Monday, September 14, 2009

Troop train

This past weekend a troop train rolled slowly past a little station I'd been visiting.


It was taking the troops to see the mayor, who was giving them a key to the city.



Something about seeing all these uniformed people sitting inside a moving train and waving - close enough to feel a connection, but too far to touch hands - hit me hard. I thought of all the men who went off to World Wars I and II on trains, and how it must have been to be a wife or a sister or a mother or a friend of somebody who was inside one, somebody who was maybe never coming back, and not really being the same even if he did.

I think this page, from a display case at the Railroad Museum in Fort Erie, says it better. Click on it, if it's too small to read here:

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