Canton, Mass: A Headlight in the Distance

I started watching trains on the platform at Canton Junction in Massachusetts waiting for my father to come home from work. He would take the New Haven in and out of Boston and I would often accompany my mother to the train station to pick him up in the afternoon. She took me because I was ``the train one'' of her boys. My two older brothers were ``the car one'' and ``the plane one,'' respectively.

                She would sit in the front seat of our maroon 1963 Impala station wagon reading a novel. In the summertime, the windows would be rolled down and in the wintertime the engine might be idling on and off -- you couldn't let it run constantly or the carbon monoxide would get you. Honestly, the way she hates to be cold I am not sure how my mother managed to sit waiting for the train in a cold car. But she did and I am glad she did because I managed a few memories of the New Haven before it disappeared from view.

                I remember hugging the wall of the Milford-pink granite station one day when an FL-9 led passenger train came roaring off the Canton Viaduct. (I didn't know the names of the locomotives in those days, but as I got older I was able to put names with the trains I saw.) I didn't often get to see an FL-9 and when I saw one I knew it was pulling a fast train that wasn't going to stop. Sometimes they would just scare the hell out of me.

                I also remember an orange RS-3 idling away on one of the freight tracks on cold winter nights. The crew would walk across the tracks and into the station to shoot the breeze with the guy who worked in the mysterious room behind the wire mesh covered windows. An old guy, who would sometimes sit and watch trains, explained to me how I could tell a train was coming by peeking into the station guy's office and looking at the board on the wall by his desk. A pair of red dots meant a train was coming, the old fellow told me. I felt like I was given life's codebook. The world made much more sense after that.

                A Providence train always came through the station before my father's. In the warmer weather, there would always be a conductor and a businessman in a suit standing in the rear door smoking cigarettes. Life seemed pretty good for those two guys. After that the switch on the Stoughton line would open and the semaphore would rise to signal the way clear on the branch line. Then there would be another headlight in the distance. This one would slow a little as it came through the rock cut just to the north of Canton Junction. The headlight would dim and the train would change tracks and start coming straight toward me.

                The guy from the station would often come out on the platform with a large bamboo stick with a message tied to it. As the orange and black GP-9 would come through the station the engineer would reach down and grab the stick, pull off the message and then toss the stick back out the window. I'd run into the dirt and grass trackside and pick it up and bring it back to the guy from the station.

                By that time the train a crowd of people would be coming down off the black and orange cars with the large N over H heralds on their sides. (There were also plain black cars too, I later learned were actually green, but they didn't look green to me.) I'd dodge my way among the crowd (mostly men) getting off the train looking for that one guy among them all that had the determined way of walking. I'd see him eventually, a copy of the Boston Globe Closing Stocks edition in his right hand. It always seemed like he saw me first. On hot days he'd wear a light-colored, short-sleeved shirt -- the uniform of engineers everywhere. When I reached him, he'd tap me on the head with the paper and we'd go off and find my mother, who was always standing not far away watching the whole time.

                It's hard to remember all of that when I go to Canton Junction now, so much has changed. The station was picked up and moved a little to the east to make way for a new track arrangement more than 10 years ago.  A catenary was hung above the tracks to allow Amtrak to run its electric locomotives and Acela sets. The New Haven became the Penn Central in December 1969 right after it had one last big derailment just north of the station. The Penn Central eventually vanished too and now the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and Amtrak own the tracks and run almost all the trains -- there is an occasional CSX local that moves through. And my father died in 2008, a month after my youngest daughter was born.

                But sometimes, when the sun is shining down at the end of the day and I can smell the creosote rising off the wood ties that mark the MBTA's Stoughton branch, I can see that headlight appear in the distance and just for a second or two I am sure it's led by a New Haven GP-9 and my father will be coming home for supper.

(About the photo: I took it with a 500 mm lens, at f/6.3, 1/1600, ISO 400, with a Canon EOS 20D on May 1, 2011. I have taken shots at this spot when there hasn't been as much distortion from the heat, but I liked this one. I wanted to start this journey with a train at Canton Junction. I also wanted to convey the idea that I was taking a photo of a memory. On that level it works for me.)