Wednesday, September 1, 2004, 8:18am
September 2004
Wednesday, September 1, 2004, 8:18am
On this warm and cloudless morning we drift and crawl hypnotically into Framingham Station. Along the way I’ve been spying newly-sawed and creosote-boiled wooden ties from my carriage window — eight and a half feet long and nine by seven inches in girth — set in small piles every dozen yards or so. This morning they are joined by a continuous rivulet of newly delivered crushed stone placed with precision along the north side of the rails. Some amazing machine has neatly poured a basaltic steam with a repeating wave as though the applicator dispenses crushed stone the same way as a pastry machine might squirt whipped confection.
The railroads use basalt because it is dense, hard, and tough. And for this reason it fractures into coarse and durable chunks filling the spaces under and between the ties. Once placed, the shapes settle into a jagged puzzle of interlocking fragments to form an immovable base. The solidness of this foundation is enough to easily support the weight of a 120-ton locomotive while at the same time sufficiently porous to allow for good drainage. Standing water is the death of the railroad – slowly rotting wooden ties in warmer weather – boiling creosote notwithstanding – while distorting the whole roadbed through expanding ice in winter months. Good drainage is the only solution.
The steel and stone and massive wooden ties feel overwrought and excessive for a mere commuter train, and as we pull through the freight yards at Framingham I realize how passenger trains are an afterthought in this respect. Although huge in many ways, the 8:07am train fully loaded with passengers is no more massive than a fully loaded tractor-trailer rig scaled up a dozen times. But freight trains are another matter.
Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the tracks were laid to serve scattered factories and deliver goods overland to cities without the need for direct water access. Aboard a single mile-long train, ten thousand tons of freight can pass any given point in less than 90 seconds, and though this does not compare to the great seagoing cargo ships, this is enough to shake the earth for miles around.
Across the aisle to my left I can no longer ignore the one-sided conversation of a cell phone specialist. His voice has been drifting around this cabin for the last 20 minutes trying to remain emotionally supportive to someone on the other end of the conversation. By now his tone has become annoyingly personal — in the neighborhood of a psychiatrist dealing with a routinely distraught patient. I can’t tell for sure, and I’m not interested enough to listen more carefully to find out, but what I do hear tells me that he’s someone who makes a living speaking in sickly calming and soothing cadences. On this train, though, he’s just another cell phone yakker speaking far louder than his cell phone microphone requires.
The psychiatrist is finally gone, and out through the mouth of Back Bay Station we roll into a beam of sunlight sharply defined and streaming through the exit of the tunnel complex. To my mind’s eye, the overhead structure forming exists only by inference the pattern of light cast below. It should be there by logic as well – tunnels like this do not stand without structure. But right now the patterns of light and shadow are all I can see directly, and so this is what I will trust to tell me the truth – and not so much my misty logic.
Rolling east fully exited from the tunnel I feel a new melancholy this morning leading to a wistfully odd notion – in the flick of a switch the train could retrace its path back to Ashland – taking me home where I’d rather be, not farther into this city. But this will not happen because the direction of a commuter train is nearly as fixed from station to station as the flow of the Sudbury across periodic dams impeding its progress. Only the time of arrival varies as the river follows the laws of gravitation while the train follows the stated schedule of the rails to its final destination.
Today, as always, the engineer has performed his job to deliver us to South Station. And emotional considerations aside, I supposed I would not have it any other way.
