Workin' on the railroad

I live on the nicest street in my town. I swear I do. However, the nicest street in my itty bitty town is directly across a small berm from the railroad tracks. Hey, man, this is small town America. You get what you get. We have no traffic to speak of, and very little crime. All we have to put up with is the occasional train.

Every few years, the railroad has to perform maintenance on the tracks to keep the trains speeding through at a good pace, and this is one of those years. The other night, some maintenance cars were parked on the side track directly in front of our house. And these are the kinds of cars that have to run all night long. For one terrible night, it sounded like a train wreck in front of my house -- All Night.

And all the cars were brightly lit, so that the railroad workers could, I don't know, keep an eye out for thieves and miscreants. Or maybe they worked all night on something. I'm not sure.

Every time I opened my front door, I smelled creosote and engine oil and diesel fuel. This odor is not unknown to me, because when I was little and lived in Social Circle, Georgia, I played at the depot all the time. There were almost always one or two engines parked at the depot, and the odor around them was identical to the one I smelled now.

It was a shot of nostalgia.

Not nostalgic were the sirens. Every once in a while, some sirens or alarms or *something* would go off -- and it sounded like a volunteer fire department's sirens to call the volunteer firemen together for a fire. I know what *that* sounds like, too, because Social Circle's fire department was about a block and a half away from my house. And there were a lot of fires in the summer of '69. That made quite an impression on me, let me tell you.

Fortunately, the alarms on the railroad equipment stopped going off around 11:00 -- but the lights remained bright all night long.

My new camera recorded the picture pretty accurately.

I really like my new camera.