A train is crawling through town as I finish this post. I can’t help but watch it from my office window. Train engines usually pull an assortment of boxcars, flatcars, and tankers from different cargo companies, but this line-up is oddly uniform — a mile or two of open-topped cars, all with the same red and white livery colors, hauling coal or rock.
I know the rhythms and shapes of trains because they are a constant here. Most trains move through town more quickly than this one. Its slow crawl tells me it might stop and block the road crossings — but it gives no hint to how long that blockage might last.
One day recently, when the town’s crossings had been blocked for hours, I ran into someone who congratulated me for living on the “right” side of the tracks. This was strange to hear. I feel like most out-of-towners would look at my surroundings and guess that my house is on the “wrong” side of the tracks — at least until they see the other side of the tracks and start to wonder where the nice part of town is hiding.
But I live on the right side of the tracks for leaving town without getting stopped by a train, so in that respect I’m fortunate.
My town still feels like a railroad town, even though trains no longer stop here. The town was originally planned out by a railroad company, which is why the tracks cut through the heart of town. The lake outside of town exists because the railroad built it to supply steam engines. We became a semi-important junction of two different rail lines, with a depot, café, and hotel to serve all the passengers those lines brought.
That all ended by the late 1960s as the railroad industry collapsed, decimated by automobiles and long-haul trucking. Some of the rail lines were torn out completely. You can still see traces of old lines — flat mesas slightly higher than the fields they run through — if you know which ghosts you’re looking for among all the other markers of things that have disappeared.
Passenger trains never come now. But freight trains roll through every hour or so, day and night, blasting their whistles as they approach. Their numbers have increased as rail shipping has come back into vogue. Double tracks cut across town from east to west. They curve along the west edge of town, banking south towards Kansas City. No matter where you are in town, each train’s whistle is audible. Its duration depends on its engineer’s whims. Courteous engineers give the shortest possible toot at every active crossing. Others seem annoyed to pass through yet another podunk nowhere place, sounding the whistle continuously and never letting up until they’re a mile outside of town.
The midnight train sounds the loudest. It’s an alarm clock in reverse, telling me I should be in bed.
When I first moved into this house, the trains woke me up. Now, their whistles and clanking wheels have faded into the backdrop, along with the rumble of passing farm equipment, the crowing of my neighbor’s roosters, and the high-pitched whine of the dairy processing plant a few blocks away. I still notice the midnight train — which really does come through at midnight every night, give or take five minutes — but my body seeks out that sound in hopes that it will convince my brain to go to sleep.
On some level, I like hearing train whistles. One of my earliest memories is of my uncle taking me on a scenic train ride as a reward for tolerating the arrival of my baby brother. My family plays train-themed board games — Ticket to Ride, of course, but also Rail Baron, which takes six hours and is exceedingly boring to casual observers. I visit every railroad museum I come across. I even cajoled six friends into taking an overnight sleeper train in India, which was equal parts magical and terrible.
But much as I like trains, and as much as I want to see high-speed passenger rail criss-cross the US, I strongly believe that all railroads are bastards.
The rail industry started with a bunch of titans of industry trying to out-bastard each other (the founder of my alma mater, good ol’ Leland Stanford, included). They kept their Gilded Age mentality all the way through the waves of train bankruptcies in the 1960s-1980s and have somehow emerged with their robber baron DNA intact.
My great-granddad worked for a railroad during the Depression. The rail execs forbade the employees from helping anyone who trespassed on trains or railroads, no matter the situation — and there were a lot of desperate people illegally riding the rails. One bitterly cold night, my great-granddad’s coworkers found a man half-frozen near the tracks. They brought him inside their office to warm up, and they gave him their own food before sending him on his way. The next day, a railroad exec in a suit and hat arrived, revealed that he was the freezing man they had helped the night before, and fired them.
It sounds like the worst episode of Undercover Boss ever.
