Out of Left Field: LIRR aside, my love affairs with trains

Michael Dinnocenzo

How extensive is your experience with trains?

Perhaps, like many folks in our suburban era of the LIRR, there is not much range beyond commuter perspectives.

Those are, indeed, significant, especially as Penn Station has now descended into “PAIN” Station. What horrors!

My experience with trains, the LIRR connections, notwithstanding, has been highly affirmative.

Indeed, I have had a love affair with trains.

Our 1852 family house was 50 yards from the railroad tracks.

As a teenager, who was a quarterback on the high school team, my ambition was to be able to throw a pass from my front porch to a receiver friend at the tracks.

Unfortunately, I was never able to throw that far, but we all enjoyed the front porch (increasingly absent in suburban Long Island), and reveled in being able to sit around for our Italian-version café society, watching the trains go by.

The trains on our two sets of tracks ran through Sparkill toward Henry Hudson’s “Tappan Zee.”

Not surprisingly, early Dutch and English settlers had chosen these banks of the Hudson River for settlements.

From early morning into the night I loved to hear the sound of the trains that passed near my home.

Our windows were always open (as celebrators of fresh air, in winter as well as summer), so the distinctive train whistles were occurrences throughout each day and night.

Many trains passed our way, but nearly all of them were freight trains carrying products to and from the huge factory on the banks of the Hudson in appropriately named “Piermont.”

Nearly all members of my family, men and women, worked at that factory which operated 24 hours a day.

My dad and other males did a different eight-hour shift each week: 7 a.m.-3; 3-11 p.m., and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. (a tough way to earn a living, working around the clock.

It was even tougher because with the Italian immigrant “rainy day” mentality, when the men had a chance to work a double shift they grabbed it.  Sixteen hour days were common).

As a kid I awoke to the early morning trains.  Most were very long freighters [just last week near midnight at Mineola station, I was reminded of my youthful experiences.

For the first time in years, I saw an astoundingly long LIRR freighter heading West-bound].

I wish I had thought to count the cars.  In these days of environmental concerns, it seems logical to transport more people and goods by trains than by cars and trucks.

That is still too rare on Long island — and elsewhere; one might ask why?

When our tracks got to Piermont there was a key connecting spur to the huge factory (which has since been torn down and replaced by million-dollar condos stretching along the banks of the Hudson).

The few passenger trains (only two a day) went on to the elite towns of the appropriately named Grand View and South Nyack.

You will not be surprised to hear that the tracks veered away from the Hudson so as not to intrude on the affluent and prominent (who included Betty Friedan in Grand View and Helen Hayes in South Nyack).

Coming from an Italian ghetto, we seldom ventured far from our neighborhood.

It took immigrants a long time (and degrees of feeling Americanized) to be secure venturing into the unknown territory of older line families (to us, the “straneri”).

It was always a special treat for me as a kid to take that train ride to Nyack  — even better than the hit song “Take a kyack to Nyack.”

My most dazzling train experiences were on a 9,000 mile rail journey that crisscrossed the United States in 1977 (be alert for my forthcoming book “On the Rails” — one noted editor paid me the compliment of saying it was better than Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”).

I’m not sure how to interpret that because I’ve become less enamored of Kerouac as I’ve learned more about him (although I do celebrate his caring about his mother).

For my 60th college reunion, as mentioned in my previous column, I rode Amtrak from Penn Station to Schenectady.

When one heads north from Penn Station, sitting next to a large window on the West side of the train makes all the difference.

“Life Reviews” can commence immediately.

They can be enhanced when a college sophomore enters a crowded train at the Poughkeepsie station, and takes the seat next to me.

[to be continued]

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