Trains

I think I might just hate trains. I know that they are an excellent use of resources. They are efficient. They are cost effective. They annoy me.

I live in a railroad town. There are tracks pretty much every where I go. I either have to go under, over or across them to get anywhere. My house is literally between two sets of tracks. Did you know that when a train comes to a crossing there is a distinct whistle pattern? The engineer isn't randomly blowing; they actually all do it the same way--except some do it until they run out of air and some of the 'whistles' are off key. And of course those that mess it up and make you wonder if they had some Irish coffee. A crossing is Long, Long, Short, Long. I really felt like I'd figured something out the day I caught on to that one (at 60 trains a day it took less than week). That's annoying, especially at three AM (Why can't it be Short, Short, Long, Short?), but necessary.

But my real gripe is the way they stop traffic. I understand that for trains to get from point A to point B we have to stop and let them through. I however, don't understand why I was stopped by THREE trains in an effort to drop off the girls last night--less than 3 miles away. There was less than a minute between two of the trains (going in opposite directions--one train was headed south at 26 miles per hour. The other train was headed north at 22 MPH. If the each left a 4:45 from their stations 35 miles apart, when would the come to annoy me?...oh yeah, not what we were talking about.). We all had to sit through two slow moving trains (the first train was on a different set of tracks) back to back. I just want there to be a gap of 5-10 minutes that the trains have to delay before blocking a major artery of the city.

And to stop waking me up at night. Oh, never mind--that was Nate.