I’m guessing the railroads would happily do the same thing today. Even in the relatively diminished circumstances of the railroad industry in 2023, they still proceed with the same sensitivity they demonstrated when they encouraged the slaughter of an estimated sixty million buffalo, intentionally destroying Native American lives and cultures to enable rail development across the Plains. The 2022 railroad strikes and this year’s East Palestine train derailment (was that really this year??), in the midst of railroads bringing in record profits and spending it all on stock buybacks instead of safety and maintenance, tell you everything you need to know about their continued robber baron instincts.
In my hometown, trains don’t stop for our benefit anymore. Trains do stop for their own benefit, and that’s when our crossings are blocked. They’re either waiting for another train to pass them on our stretch of double track, or held up by a derailment farther down the line. Either way, the trains stop here, with the crossguards clanging and their engines idling, for as long as they want, at any time of day or night.
It happened yet again a few days ago. This time, every crossing in town was blocked for most of the day. Anyone trying to get to school, work, the doctor, etc., from the south side of town had to detour around the train on miles of gravel roads. Since trains in the modern rail era can easily be two miles long, and since railroads have closed many crossings to avoid maintenance, getting around trains is a major stressor.
Supposedly, there are rules against blocking crossings. And state governments across the Midwest are trying to pass laws to limit trains to 1.5 miles long. But in an “all railroads are bastards” world, it doesn’t really matter. A ProPublica exposé about blocked train crossings showed that many towns have it worse — in Hammond, Illinois, ProPublica found elementary kids climbing over and under idling trains almost daily to avoid being late for school. None of those towns have been able to force the railroads to protect their kids.
I said at the beginning of this post that I’m not sure I live on the right side of the tracks. It’s murky — there’s no good neighborhood or bad neighborhood, just 430 people spread across one square mile. The town never grew enough to build nicer neighborhoods far away from the tracks, or to develop the (problematic) HOAs and covenants that enforce class strata through property rules. Well-maintained houses and burned-out trailers sit next to each other. Some lawns have beautiful gardens and lawn decorations. Others are de facto salvage yards, with junk sprouting like weeds until the city government makes another attempt to encourage clean-ups.
There are places like this everywhere, even if the flavors are different. Tiny dots spread out across the vastness of rural America. Sprawling exurbs clinging to the edges of richer metropolises. Shadowy underpasses and litter-strewn no-mans-lands wrapped around giant urban rail yards and interchanges. All of them shaped by railroads, highways, and interstates whose planning commissions did not spare a thought for the communities they created or cut down.
The sound of the train whistle no longer announces the arrival of anything nice or friendly or fun. The whistle reminds us, every hour, that we are in its way. We’re just another tiny pinprick, an inconvenient speed bump that forces the train to slow down — our crossings now an annoying bit of maintenance for the railroad, not an important junction and base for their operations.
Those whistles — and especially those all-day blockages — remind us that the rail industry, like most other industries, can take as much advantage as it wants, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
Other people have written more eloquently and deeply — or more reactively and judgmentally — about the angry disenchantment of rural America. It’s too nuanced for this post, and I’m not going to claim it was caused by railroads any more than it was caused by any other single source of fury.
But I will say: I don’t think the human heart was designed to live with an hourly reminder that blares out, “you’re in the way, and there are better places to be.”
Even if your mind filters out the noise, your body remembers the message.
And if you die waiting for an ambulance that can’t make it through a blocked crossing — well, maybe you aren’t allowed to be angry, because you shouldn’t have stayed in a town the railroad built and left behind.
Cheers,
Sara
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And if you missed last week’s post - I talked about our local community Thanksgiving dinner:
I don't know if you wereinspired by the latest John Oliver episode on freight trains but it's a good watch. He mentions the ProPublica coverage as well and the negative impacts on both the communities they run through and the railroads' own employees.
I woke up today with an urge to find a rural voice on Substack, buried somewhere among the political, philosophical and urban-centric posts. A quick search for the word Rural brought me to your page, and I'm so glad to have clicked on it! Wonderful writing; you describe southern Iowa in the way that I would like to explain southern Missouri, were I a gifted writer. Bravo, I look forward to reading more of your work!