Bellevue Train Museum

We were driving around on our way to the caverns, which took us miraculously through Downtown Bellevue. Anytime I head west, I end up in Bellevue. It is a magnet to the secret rural desires of my martini stained soul. We found the church that was on sale last year for 70,000. It was a haunted house the first time I saw it. It's a daycare now. But it's still next to the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum. I haven't been inside the museum yet. Instead we pulled over and I wandered around the empty railway cars. It was a rainy Sunday, and no one was around, though there was a muted light coming from inside one of the offices. Inside was probably some middle aged volunteer, playing Bejeweled and drinking Diet Coke, waiting for anyone in rustbelt Ohio who might still be interested in the trains that have crisscrossed their towns for a hundred years.

In an alternate world, I would have bought that church, and lived in it, with the engines and cabooses in my backyard.

I have no bent to engineering or mechanics. I have no idea how these things work. But I love the sounds they make, and I love the motion of them. If it is big and metal and moves, I want to be around it. Remember Richard Scarry's Cars, Trucks, and Things That Go? And the pickle truck accident? Remember seeing the impossible giant tankers waiting on the Cuyahoga river, filling up with salt and gravel and mountains of unknown rock? Remember the engine they have at COSI, which moves back and forth on a track in a room, while kids (you, me) sit in the engine room full of power?



One day when I was very young, pre-teen, I took the train from my grandmother's house in Philadelphia to New York. And I took it back. It was the best part of the day, rocking back and forth on the dirty beige upholstery, watching generic landscape swish by. It's best to move very fast, wherever you are going. Its best to be sealed up in steel, careening through air, untouchable.



Remember The Boxcar children?


I'm in a funny kind of mood. I want to be safe wherever I am, and the only things that make me feel that way these days are monoliths of rock, brick, metal, wood. I want to be in structured large spaces, alone. It's like autumn starts to sniff around and the bear in me starts looking for a flat cold floor to stretch out on, where the weather becomes only a muted noise banging on the walls. Old things that have proven their stamina already. It's hard to be lonely in places like that, for me anyway.

Once upon a time people and children and farm animals and clothing and coal and liquor and tin cans and guns and tractors and radios and vegetables and letters traveled in these boxes across the plains and mountains, on slick steel rails, bouncing back and forth and up and down. And they came to Ohio, where they stopped. Then someone stuck them in a park, where local kids could love them when they were little and throw rocks at them when they grew up.

More trains here.