I was sitting at my desk tonight doing some research for an article I’m writing for the neighborhood newsletter about the rail line next to our neighborhood. The Seaboard Air Line has a colorful history, once bringing passengers and cargo through the heart of the South. As I looked at the multitude of pages on the history of this line, I heard a quite unusual sound. A CSX train’s horn was blowing in the distance.

We get trains here all the time, but typically they are daytime-only. One will pass around 9 AM, another around noon, and one passes by around dinnertime. They don’t even faze us anymore. But tonight’s was special. It was the first train to ever pass our house at night.

I picked up my radio, tuned to the road channel of the train, grabbed my flashlight and stood out on the porch as the rumbling got louder. The locomotive’s horn was blaring far more frequently than usual, owing to its late schedule. It seemed to take forever for it to approach.

The rumbling got louder and I could now see the train’s light flashing through the woods. It was moving at the maximum speed, about twice as fast as daytime trains. The lights showing the train numbers was all I could see of this massive steel beast. Twenty cars went rumbling past, a mere thirty feet from my backyard. My ears told me the cars were empty, my hearing somehow tuned to the multitude of passing sounds.

This phantom night train rumbled past, its insistent horn piercing the night on the way to downtown Raleigh or beyond. I feel its visit during my writing delivered a message to me.

Two hundred years since their invention, trains still carry magic whereever they go. They’ve got me under their spell.