Thinking of Trains at Three in the Morning

Awake. I can’t get back to sleep.

No whistles sound tonight. There are no Now Arriving

or All Aboard announcements. I’ve missed the train

and I’m stuck at the CB&Q depot back when it 

contained a shoeshine stand in the men’s lounge,

when businessmen wore wingtips and white shirts with ties,

when the newsstand overflowed with multiple papers, 

when the white glazed brick walls of the main waiting room

echoed announcements of 38 arrivals and departures,

every day, people sitting on the huge wooden benches,

the ones with massive armrests to prevent lying down

like tonight as I sit here, isolated with a fool’s reminiscence

and these thoughts tend towards vanished trains. 

 I remember riding on the Zephyr at night from Denver,

 the clicking of metal in motion, the gentle sway of the bed. 

 If I were only on it tonight, I’d be sound asleep.

--Jay Matson

These photos (you can click on them to see them full size) are of the old Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad station in Galesburg, Illinois, which this poem describes.  The poet, Jay Matson, lived in Galesburg before and after he attended Knox College, also in Galesburg.  He was a senior when I was first year.  The top photo is from 1961, the one of the waiting room seems older.  (It's a colorized print for a postcard, I think.)  I remember the waiting room as darker and smaller.

My first glimpse of this station and this town where I was to go to college was from the Denver Zephyr to Denver in the spring of my senior year of high school.  In my first college years, I often took the trains from my Pennsylvania home to Galesburg, until there was half-fare flying to O'Hare, and then I took the train from Chicago to Galesburg.   By that time, the mid to late 1960s, the station had probably lost many of its amenities, but it still hosted a kind of diner, famous with students for being open all night and for its blueberry pancakes.   This station was torn down in 1984 and replaced with a smaller one.  Amtrak still runs this route.

 I also grew up with the sound of trains, though our Greensburg, PA station was closed by the time I was five.  (It has since been restored but not as a station.)  All the trains have disappeared from where I live now in far northern California--recently enough that some crossing signals still exist, and until a few years ago, there were abandoned boxcars in Eureka.  When I first got here I did imagine now and again that I heard those whistles in the night.  But not for years.  

This poem is from Jay Matson's latest collection, Old Affairs.