Diesel

a liturgy of locomotion

Most people think that all train horns sound the same. But anyone who has lived next to a pair of tracks for any serious amount of time would tell you otherwise. No two are the same, an observation that doesn’t require close listening or perfect pitch. Most people might also expect that trains follow a strict schedule, grinding past the same point like clockwork. This, again, is false. Maybe they used to, when people moved on rails and had places to be. But trains don’t move people anymore, they move freight and grain and coal and ore and other heavy things without schedules. Sometimes a horn sounds like you’d expect, loud and dissonant and affronting and warning, serving its intended purpose. Standard. Sometimes, maybe half the time or three eighths of the time or five sixteenths of the time it’s something else entirely. Starting from a distance, four or five intersections away, a low moaning and then the cacophonous wailing of some lonely animal all steel and slinking and kicking up the dust and the smoke from the diesel. It doesn’t take a trained ear because you aren’t afforded the option of not hearing it so you listen because you have to. Other times the animal lets out something resembling a harmony, more like a jazz chord that’s diminished and maybe one finger is on the wrong key but not altogether unpleasant. Someone is in the train, the only person that trains still move and it’s the conductor or the engineer or whoever pulls the levers and the pushes the buttons and radios to the next station that this lumbering beast I’m controlling is coming your way. And you can glean a lot of insight into his personality just by hearing the train horn that sonic window into the heart of some industrial jockey. Late at night he knows its late and maybe he doesn’t want to disturb those of us who live next to the rails, so the horn is short and soft and the absolute minimum required of him by some sort of locomotive legality. Other times maybe you have the misfortune of coming across a sadist, he doesn’t care that it’s late and that you’re asleep, he has to suffer and work and stay awake and others will have to as well and he presses some button or pulls a cord and his stead gnashes its teeth and lets loose some horrible scream into the darkness, some deafening victorious cry into the void. Then its gone but now you’re awake and the quiet seems louder than before.