Riding the Rails with the Ghosts of the Past

All his life, Antonio Glionna worked around trains. 

My grandfather arrived as an immigrant from Italy in 1899 and labored as a track walker in rural New York State, always walking, day after day, checking for loose ties and twisted rails.

One night, dead tired, he sat in the backyard of his home along the line, near places named the Cherry Valley and Big Indian Wilderness, and watched the ghost of a child, killed in a recent train mishap at a nearby crossing, skip happily along the tracks. 

He hurried inside, mute, unable to initially relate what he had just seen.

But he would tell the story for years.

Before the war, my father rode those very same tracks to college in nearby Cobleskill. He listened to the conductor call out the names of each small-town station.

“Worcester!” the man barked, changing the emphasis on the word. “Worces-TER! WORCESter!”

The journey made my father glad to live in such a rural place where train workers checked their pocket watches and the days held a simple sunlit clarity.

A generation later, I have my own relationship with the rails. 

I romanticize the old-time spirit of train travel and have on occasion cursed its ineptitude. Yet I still pulse with excitement each time I hear the big huff of the engine as it pulls into a station.

I have taken trains across Canada and Upstate New York, passing close to where that little ghost once danced. I have ridden tracks across Southern Italy, New Zealand, Inner Mongolia and from Beijing to Shanghai. I have taken bullet-fast trains in Japan, riding a cushion of air through the city of Osaka, feeling modern and sophisticated, sitting next to a Japanese woman with hands old enough to have invented origami.

Each time I step onboard, I feel my father and my grandfather beside me.

There is a moment from riding trains that beats all others. 

I had traveled with my parents to visit the Italian hill town where my grandfather was born. The small stone house sat amid a vineyard now tended by his descendants. It was situated next to a towering tree that, as family legend has it, he had planted as a boy.

When we left, our relatives gave us red wine from the field; bottled not in glass, but inside plastic soda containers; a simple gift, offered with pride.

Days later, we left Rome for a weekend trip to Venice and we ran down the platform to hop aboard a packed train that was already moving. 

An Italian man gave up his seat for my exhausted mother, but there was no place my father and I, who soon found ourselves perched outside, between two passenger cars, the joints creaking and swaying, the late afternoon breeze in our faces. 

We passed the red wine between us. It was warm and we took long draws from the bottle like it was water, feeling like stowaways, smiling at our luck, watching sunburned fields pass, and small villages.

We would revisit that moment for many years to come.

Years before, on my first trip to Italy, I had traveled alone on a train between Pomarico, my grandfather’s birth town, and the city of Pompeii, the home of a descendant of my paternal grandmother, Susanna. 

My cousin Giuseppe is a successful architect and he lives just ninety minutes from my paternal relatives, who carved out livings unchanged for 100 years, near the ruins of an 18th Century castle.

On the train, I sat next to an Italian history professor who marveled at my connection with relatives inhabiting both the old Italy and the new.

“You are lucky,” she said.

Sometimes, train travel has vexed me, presenting challenges that were painful to experience but made for good story-telling when they were over.

Years ago, my wife and I took a train across Canada; from Vancouver, British Columbia, clear to the east coast, to Halifax in Nova Scotia.

There is pure comfort, I’ve found, in sleeping on trains. Swaying atop the rails, the coach feels like a cradle rocked throughout the darkest hours. Each night, an attendant turned down our beds and made them up in the morning.

As the train twisted through the Canadian rockies, I sat in a viewing car with a glass-topped roof, surrounded by mountains, listening to Van Morrison. I felt soulful and wished my father was with me, for him to see what I saw.

We made stops in Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, but the trouble started in Halifax, at the far end of the line.

It was a Sunday and we’d just returned from several days on Cape Breton Island. We planned to take the overnight train back west to Toronto, to meet three of my sisters who lived in Upstate New York, adding a personal touch to the end of our journey.

We arrived at the station ninety minutes before the train’s departure.

It was empty.

“Where are all the people?” I asked the ticket-taker.

“On the train,” he answered. “It left a half hour ago.”

As it turns out, I had misread my ticket, the departure hour written in military time. What I thought was 3:30 p.m. was actually 13:30, or 1:30 p.m.

“Just stay another night,” the attendant suggested. “You’re on vacation, right?”

I explained I had family who would be waiting the following afternoon in Toronto.

He looked at his watch, then gazed across the small station at two men drinking coffee and reading the paper.

“Go talk to those taxi drivers,” he said. “If they drive like hell, you might be able to beat the train to New Brunswick.”

The men were skeptical, unwilling to risk a ticket.

Then one called a friend. He was hungry for a fare and said he’d do it.

We threw our bags in the trunk and set off.

My wife wasn’t happy. 

She glowered in the backseat, arms crossed, staring straight ahead. She hated the fact that this man was risking his license to make up for what was my blunder.

“It’s OK,” I assured her. “We’ll make it.”

The driver got stopped for speeding, threw the ticket on the dashboard and kept driving. My wife was livid.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said.

We arrived in New Brunswick just minutes before the train. I gave the cab driver a big tip and apologized as my wife stormed ahead with the luggage.

Later that night, over dinner in the dining car, I told the attendant our story.

Such a romantic tale, he said, and gave us a free bottle of wine to celebrate.

My wife still was not happy.

I did a toast, clinked her glass, and told her that we had cheated fate.

“That’s the problem,” she said. “Nobody cheats fate.”

The train is going to crash tonight, she said.

We made it safely to Toronto.

It’s a story, like my grandfather’s about the little ghost, that I’ve told for years.