Train games: A late night mystery
My late mom’s little bungalow ranch home sat where our new home, built in 2011, sits now.
My father built the ranch over a few years beginning in 1956 and when he passed away in 1970, Mom continued to live there. Even while suffering from congestive heart failure and myasthenia gravis she was mobile and cheerful with a mind like a steel trap.
She often asked why engines ran all night in the nearby Dickerson Run yard. “Late at night when everything is quiet,” she said, “I can hear something.”
The question troubled me at the time, but I thought the sounds may have had something to do with her tinnitus. Still, I told her I would come up some evening and listen with her, a promise I regrettably never kept.
I have noted in past columns that the placement of our newer house, with a sweeping view of the Youghiogheny River, meant we could hear oncoming trains for miles. Weather makes a difference as well; and the train sounds are louder in winter when trees are bare.
The eastbound trains are much louder, as the engines are pulling a grade and freight trains today can approach 250 cars.
Other than train noise, our neighborhood is very quiet. Late at night under the right conditions, it sounds as if the tracks run past our house. Many nights (or early mornings), I can hear eastbound trains for quite a few minutes as they near the borough. The first diesel blast sounds as the engines approach the lower River Road crossing.
But a few nights ago, a situation occurred that caused me to reflect on my mother’s question years ago, and it may have shed some light on the mystery. As I laid in bed after midnight, I listened to the drone of an eastbound train as it approached the town. The sound rose and ebbed, as it usually does when it’s breezy. But 10 minutes or so later, I was still hearing the diesel engine. It droned away, long after the engine should have been silenced by the river hills as it pulled upriver toward Connellsville. I even got up and looked out the door to the deck, trying to pinpoint the location of the sounds.
It was then I realized why the engine’s sound had continued for an extended time. The train had received a red block at the lower end of Dawson and was stopped there for an extended period.
Just as I had this epiphany moment, the diesel horn sounded and the powerful engine revved up to continue its upgrade trek. The scenario was not really new to me; my dad had spent most of his life on the railroad, and I had grown up along the tracks. I just hadn’t put the time and circumstance together.
I believe that the late night engine sounds that Mom heard came from diesels idling at the red block below Dawson. It would prevent long trains from blocking crossings, should it be stopped in town. The delay, usually required to better space trains on the same rails, could last from 20 minutes to several hours.
I now believe that’s what my mother heard – not the buzzing of her tinnitus and not ghost engines.
Roy Hess Sr. is a retired teacher and businessman from Dawson.