Thursday, January 20, 2005, 8:20
Thursday, January 20, 2005, 8:20
At arm’s length away, I am confronted through my window by the side-access door of a newly arrived MBTA locomotive out of Boston. The door is perhaps 16 inches wide and on either side bright yellow painted handrails garnish the view. Locomotives are big, but then lots of things are big. And what I find so odd about locomotives is how they’re about the same as even bigger engine rooms buried inside ocean going ships. A locomotive is really one of those engine rooms put on wheels complete with massive power plant and a secondary diesel motor tucked into the back generating copious volumes of electricity at 440 volt for the lights, ventilation, heating, cooling, and controls. Taking up most of the interior space, however, the main diesel motor generates electric power to pull the whole train.
The cockpit at the front is more like a control room with front-facing office-window windshields much wider than even the largest long-haul trucks on the road. The windows are protected by thickly-barred grillwork of tough steel — a windshield indeed and I suppose a rock and small boulder shield as well.
The engineer can inspect the outside of the locomotive by exiting one of several doors leading to an external decking halfway up the sides of the beast. The small 16-inch wide door I saw at my window is one of those exits.
At Lake Cochituate the water has finally yielded to the will of the Old Man with a uniform expanse of unblemished white. Only in one alcove do I see a bit of open water where most likely there is an inlet from an unseen stream.
Before departing from Natick Station the train rolls back a few inches to the west. We’ve had a smooth ride since Ashland, so perhaps this is one of the finer techniques of a master engineer.
Natural rock faces and man made stonework have caught more of the soft drifting snow that fell again last night. Only an inch of new powder, it nonetheless coats the branches of leafless trees out to their fingertips, while filling the spaces between pine needles and frosting the ties and crushed stone to leave only the dark parallel steel of the railroad running through an otherwise formless sea. Making good time, I notice the same sort of blizzard as yesterday kicking up and blowing past my window, adding a greater sense of speed while restoring memories of downhill sledding from 40 years ago.
Even the Charles River is frozen this morning – at least in this stretch near our junction with Route 128. It’s hard to imagine how this rail line was operational for at least 100 years before Route 128 was even conceived. Small adjustments have been necessary like the bridge over the highway that replaces some amount of earth that was once the roadbed here and the sweeping turns needed for the Mass Pike crisscross once that highway was assembled to share a portion of the ancient Worcester line route.
Then a truly strange idea comes to mind about the history of this line. As a one-term congressman from Illinois traveling by rail to Faneul Hall I’d once believed that Abraham Lincoln rode this portion of the Worcester line to Boston. After taking my own Washington trip aboard the high speed Acela train I surrendered that idea as we passed through Rhode Island and along the seacoast. This is the most a sensible route to and from Washington – yet not one inch is a part of the Worcester Line.
Yet recently, I’ve learned how Lincoln’s trip to Boston happened before those coastal tracks were ever laid – and so he must have traveled the only other way available – up to Albany and from there straight east through Worcester all the way to some precursor of South Station. So it seems that Lincoln very likely passed through Ashland on his way to Boston, and we have yet another small claim to fame in town.
One particular day many years I took the train between Framingham and Back Bay. I remember that I’d walked to the station from our apartment on Frederick Street and from the inbound leg I have a fairly clear picture in mind of a conductor sporting a meticulous and slightly overwrought Van Dyke beard. I rode into the city that day to collect job-hunting advice. Checking and rechecking the two dollars stuffed into my pocket for the ride home is my only other clear memory from the day. Escaping from Boston has always been a priority for me.
Twenty years have passed from that time – less than one eighth of the time since Abraham Lincoln once rode along this same line in 1843 for perhaps a penny a mile.
