My nephew Scotty is another young train buff. He's six years old, and is a huge fan of the British "Thomas the Tank Engine" series, and he has quite the collection of Thomas trains. He wanted to take me on the Utah Transit Authority "Front Runner" which is the new commuter rail service in Salt Lake City, so we made plans to do just that today. Why in the world Seattle can't do something like this is beyond me - especially with the larger population base. The Front Runner started earlier this year, and there is a train every thirty minutes making the 40 mile trip north to Ogden Utah, starting at 4am and going until midnight. The pitiful Seattle "Sounder" service offers only 8 trains all day -- all in the rush hour. Salt Lake also has a fantastic Light Rail system, and both Front Runner and the Light Rail are expanding.
We got off to inspect the train and I put Scotty on my shoulders. It was at this point he noticed that I had no hair and exclaimed, "you have no hair", and proceeded to wrap his arms around my head to keep me warm as I carried him. He broke off the ice on the locomotive and waved at the engineer and we walked the length of the train with his sister Shay. The train doesn't turn around as there is a locomotove control in the end of the last car and it becomes a "push" train rather than a "pull" train and heads back to Salt Lake.
Our ten minutes on the platform came to an end and we hopped back on board for the ride home. Scotty and I watched trains again and wished we could go further, and he gave me a big hug as the train pulled into Layton and they got off. I bet in a few years I'll come back and he'll hop on the back of my motorcycle and we'll take a day to ride and watch trains again.
I'm just wishing we had this kind of a system running between Seattle and Olympia.