Lexington, KY - The town of Russell, the faded billboard next to the underpass off of U.S. Route 23 reads, is the "former location of the world's largest independently owned railroad yard." I can recite this luminous accreditation by heart -
and have on many occasions -
not because I am a railroad buff, but because as a child running amok in that small river community, that phrase was a source of pride to me - even though I had no idea what it meant. I just knew that little old Russell, with its bumpy brick streets and single stoplight, had the biggest something in the world, which logically translated to, in my mind, the best in the world.
The railroad tracks that lead to and from this once massive, now immaterial, railroad yard ran about 30 yards from where some classmates and I had to catch the bus to get to school in the morning. Usually when a train steamed by, it was just an infinite black snake of hopper cars full of coal and other freighters. But sometimes, when the bus was running late, we would get a chance to see the (mostly empty) silver Amtrak passenger cars blur past us from Maysville toward the next stop in Ashland. We always hollered at the passengers and flailed our arms, but I don't remember a passenger ever waving back at us. I do remember wishing that I was sitting on that train, going somewhere, anywhere but school.
I don't know what the line was called back then, but it's the Cardinal Line now, and trains No. 50 and 51 run to and from Chicago and Washington, D.C. once a day, six days a week. I took the line once from Chicago to Ashland and made sure I was paying attention when we chugged past my old bus stop, but there weren't any children milling about. I guess the bus was on time that morning, or our conductor wasn't running a very tight ship.
I might not be a railroad buff, but I am an unabashed enthusiast. In Europe I've taken the train all over - from Amsterdam to Venice, Bratislava to Istanbul, and many of the spots in between. In Japan, I took the Shinkansen bullet train from Tokyo to Toyohashi on the busiest high-speed train line in the world (Tokyo to Osaka), at ground speeds over 120 mph. Even in our country, where passenger trains are about as antiquated as powdered wigs, I've taken the Amtrak up and down the West Coast, and once from Los Angeles to Chicago on the infamous and laborious Southwest Chief -
a 42-hour affair. And I wasn't ready to get off when we pulled into Union Station in downtown Chicago.
Trains had, and still have in my mind, an aura of romanticism that has yet to be rivaled. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald -
they wrote on trains. Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers -
they sang about trains. Cornelius Vanderbilt, he built an American dynasty on trains. More importantly, today you don't have to take your shoes off to get on a train, and you definitely aren't subject to random searches or body scans; I've never heard of a train losing somebody's luggage.
In this issue, unfortunately, we won't be writing about catching a train in Lexington, but we do have an interesting section of features about local transportation -
including a few glances at some new (like the downtown Colt Trolley) and unconventional ways (like bicycle rickshaws) people are starting to get around town.
These certainly aren't earth-shattering solutions to our troubles surrounding transportation, which are a direct offshoot of our egregious dependence on inefficient uses of energy, but they are an opening to a dialogue. I hope travelers and commuters will get more adventurous when it comes to getting around, and I hope they'll remember to wave at the kids as they go rolling by.