That's me waving while my sister plugs her ears, as our grandpa returning from work waves from the driver's seat. In one of his stories about growing up in Needles, my dad told that each engineer had a distinct "call" on the train whistle, so the whole town knew when it was Lester coming in, or whoever else it might be.
I'm the first in four generations not to have worked on the railroad. My dad worked summers on the Santa Fe; his dad ran locomotives in France during World War I, then for 40 years or so between Needles and Seligman; his dad, a Santa Fe fireman, was killed in a railroad accident in New Mexico, when Grandpa was a baby. I wrote a song about it:
My father's father's father was a railroad man too,
a Santa Fe fireman on the Albuquerque line.
He rode the locomotives on the long night run
while his wife and tiny children stayed home.
One day great-grandpa kissed his wife and headed for the yard,
took a Kansas-bound freighter in the middle of the night.
The train was high-ballin', he leaned to get his orders
and he lost his head completely on a narrow steel bridge.
Then father's father's mother had to tell her little children
they'd have to get along without a dad because he wasn't coming home.
They did, and father's father became an engineer,
he drove the locomotives on the Albuquerque Line.
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