By Daniel Wirtheim, Features Editor

Published Sept.3, 2014

     Every time I hear the train whistle I think of them. Sitting in their chairs, laughing about wives and the economy. Then the few moments of excitement when a train comes rattling by in a cloud of exhaust.

    When Greensboro had a booming textile industry, little transportation hubs like the Greensboro Railway Depot flourished.   Now, the railroads still function, but they mostly carry goods from China. It’s less of a graveyard for American prosperity than it is an alter for the changing times.

    When a friend came to visit from England I had to take her to the Oakland Avenue station. I knew that Europe had a fabulous electric rail system, but I wanted to show her something raw and American. I remember that evening well.

     It was a full moon, and luckily, my railroad friend, Corey Hodge, who is an affiliate of Norfolk Southern, was there. With years of train knowledge, and his accent thick as country grits, you can understand just enough to determine whether he’s talking about the Norfolk Southern, his own private tourist rail or just trains in general.

    “That’s a Canadian freighter, right there,” said Hodge, excitedly pointing to a freight car bearing a red maple leaf that’s rattling through the station. “It’s fun to see the foreign freighters come these ways.”

     My British friend seemed disturbed, yet interested. Like she had walked into some photograph of 1920’s America. It seemed absurd that this was still going on. Even more absurd that the whole scene wasn’t a commercialized tourist attraction, that this was a legitimate place of leisure for the self-proclaimed “train nuts.”

     Hodge is one of a group of about ten or twelve that sits behind the station’s fence Wednesday through Saturday night to watch the trains pass the Oakland Avenue station.

     They don’t drink, they don’t smoke and they don’t do much but watch with great, almost maniacal enthusiasm.          

    On multiple occasions I’ve seen a young boy who carries a radio scanner that picks up frequencies from the oncoming locomotives. There’s some static, a muffled voice picked up by the old antenna and the boy gets up excitedly, yelling some railroad jargon and pointing in the direction of the oncoming train.

     He’s a prodigy. With his talent, he might be a legendary train professional one day, a modern day Casey Jones.

     “That is if they don’t find out he’s a train nut,” said Hodge. According to Hodge, train nuts are a liability for the station. “He could be watching one train coming this way,” said Hodge, referencing the tracks ahead. “And he might back up into a stopped locomotive.”

     There’s a tourist steam engine that will be making its way to Greensboro in the near future, and Hodge claims that it will be something great for our generation to see.

     It might be his clairvoyant vision of the good ole’ days making a triumphant return that makes Hodge the ringleader of the crowd, a conjurer of some strange magic that encapsulates the train nuts.    

     They’re a group focused not on consumer goods, not on producing some cheap product or having the best job, but a harkening back to a much simpler time, a time when a train ticket from New York to New Orleans was as cheap as a tank of gas.

     Maybe it’s more complex. Maybe the trains are a metaphor for a world that’s moving much too fast as we try to grasp onto something legitimate, something that could construct meaning from a world that’s quickly falling out of our grasps and into the future’s electronic haze.