I never liked to read that much. School required enough that recreational reading in the 70's wasn't that hip to a teenager. Thus, I never read anything by Mark Twain. What did I have in common with a long-winded guy who told stories about life in a small town near the Mississippi River? Okay, except for writing talent, I had a lot in common with Twain, a.k.a. Samuel Clemens. Still, I hadn't read Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, but I did catch the movies so I had a pretty good grasp of their concepts. One thing I admired was Sawyer's sales ability to convince his friends to do something they didn't want to (paint a picket fence). I applied this technique often as a youth, especially when I wanted my friends to go watch trains with me.

Living in a small town means there aren't always fun things to do, especially in the 70's. Cruising, playing mini-golf in Cape, fishing, that is about it. We were too young to attend the shooting matches at Al's Tavern although that concept intrigued me. It was as close to Vegas as most in the 63740 zip code would get. So often we had to manufacture some fun. Ring door bells and run, cow tipping, sneak into the closed city pool or use your dad's railroad flashlight to try to turn off street lights via their auto sensor. That doesn't wow my kids these days, with X-Box, MySpace, Pay Per View and Blue Toothed
Cell calls. But in 1981, my concept of rural fun was to drive to railroad tracks, wait an hour, and then have a mile long of steel fly by in a matter of seconds. Train watching was my hobby.

If train watching made me a dork, I was actually the apprentice to the master dork in Tim Cannon, the publisher of ChaffeeMissouri.com. Tim loved trains more than I did. It was an avid hobby for him. But in 1981, he had a life, a girlfriend, and he didn't always have time for the hobby. I had nothing but time. Tim had taught me about one of the most fascinating train watches out there, the fast freight train known as the Blue Streak Merchandiser. The Blue Streak was a really fast train on the Cotton Belt that left the Alton and Southern yard in East St. Louis and rocketed at 80 plus m.p.h. on its way to Dallas. It passed just north of Chaffee on the Cotton Belt's tracks at Rockview. While most trains came through Rockview never over 50 mph, the Blue Streak was green lighted to go faster than anything I had ever seen.

I was sold, but it is never fun to watch trains alone. I needed my friends. So I convinced them that watching the Blue Streak would be more fun than lighting bags of dog droppings on someone's porch. They came along a few times. Most were bored but I found the jaunt fascinating. To see the Blue Streak, you drove to Rockview. We parked a half mile away and walked up the Frisco tracks to the intersection with the Cotton Belt. Some climbed the signal tower nearby. While train watching is often random, never knowing when or what you will see, the Blue Streak was the model of timing. Every night at 9 pm in came so you couldn't be late.

There was never another train getting in the way. The Blue Streak had such time sensitive cargo that every train got out of the way well in advance. I have no idea what the cargo was or why it was such a dire emergency. They weren't refrigerated cars. Someone said it was stolen auto parts but that doesn't seem that believable as an adult. Sort of like the story of the guy who fell asleep in a bar and awoke in a bathtub full of ice missing a kidney. Plausible or not, whatever the cargo, the train was coming and we would be ready. It was almost total darkness except the stars and the moon. When it approached, far off you could see the Mars light, a headlight we only saw on Cotton Belt trains. Its slow circles hid the fact that the light itself was approaching you at 85 m.p.h. You tensed up because you knew the show was about to go down. You stepped back from the tracks because at that speed, if the train had problems, you needed a head start. You could hear the horn blowing loudly at the first crossing in Rockview and before you knew it, it was blaring at the second crossing (which is no longer there) and the Blue Streak Merchandiser was upon you.

It is hard to tell which is louder, the train's horn blaring or just the thunder of something so massive hammering the intersection rails. You really couldn't look up and recognize much of what was right in front of you. It really was a streak. These days, it is like being on the front row of a NASCAR race and staring straight ahead and trying to focus on a car flashing in front of you. The burst of noise and light was pretty much sensory overload. Since the train was never that long, it passed it about 30 seconds but for that half minute, if you were close enough, everything in your field of view had transformed in such a rapid pace that the experience itself was a thrill ride, at least for a dork like me. As the Streak passed, the sounds dropped and all you saw was a quiet caboose quickly disappearing into the evening skyline.

While I couldn't convince many of my friends to go watch the Blue Streak many times, to this day, many of them recall with a smile the night they went to see the phenomenon of the Blue Streak Merchandiser. While it may not have topped their list of experiences as a kid, perhaps it did make it on the list and somehow found a way to land ahead of cow tipping. The animal rights people probably prefer it that way too.