The Last Great American Engineer

by Brendyn Schneider

The train rushes past.

I’m six years old, standing on tip toes in my uncle’s train room.

Uncle Bob was a carpenter, a good one. But everything he made was too heavy – coffee tables, dressers, chess pieces. He once made this picture frame of thick glass and high-lacquered wood. I remember it hanging defiantly over his couch. My mom dubbed it “the white elephant.” Not only did it stand out but if the screws in the wall had ever felt especially evil, it could have inflicted as much carnage as its namesake. My mother never sat on the couch. My brothers and I did, but only in the way that small children pet large dogs.

Now, there are still some record books out there that will tell you that the most dominating object ever constructed by man was my uncle’s model train board. It was an awesome sight. Thick, sanded wood from one end of the room to the other, five feet tall and 8,000 pounds. It’s been 30 years but I’ll put money on the likelihood that the carpet in that room still has deep indentations.

Some would call it overkill but all that weight was necessary. It was a tribute, respect in the form of pressure treated oak. Uncle Bob had created a dais for the coolest toys around – his H.O. model trains. Unlike anything in my room, these were his, built by him, painted by him, his toys. That made them all the more fantastic.

There were four sets of tracks. Track 4 sat on a trestle high against the back wall hills of the train board. This was where the premier locomotives sat, namely the Re-Re Special, named after Aunt Renee. Track 3, beneath the trestle, was a place of perpetual construction. Your broken down trains hung out here with assorted track-side junk. Beyond this was a hillock of cork and a little pond of moss and dried epoxy – clear and deep.

The bulk of the board’s action happened on Tracks 1 and 2. Here, Big Boy was king. He hauled brown and yellow boxcars, Atlantic Rail passenger cars and the obligatory red caboose. Big Boy was the fastest locomotive in the fleet. He had never heard of Track 3 and man, look at that stack! It actually smoked!

There were the specialty cars too, usually the product of me and my brothers dancing and pleading in the hobby shops Uncle Bob frequented.

The guys who ran these places smelled like our uncle – equal parts sawdust, flannel, Heineken, and cassette tapes by The Doors. I remember Phil of Phil’s Hobby House rolling his eyes when I begged my uncle for the Spot Light Emergency Rail Rescue Vehicle. Phil’s look said, “Get rid of these kids, Bill, so we can talk about some real modelin’…and ‘Nam.”

When we got back to my aunt and uncle’s place, the Spot Light Emergency Rail Rescue Vehicle became the toast of the board. Its miniature klieg shot forth a beam of light that, I swear, carried heat. We turned off the desk lamp and shadows shot around the room, making the train board’s hills look like fast moving mountains on the walls. Uncle Bob placed it beside the Re-Re Special on Track 4 when we were through and I beamed.

My brothers and I weren’t the only ones drawn to the specialty cars. Uncle Bob once placed a pump car on Track 1. Two tiny men in blue overalls stood ready at the seesaw bar between them. My uncle gave the track some juice and the men went to work, sailing the car smoothly down the rails.

It was a different story when we got a hold of the controls. One day, I walked into the train room and spotted the pump car on Track 3 with the retirees.

“What happened, Uncle Bob?”

“What happened? You mugs happened! You fired that thing down the track so fast that you burned out the motor and the two poor saps driving the damn thing – their arms are now about eight feet long!”

We liked to run the trains fast, sure, but the resulting damage wasn’t always our fault. The power supply was from Hell. Frightening stuff. It was a heavy black box with a big dial and hundreds of lights and buttons. If you held it just right, you could pick up signals from deep space. The word, “MOMENTUM” was written across the front in big block letters and when you flipped the thing on, a red light glowed right in the center and watched you like HAL.

Now, red means stop. Easy enough.
Turn the big dial, a green light comes on and the train starts down the track. Still with you.

But MOMENTUM had a yellow light that came on when you pressed a button to the right of the dial. It was real easy to hit it accidentally. The locomotive would stop, then start down the track at an ever-increasing rate of speed. No action could stop it. Turn the dials, hit the buttons – any of them – try hitting the yellow light itself, plead with it, say, “MOMENTUM, please, please stop…momentuming!” But it was no use! The power supply cares nothing for 5-year olds! And Big Boy was going to pay the price. It was headed toward the end of the track. Next stop the Berber below. Run! Try to save it! Nooo! Too late!

“Hey! Don’t run the trains off the cliff!”

“But Uncle Bob! That switch…Momentum!”

To this day, a piece of me cringes at the mention of that terrible, terrible word.

My brothers and I got a little older. We got into different things. Ed joined a bowling league at Farmingdale Lanes – a house with, according to our dad, excellent conditions. Graham and I couldn’t testify to that. We were too obsessed with the bowling alley’s arcade to care.

Uncle Bob came to watch Ed a lot. When we were leaving once, he showed us a large hole in the fence at the rear of the parking lot. Railroad tracks beckoned just beyond the property line.

The first time that LIRR Westbound flew past, I felt it through my whole body. It carried a mini-concussion with every passing car. SH-THUMM! SH-THUMM! Through your chest, slamming your very soul into your back. Standing there, watching, without a platform or any sort of barrier in between, I realized just how far from immortality I really was.

When the train was gone, Uncle Bob gave us each a nickel. We followed when he put his on one of the rails.

“Okay,” he said. “Now we wait.”

We tooled around the rails, picking up spikes and assorted bits of track-side junk.

The next train appeared in the distance and we ran for the fence. When we ran back, I noticed the rails were warm and vibrating. We found our nickels. They had turned into mutant silver dollars – crushed, smoothed out and away – Thomas Jefferson with a carnival mirror forehead. I didn’t know you could do that!

I looked up at the retreating train, now a mile on, now two. It seeped into the horizon.

Have you ever seen two parallel lines coming together in a vanishing point? There’s a fascinating eerie about it, like relativity or suddenly realizing that you’re 35. The inevitability makes you dizzy. Uncle Bob was looking at the horizon too. Maybe he felt the same way. Heavy, but good.

When our uncle died, we spread his ashes on that same stretch of railroad track. We each placed a coin on the rails. An offbeat location but fitting for the Last Great American Engineer. Ashes to ashes. Coins to dust.

And the train rushes past.

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More stories by Brendyn Schneider can be found at brendynschneider.com © 2011-2012, Brendyn Schneider, reprinted by Dadity.com with permission. Use or reprint not authorized without permission from the author. All rights reserved.

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