Rusty Rails

I like to watch railroad tracks, or, more specifically, abandoned or little used rails. They are a link to what was, the way we traveled, the way we got things, the way we even celebrated holidays.
Train time was an event. When my brother was born, my grandmother came over from New Hampshire on the train to take care of my sister and me while my mother was in the hospital. We drove downtown to the stately granite, oak and polished brass station to await her arrival. A few people waited in the darkening evening. There were folks waiting for arrivals such as we were, others leaving for parts unknown, one or two sailors departing for leave from the naval air station. Now and again we would go out onto the cold platform, even though we knew what time the train would arrive. And arrive it did. The rails had been converted to diesel by then, but we could hear the lonesome horn to the west, echoing as the engine passed through Deep Cut on the old Maine Central Line. The train stopped with a squeal of steel on steel, and my grandmother stepped down from the shiny car. It was all so thrilling.
Children’s books told us of how the good things we ate and everything else arrived in box cars behind the hard working engines. New cars were unloaded for the local dealerships, coal and oil were brought onto the siding at Brunswick Coal and Lumber to heat up our homes. Long trains filled with cement, potatoes, and wood products rumbled through town on their way to bigger places like Boston, New York and beyond.
The box cars were lessons in geography to us: The Louisville & Nashville, New York, Hartford & New Haven; Delaware & Hudson; and the Canadian National and Grand Trunk railroads.
But best of all was after Thanksgiving in early December, when the railway express cars would be shunted to the Railway Express depot, disgorging brown paper wrapped packages from distant relatives or large boxes from catalog stores. Christmas fever was boosted to a higher pitch, when the olive drab delivery trucks started up and down the street, stopping next door or even at your own place because every kid knew what that meant: presents were starting to arrive.
But all that is gone now. The few trains that come through are sorry affairs; one or two unmarked, unremarkable, rusting storage sheds on wheels pulled by equally drab mono-colored engines. No more do kids count them and try to find out where they have come from.
Most of the track is abandoned. Leaning telegraph poles and old ties still lie scattered along them, as if someone walked away and forgot what to do with them. Those are the tracks I like to stand beside. I like the grass covered rails leading off around the next corner into the fields or woods to disappear with their stories.