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This summer, the McConnell Center sponsored my class on a long trip through Italy. Unexpectedly, one of my favorite parts was watching and riding the passenger trains. Connect all cities and towns with fast, cheap, reliable transportation accessible to everyone. I long to see passenger trains of that caliber return to Kentucky, and advocate for it to be so daily.
There are hundreds of practical reasons we need passenger trains in our country, but one of my favorite reasons is nostalgia. The practical reasons are only an internet search away, but nostalgia is a hard emotion to convey. I am too young to remember an extensive passenger railroad in Kentucky, so I have relied on the memories of others, through records and conversations, to gain a sense of nostalgia all my own. Kentucky does have a few active passenger railway stations still in use. Still, they are situated in small towns in far Eastern and Western Kentucky and either hardly have service or are dedicated to short-distance dinner or sightseeing trains and not transportation. This poem is not specific to Kentucky, but it has been a potent fuel nonetheless. I share it in the hope of fuelling a longing in you as well!
The Railway Train
by Emily Dickinson
I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step
Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties, by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare
To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill
And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.