Trains and Newspaper Offices

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Newspaper offices and trains have gone hand-in-hand throughout my checkered career. This current gig is no exception.

We moved our office downtown last August, on my birthday. It was not my intent to celebrate the final year of my sixth decade on this planet by sweating profusely and risking back injury while moving desks, filing cabinets and the like. But that is how it worked out. Football season was set to begin the following Friday, and I wanted us settled in our new digs before that commenced. Moving downtown proved to be a wise choice. Our walk-in traffic has increased immensely, and being next door to the jail provides constant entertainment. As a friend is fond of saying, “It doesn’t take all kinds. We just have all kinds.” And all kinds of folks do wander around our block.

My office is just behind the front counter, so I can hear most everything that is going on between the customers and the staff, as well as most of the phone conversations. That is the way I prefer it. But sometimes if I need to make a call I’ll take my cellphone outside for both privacy, and so I can hear. When we have two or three customers inside placing garage sale ads or renewing a subscription, it gets a bit noisy.

Invariably, not long after I have engaged in a conversation outside, here comes the mournful whistle of the train winding down the tracks that run along the eastern edge of downtown. Soon I am back inside the office, since the engineer feels obligated to lay on the horn from somewhere around the chocolate factory to where the overpass crosses Hwy. 49 by Walgreens. One day the horn went on so long that our neighbors joined me outside, figuring there was about to be a terrible accident or derailment. But apparently the person pulling the whistle (these days it’s probably just a button) was just making sure everybody within a mile of the track was wide awake.

At the Lufkin paper, where I occupied the publisher’s office for five years — again right up front where I could keep an eye on things — the train track was across the street from my office, about a sand wedge shot away. If I was on the phone when the train came barreling through, on the west side of downtown in this case, all conversation ceased. The whistle would make my office window rattle so loudly I often worried the glass was going to pop out. This happened about a dozen times daily.

I lived on the other side of the track from the train, but close to downtown. Every workday it was a race to see if I could get to work and not be stymied by the train. As I pulled out of my driveway I would listen for the whistle to try and determine if I should go the long way through downtown so I could go under the overpass and not get stuck. I usually guessed wrong.

After Lufkin, I meandered north back to my hometown of Longview, where the train track ran behind the building. I quickly learned to avoid all southbound streets out of downtown except for Green Street, which was where the overpass was located. This track and I go back to 1968, when I ran a paper route through downtown and the neighborhoods nearby, riding my bicycle. Often I was stuck by the train, a 13-year-old kid watching the cars go by newspapers in my cloth satchel, its strap cutting into my shoulder. Whenever I saw a railcar transporting vehicles stacked three high, I used to daydream about somehow a nice Ford Mustang slipping gently off the railcar and into my possession. Unsurprisingly, this never happened.

What did occur at the overpass quite often and continues to this day were trucks not noticing the sign warning of low height clearance — just 10 feet – and shearing the top off the cargo compartment. A couple years back, after voters approved a $52.6 million bond issue, the city shut down the street and worked on lowering it so as to raise the height clearance. But best-laid plans and all that, and crews encountered foundation structures that could not be removed. So, after 16 months of work, the clearance was increased a mere 14 inches. And trucks continue to plow into it, as recently as March.

At least it provides plenty of photo opportunities for the paper, especially if the train is speeding by overhead, its whistle drowning out everything within earshot. Some things never change.

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