As I notched the locomotive's throttle up to five, I heard it -- the throaty mechanical bellow that a fellow railroad nut had once described as "the voice of God," accompanied by the thickening scent of diesel smoke and a slight surge forward as the steel wheels dug into the rails. It was a moment I'll treasure, and if I think of it just before I die, perhaps I'll go out smiling.

It's rare that we get to fulfill childhood fantasies. So when I stumbled upon the "Engineer for an Hour" program -- run as a fundraiser by the Naugatuck Railroad in Thomaston, Connecticut -- while browsing train Web sites last year, I had to apply. For 35 years I'd wondered what the view was like from high up in the cab of a locomotive, and none more than the red, black, and white liveried New Haven Railroad passenger engines that hurtled by when I was a kid in Meriden, Connecticut. They seemed so powerful, sleek, huge. When they passed, the earth shook, and their tail of silvery cars flashed by in an instant, leaving behind only the black plume that belched from their exhaust vents. It was as if a magician had made them appear and disappear, for the sole purpose of leaving me awestruck.

I'd never completely gotten over my love of trains, although when girls and drugs and rock 'n' roll beckoned in high school, I put it aside. And that's where it stayed through college and the decades spent falling in love and building a career as a journalist and musician. Until 1998, when my wife, Laurie, bought me a small
N-scale train set for Christmas. It was cute, grinding around a circle of tiny brass rails; it reminded me of the electric trains I'd had as a child. But it sat in a box for the next two years. On a whim, in 2000, we dug it out of the closet and set it up in front of our Christmas tree. We agreed that it needed more track to make a good loop around the tree stand, so I set out for a model-train shop to pick some up. When I got there, I was taken by the hobby's dramatic advances in realism and variety, and ended up coming home with a boxcar, too. By the time the tree came down, our four-car train had doubled to eight, and the tracks had gone from an 18-inch loop to a four-foot figure eight.

Today my train set has five operating lines, a freight yard, a roundhouse, a town, mountains, and ponds -- all of which consume every inch of a four-by-eight table. I own 18 locomotives and am almost out of space for freight and passenger cars. When I have free time, I spend hours scratch-building wooden stations and platforms, gluing scale-model gravel bits onto the roadbed, and setting microscopic waterfowl on the ponds with tweezers and a magnifying glass. I tell myself that it's the model railroad I wanted as a child and couldn't afford, but deep down I know it's just a start.

Trains -- model and, as we addicts say, prototypical -- have become my heroin. Or maybe my therapy. I go to model-railroad shows. I subscribe to the magazines and buy the books. For my birthday, Laurie took me to Worcester Station for a heavenly day of train watching. I find the howl of massive, real locomotives intoxicating. When my small trains churn over their plastic railroad ties past the vegetation and hills I've constructed, I can feel the muscles in my back unknot.

For 25 years I had no hobbies -- just a passion for writing, music, and the arts. Now I can't imagine life without my trains. And the more I try to understand why, the more I find myself thinking about my late father. We had a difficult relationship. He was a bully and, like most bullies, he was insecure and perpetually defensive. He dominated my mother and literally beat many of his insecurities into me. He died terribly from cancer, leaving behind unresolved issues between us. Sometimes, the unhappiness he inflicted on my childhood haunts me.

But along with the rediscovery of my love of trains has come the rediscovery of the happy times we spent together watching trains and tinkering with Lionel models. My father loved trains, and used to casually hobo in empty freight cars as a kid. His thrill at the sight of those big New Havens ripping past at 70 mph or more was no less intense than mine.

As luck had it, my "Engineer for an Hour" application came up just after the Naugatuck Railroad, which is a working excursion-line museum, received a pair of retired General Motors FL-9 locomotives in New Haven colors from the Connecticut Department of Transportation. That's how I got to drive two of those locomotives or, rather, "run" them, as Al, my personable engineering instructor, explained. Climbing into the cab some 10 feet up was surreal, and sitting down in the engineer's seat as Al talked me through was sublime. Four times I passed over a six-mile stretch of beautiful country right-of-way, curving through cutaway cliff sides and forest, over trestle-crossed brooks, and under bridges. Once a deer leapt out onto the tracks ahead and ran along them before ducking back into the woods. Al coached me on the art of using the brake and throttle to compensate for the 1750-horsepower machine's weight as we rode up and down grades and fought the resistance of the curves and the tug and drag of inertia. I kept the window open to smell the exhaust and hear the thrumming chuff of the engines and the steel-on-steel song of the wheels.

On my final pass, Al had a sandwich and I ran the locomotives, connected tail-to-tail, undirected. Occasionally I glanced behind me at the painted metal sides to reassure myself it was really happening. But mostly I had my eyes on the view I'd wondered about all those years: I watched the tracks winding ahead as well as the speedometer, keeping the powerful giant rolling along at a steady 25 to 30 mph. As we approached the end of the run, the former station at East Litchfield, I pulled the slider that activated the warning bell a final time and gave the proper whistle signal -- two longs, a short, and a long. As I climbed back down from the cab and walked toward Laurie and my mother, Rose, who'd both come to witness my trip, I felt nothing but joy. I thought of my father and smiled, knowing it was a feeling we would have shared.

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Ted Drozdowski can be reached at dtuned1@aol.com.

Issue Date: August 23 - 29, 2002