Train Traffic

By Margaret Turner Taylor

Austin loves to ride the train.  In his mind, he designs trains of the future.  Imagine the boy's surprise when he discovers Alberto, a victim of human trafficking, hiding in the cabana behind his home in Merryvale Park.  Alberto has just escaped from a hidden compartment in a private railroad car.  While keeping Alberto's ex

• Language: English
• Publisher: LLOURETTIA GATES BOOKS, LLC
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953082954

Book preview

2019-Train-Traffic-KDP-cover_1600x2500.jpg

Train

Traffic

Margaret Turner Taylor

This book is a work of fiction. Many of the names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or person living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 Llourettia Gates Books, LLC

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

Llourettia Gates Books, LLC

P.O. Box #411

Fruitland, Maryland 21826

www.margaretttaylorwrites.com

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-953082-97-8

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-953082-96-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-953082-95-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020910812

Cover design by Jaime L. Coston

Photography by Andrea L

õ

pez Burns

Interior design and layout by Jamie Tipton, Open Heart Designs

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Author’s Note

This book is dedicated with all my love to Theodore Austin Gaillard

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my readers Jane, Teddy, Lane, Robert, Margaret, Peggy, Nancy, Tom, Bettyrose, David, Jaime, and others. I value your input.

My grandson Teddy helped create and made valuable suggestions to the story. He chose the title, and I hope the final product is fun for him.

Thank you to my husband Robert Lane Taylor for his excellent editing and pertinent critical comments. Extra special appreciation for their time and terrific editing skills goes to my dear friends Nancy Calland Hart and Tom Gallaher and to my wonderful neighbors David and Bettyrose Hetzel. A special thank you to my daughter Margaret Lane Taylor for her excellent advice. Each of you has contributed to making this literary effort so much better.

I am grateful to Stephanie Fowler and others at Salt Water Media for their crucial assistance moving TRAIN TRAFFIC into its printed form.

Jaime Coston, my cover artist, has worked tirelessly to produce the Merryvale Park train station, the PRC, and the reference map on the back of the book. I am in awe of her artistic skills, her creative sensitivity, and her forbearance with me. She is so talented, and I am fortunate that she is willing to share her abilities.

I could not have done any of my books without the help of Jamie Tipton of Open Heart Designs, my brilliant interior book design and layout expert. She does such beautiful work and is very patient with me. I am lucky and thankful to have her on my team.

Thanks to Andrea L

õ

pez Burns who produced the photograph of me you see on this cover and on the covers of the other books in this series. Her son Seth is her excellent assistant. Andrea is a photography artist and a genius. Yes, it is a very recent photo. Thank you, Andrea and Seth, for making me look good.

The first question Elizabeth Burke, M.D., always asked me when I saw her in her office was: What’s new and exciting in your life? I promised myself that one day I would have a good answer for her. Thank you, Dr. Burke.

Many thanks to all of you who have offered me verbal and written encouragement and have urged me to keep writing. I appreciate your positive feedback more than I can say.

Preface

Train Traffic is a work of fiction. Because my grandson Teddy has always loved trains, this book was destined to be about his passion for this very special mode of transportation. Teddy has a significant social conscience, so his book had to be about more than trains. We discussed a number of issues that Teddy is concerned about and decided to take on human trafficking.

This is a book for young people, and human trafficking is a difficult subject to think and talk about, as well as to write about. I have greatly simplified the travesty of human trafficking in the story, Train Traffic. In real life, it is a much more complex problem. According to government statistics, abductions off the street account for relatively few human trafficking victims. Some victims that arrive in the United States do work on unpaid cleaning crews and as unpaid agricultural workers. Other victims are caught in much more unseemly situations.

I made some difficult choices in limiting the scope of the plight of the human trafficking victims in this narrative. My intention is not to minimize the more serious aspects of this terrible crisis in our midst. My goal in this work of fiction is to offer a preliminary introduction to the subject of human trafficking and to give some sense of the suffering this tragedy brings to the human condition.

www.margaretttaylorwrites.com

Prologue

There is nothing like a train!

There are many ways to travel from place to place in the world, but there is nothing quite as thrilling, and at the same time as comforting, as a train ride. Airplanes, cars, buses, bikes, scooters, motorcycles, and all the rest of those things with wheels can take us where we want to go. Each has its advantages, and each provides us with its own kind of fun. But the train is special. It’s more than just a way of traveling someplace and back. It’s an experience to ride the train, even if you aren’t actually going anywhere. It’s fun to ride the train, just for fun, just to ride.

Some countries take better care of their trains than others. The United States used to take pretty good care of its trains. Sometime in the 1960s, when airplanes began to take their business away, trains fell on hard times and were neglected. The dining cars with white tablecloths and china plates disappeared and were replaced with snack bars that sold dried-out cardboard sandwiches wrapped in cellophane and other lousy food. Sleeping cars and drawing rooms became hard to find. (Do you even know what a drawing room is these days?) Fewer trains were on the tracks, and fewer people were riding.

Europe has always taken very good care of its trains. Europeans love their trains, and European governments contribute generous amounts of tax dollars so their trains are clean and modern. Technology has not bypassed the railroad industry in Europe, and high-speed trains have enabled this mode of transportation to compete with airplanes. These days, it’s faster to travel some places by train than to go by plane. And it’s ever so much more fun and relaxing.

