Monday, November 29, 5:38pm
Monday, November 29, 5:38pm
Winter blackness fills my window aboard this 5:30 Worcester Local, a blackness broken by the drifting of streetlights and the occasional passing window glowing faintly from some internal warehouse or factory security lamp.
Above the gloom I see the stadium lights aglow at Fenway – filling this neighborhood with a slice of daylight. Yet even as I write, one of the towers fades to black and under greater scrutiny I notice how banks of lights on the remaining towers are limited to perhaps a quarter of all lamps available. The gloom returns, then the blackness. If I were to press my face right up to the window glass and shield my eyes from all interior cabin lighting, perhaps I could see more.
At the crisscross we shimmy through the usual frightful jog that makes standing passengers lurch for a handhold. It’s a pretty tight turn at 65mph, and lateral shock absorbing seems to contribute to the effect as the side-travel bottoms out. But it might not happen at all if the rails were better aligned, or if the train slowed through this underpass …or a hundred other ways the train could be made to run more smoothly from Boston to Worcester.
At Newtonville we make our first stop since Back Bay. As far as I’ve ever seen, the Newton stations have no ancient brownstone stationhouses nearby and the only shelters here are cheaply made and open to the elements – mere plywood awnings like the overnight platforms up Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. From their rundown condition I can see they’ve not seen much attention since passenger service resumed in the early 1980s.
Perhaps genuine train stations once stood near the Newton stops and were sacrificed to make room for the Mass Pike extension into Boston. Such was still possible when this section of the Pike was built 40 years – just before historical preservation became a priority in this country. Nowadays the trick is to be secretive and quick – such as when they tore down the Framingham Jordan Marsh dome at Shoppers World in the wee hours several days ahead of the announce schedule – pulverizing it into a million pieces before the preservationists could present a schedule-busting plan to save it – or even lie in the path of the bulldozers.
So much for historical value!
With or without fancy stationhouses the trains remain, chugging along year after year. I’ll have to check this out again – but I somehow remember that it takes about 200 gallons of diesel oil to make the trip from Boston to Worcester. This has to be less than cars on the road carrying the same number of people. Assuming that our train starts at South Station with 800 passengers with most gone by Worcester, the load averages perhaps 400 people making the whole trip – or about a half gallon of fuel per person.
Assuming that most commuters drive alone, driving the same 50 miles to Worcester in an automobile with today’s average fuel economy of about 20 MPG adds up to about 2.5 gallons of fuel per passenger. So with respect to mileage, a reasonably full train like ours tonight might be like commuting in a car with 100 MPG fuel efficiency. Yet with so few rail lines in this country I have no idea if it makes any real difference in fuel savings or air quality.
We approach Wellesley Square and once again I need to take the word of the conductors on this point. Stopped now, I see faint lighting barely leaking from the backside of some old warehouse – the same building that blocks the morning sun from passengers waiting here in the cold. If I had to guess I’d say that this is the Wellesley Square post office building and what I see is nothing more than basic nighttime security lighting.
From Wellesley we run fast and smooth. This is a good section of track – at least until we reach downtown Natick. But tonight aboard this local train we grind to a halt rather than riding at express speed through the usual roller coaster of bumps and heaves. Here I see no lights at all, which seems odd, since there is a station platform out there somewhere.
Underway I realize that sitting here in the last car placed my window east of the station. Drifting a little further I begin to recognize the ghostly form of a familiar platform shelter where the giant mural is painted onto the backs of two-story buildings a dozen feet beyond. Under a numbingly monochromatic street lighting, though, the painting is partially lit – yet I can resolve nothing of the mural itself. The walls are there – but I see only a blank salmon-orange canvass.
Perhaps I shouldn’t expect the railroad tracks to be better lit than this. It would seen as a waste – the railroads in this country being an armpit to be ignored day or night. Nevertheless the trains bring noise from rumbling locomotives and howling train whistles and the smell of diesel from belching stacks. But out there tonight beyond the cold and unlit moonscape, and despite our conspicuous presence, little conscious thinking takes place about the railroad in most people’s minds unless one has some conscious reason to notice us.
People can’t notice everything, and just as I consider that notion, I see how I haven’t noticed the cabin emptying from standing room only to nearly passengerless by the time we now pull into Framingham Station. It is no use to notice everything. Even if I were to raise my awareness to more fully capture a scene, the next scene arrives to push my incomplete thoughts aside. The vast hard-wired purpose of the human mind is to filter and contemplate, not collect data – since data is plentiful and we’d go mad if we could not focus on just a few ideas at a time.
