A Train Story

After the development of several water projects in Utah’s central desert, Delta was founded in 1908 as an agricultural town supported by irrigation.  With that irrigation water in play, Delta achieved a prominent ranking as one of the largest alfalfa and hay seed producing regions in the USA from the 1920s through the 1960s.  But this is not an agriculture story; it is a train story.  In 1911, the Utah Southern Railroad closed its Deseret Station in Oasis, Utah, and opened its Delta Station—the largest station south of Salt Lake City—in the burgeoning new town.  My mother was born and raised in Delta, Utah (not counting the one year the family resided in Las Vegas).  Throughout my entire childhood, my family made regular trips to Delta to visit my grandparents, a few aunts and uncles, and lots of cousins.  I was a girl raised in suburbia, but the family visits to Delta introduced me to small town life—a realm with only one high school, pickups and tractors, water play optioned by large scale irrigation, dragging Main Street, full knowledge of back stories for the cashier in the store or the teens at the fast-food drive-in where we bought root beer flavored soft serve cones—and trains.

On a summer’s night, outside on a lawn in a tangle of sleeping bags with siblings and cousins, or even nestled on a couch or a bed in my grandparents’ house with windows open to catch the fortuitous cooling of a desert in darkness, the din and the vibration and the melody of trains wove themselves into intervals of a night’s soundtrack.  One summer my mother led us on a family hike along the tracks.  We practiced walking the rails like she had done as a child, with our hands we felt the tremor of those rails as a train in the far distance approached still too silent for our ears, then we marveled at the tangible clamor of a train passing over us as we crouched under the tracks bridging a dry gully, and we gaped at the flattened penny my dad placed on the tracks before the train actually passed our small party standing in reverential awe a safe distance away.  In Delta I learned the sound repertoire of trains:  hiss, clank, murmur, whistle, chug, rumble, shriek, and roar.  Up close and personal, without a car’s protective encasement, a moving train envelops one’s very being in blaring tumult, ambient agitation, and then a sense of shift in time and space.  For me, even now, it is shocking alchemy.

During summers stateside, I often drive from my dad’s home near Tooele, Utah, to the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, Utah, to attend a few plays.  Instead of taking the Interstate route, I follow a string of two-lane highways “the back way”—Tooele to Delta to Milford to Cedar City—roads with sparse traffic and signs cautioning drivers of the possibility of deer or cattle sharing the drive space.  My sister Diane mentioned a spring located just off the highway in all the space and empty between Delta and Milford that might offer some photographic moments interesting to me; it would also necessitate my leaving the highway and following a dirt road for short way.  On my return trip from Cedar City to Tooele, I spotted the sudden green space in the otherwise arid landscape, and I turned off the highway onto the dirt road.  After twenty minutes or so of dirt road driving and photographic fun, I made my way back to the highway but discovered this:

A train fully stopped on the tracks just in front of my entrance back onto the highway!

I waited a few minutes, hopefully expecting it to begin moving again.  Instead, I heard the hum of engines power down to silence.  Surely it would move again soon, I explained to myself, because why would a train stop here.  Then I hopped back out of the car to take train photos, of course.  The train remained still.  There was no way I could get my car to the highway side of the tracks as long as the train maintained its current position.  Where did the dirt road lead, I began wondering.  Would it end abruptly somewhere out on the desert or would it connect to another road that would lead back to the highway at another place?  What kind of options did I have if the train did not move?

Maybe twenty minutes later I discovered the headlight of a train traveling in the opposite direction of the one stopped in front of me.  So, the scenario unfolded before me did have a rationale, and I smiled with a certain sense of relief. 

The second train passed by, and the first train revved up the engines once more before slowly commencing forward movement.  Eventually the space between my car at rest on the dirt road and the highway across the tracks had cleared of train car obstacles, and I was on my way.  Once on the paved highway, I pursued “my train,” passed it, and then surrendered my view of it at all as the tracks angled right and the highway curved left. 

Train tracks stretch along the bench of the small mountain range several miles east of my dad’s house.  On summer nights when the windows are open, sometimes I hear the mournful wail of a train running those rails, and I am transported into the magic of childhood and memory.  All is well and I sleep.