Train trip created flight questions

Wandering through the Dunkirk passenger depot with my friends Jack Robbins and Dane Mumbower, I found myself recalling my first train ride.

David Littler once told me he’d made his first train trip out of the Dunkirk depot, which is extremely cool.

For me, the first railroad adventure came with a journey when I was maybe 8 years old.

For reasons lost to the mists of time, we were going to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I think the trip included my younger sister Louise as well as our mother and me. And we might have been going to pick up my older sister Linda.

At my age, those details get more than a little fuzzy.

Why Champaign-Urbana? That’s where my aunt and uncle Janet and Jim Hine lived. Uncle Jim was a Presbyterian pastor there.

For whatever reason, we needed to make the trek to visit them.

Even then, in what was probably about 1955 or 1956, passenger rail service in the United States was evaporating. Passenger trains might have been stopping in Dunkirk, but they weren’t stopping in Portland. The glory days of the old GR&I (Grand Rapids and Indiana) line were long gone.

Instead, we had to drive down to Richmond, as I recall, to catch the train west to Illinois.

At first, I loved it. Every kid loves trains, every boy especially. The noise, the movement, the newness of it all — even though it was anything but new to our fellow passengers — delighted me.

For awhile.

Then, like any 7 or 8 year old, I got bored.

The train wasn’t an express. It made local stops about every 20 minutes or so it seemed.

But there were distractions.

There was an old fashioned water cooler, the kind with the big jug of water on top. It was equipped with little paper, cone-shaped cups.

So, a kid is bored and a kid gets thirsty.

I have no idea how many cone-shaped paper cups were consumed, but I do know this: It was not long before I needed to go to the restroom.

And that provided distraction number 2.

Having relieved myself, I flushed.

And there to my 8-year-old amazement were railroad ties, flying by as we made our way west.

The contents of the toilet simply disappeared amid a flash of sunlight and the sound of the wheels on the rails.

What could be cooler than that? At least, to an 8-year-old.

There now coalesced a plan for how to deal with the endlessly boring trip.

I would keep drinking water in those paper cones, and I would keep visiting the restroom to watch the railroad ties fly by.

It seemed to be the perfect solution.

Until we stopped at a station, and I flushed.

The conductor had a word with my mother, and that was the end of that.

Just the same, more than once I’ve found myself wondering about all those airlines flying over head.