Twain Twacks!
Twain Twacks!
CalTrain runs a passenger commute rail service north and south along the San Francisco peninsula. I live a twenty-minute walk from one station, and freeway traffic is horrific during an ever-growing proportion of the time, and I have never had any problem reading or fussing with my computer on a moving vehicle, so I take the train whenever I can. The new “Baby Bullet” trains, that provide express service during commute hours, are particularly impressive. When I ride one, I can get from my home in Palo Alto into downtown San Francisco in less time than if I drove all the way, even if there were no traffic on the freeway at all.
I also take classes at San Jose State. It is a 35-minute walk from the San Jose train station to the university, but I like to walk, and I need the exercise, and I can review flash cards from my Arabic class while I am walking, so that works, too.
Last night I was on the way home after class, and decided to try the scenic view: These trains are “push-pulls”, which means that the engine is not always at the front of the train. They don’t turn around at the end of the line, they simply reverse, and the engineer operates the train from an outpost in the passenger car farthest from the engine. The big diesels are at the south end of the train, which means that if you stand at the forward end of the frontmost passenger car on the northbound route — that’s my train home from SJSU — you can look through the window in the door that would normally lead to the next car, and have a straight-ahead view up the line, as the tracks and roadbed whiz by beneath you. For anyone whose childhood dreaming even momentarily included thoughts of becoming an engineer, those minutes are a little bit of heaven. So I did.
Part way home, however, I had the unusual opportunity of looking way, way out in the distance — the track runs straight as an arrow for miles at a time — and seeing the lights of an oncoming train. Minutes passed, and it became clear that the fast-moving locomotive was not on the track normally used for southbound trains, it was on our track, heading directly toward us. Most people have not had the chance to look north into the rapidly-approaching headlights of a southbound freight, so I thought I should report that the experience is just as unsettling as you might expect.
Of course, I am cheating a little bit in this posting. We were stopped at a station at the time, and I had overheard the conductors talking about the delay we would incur while the oncoming freight passed by us. In our own headlight beam, I could even see the switch and crossover track the freight would use to sidestep to the other line. But that stuff was only about a hundred yards away, and the view down the track stretched for miles, so for some minutes I had the continuing sensation of being a deer caught in headlights, as the freight came thundering on. Do you all remember the Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Elmer Fudd, the hunter, in which the audio goes “… Wabbit twacks! … Beah twacks! (*)… Twain twacks! … chucka-chucka-whoo-whoo-SPLAT!!”. You may be sure that I remembered it. But the train did eventually cross to the adjacent line and pass us by.
(*) That would be “Bear tracks!” if you are not Elmer.
Jay Freeman’s Blog Entries
Tuesday, July 24, 2007