Train Music
Probably the most iconic song written about trains in America is “The City of New Orleans” made famous by Arlo Guthire on his 1972 Album Hobo’s Lullaby
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ0JgqoF2W4&feature=related[/youtube]
Train Video
I shot this video on a trip to the Black Rock Desert a few years ago and edited it to The White Stripes
song Aluminum. There isn’t really anything remarkable about the train or the railway, except that it is in a rather remote place and the train rumbles up on you out of nowhere.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/4990435[/vimeo]
Train Story
This is a short short story I wrote a few years ago while riding an Amtrak train from Reno, NV to Salk Lake City, Utah and having breakfast with strangers in the dining car. To be efficient, they load passengers up 4 to a table whether they know eath other or not, It’s a great way to meet new people.
“You put vegetables on my omelet.” Lavon says holding out her plate into the aisle. Lester comes back.
“What did you want; you said you wanted an omelet?” They had teased each other, playing off it, flirting. Perhaps they knew each other from the trip out, perhaps this was just their natural and automatic rapport. read the rest of this story
Train Photos
Some Photos I took of the Amtrak Train on a station stop in Winnemucca, Nevada at dawn on the trip home from Salt Lake City.
Ant that concludes our first article on trains. What’s your favorite train song, story, photo, fact or video?
-Mike
Add comment