The compartment approach, favored by European trains, is an elegant way to travel. Instead of sitting in rows, one behind the other, like in a bus or in an airplane, the compartment gives you a kind of cozy privacy. Even if you don’t know anyone else who is sitting in your compartment, for that trip, you become a group. You are joined in some odd way with the others in your compartment, and they are your traveling companions, if only for a few hours. There is a feeling of safety, and at the same time a sense of adventure, that can’t be duplicated by any other travel experience. You are in your own world, going someplace, protected and secure. All of your luggage and other stuff is right there with you, where you can keep an eye on it – not stowed in a distant baggage compartment somewhere, or forgotten on the tarmac or in a baggage holding area. In a train compartment, there is room for your legs. You are not scrunched up behind another seat with your chin in someone else’s hairdo. You can bring your lunch and have room to put it on your lap. And while you are eating or reading a book, with plenty of room for your knees, you are progressing towards your destination.

There’s nothing else like riding on a train. The sway and the swagger, the unique motion that gently rocks you from side-to-side at the same time it moves you forward, evokes a time gone by, a nostalgic visit to the past, even as you are being propelled into the future. Bullet trains that travel at high rates of speed offer a different kind of train experience, but there is nothing like a train. Your seat is there, right beside your view. Your bed is sometimes there, and your dinner and your breakfast might also be there. Everything you need is moving along the rails with you, inside your compartment. You will arrive with your luggage, having already eaten and slept. It’s magical.

Chapter 1

I love trains. I think about them every day and ride a train whenever I have the chance. When my parents moved to the San Francisco area, it was just luck that they bought a house close to the train tracks, but it was my good luck. When I look out my bedroom window through the trees, I can see the train when it goes by. I have the best view in winter when the trees are bare. At night, when I’m supposed to be asleep, I listen for the train. I hear it get louder as it comes closer and closer, and then it moves away into the distance until I can’t hear it any more. Sometimes, when it’s behind my house, it blows its whistle. I love that.

I know trains, the way they look and the way they sound. I make up stories about trains and imagine what trains of the future will be like. I even design trains of the future. My grandmother has given me many books about trains, and I’ve read them all.

My parents have taken me on trips to Europe where we’ve ridden everywhere on the train. A Eurail Pass is a wonderful thing!

On Saturday mornings, from the time I was a little boy, my mom would take me for rides on the train. We might ride one train or another all day long. We might stop for pastries and hot chocolate at a favorite bakery. We might ride into San Francisco for lunch and ride the train back home again. In all the eleven years of my life, I’ve never grown tired of riding the train.

My family has stories about trains. Some are funny, and some are happy. Some are sad.

My Gram remembers riding the train during World War Two. The trains were full of soldiers, and the men heading off to war were given first choice to have a seat. On one trip, my great grandmother sat on her suitcase in the aisle of the overcrowded train, overnight from Baltimore, Maryland to Belmont, Ohio. She held my grandmother in her arms all the way.

My grandmother has told me about Pullman cars. The daytime seats on the train could be turned into sleeping berths at night – one up and one down. My grandmother remembers train trips in Pullman cars with her mother, climbing into the upper berth and trying to go to sleep as the train chugged its way west to take my grandmother to visit her grandparents who lived in Ohio.

I have a railroad sign that says Belmont. It used to hang at the railroad stop in the small town in Eastern Ohio where both of my great grandparents were born and grew up. There wasn’t any train station in Belmont, just a platform where you waited for the train to stop. You could sit on a covered bench to get out of the rain. My great grandmother began her European adventure there in June of 1938. Many tears were shed on that platform a few years later, when she kissed my great grandfather goodbye before he left for war in the South Pacific. That sign represents a lot of family memories. My great grandmother bought it from the town when the train stopped coming to Belmont and the platform was torn down.

My best birthday party ever was a combination train ride and scavenger hunt. My friends and I rode on the train from stop to stop, searching for and finding one clue after another that led us on to the next clue and the next stop on the train. Our prize, and final stop, was dinner at the Slanted Door, my favorite Vietnamese restaurant. What a wonderful birthday!

Chapter 2

One night in early April, when I was supposed to be asleep, I was reading under the blanket with a flashlight. I’d listened to the trains passing by my house at night for so long and was so accustomed to their comings and goings, I hardly paid attention to them anymore. They were part of the background noise, comforting and familiar, a part of the fabric of my nightly existence. If the trains kept to their usual schedules, I no longer noticed they were there. That night I heard the train approaching. Next I heard the train whistle. That night the sounds of the train got my attention. Something was different. Then the train stopped, and I knew this wasn’t a regular stop. I climbed out of bed and put on my bedroom slippers because the floor was cold. There was a comfortable chair beside my window where I could look out and see the train tracks. Sure enough, the train had stopped before it reached the station, right there, just beyond my back yard. I’d heard this train go by my house every night, and it had never stopped so close to my house.

The moon was nearly full, and there weren’t any clouds in the sky. In early April the trees are still bare. I had a better view of the train on this night than I did when there was a new moon or lots of clouds or when the trees were full of leaves. I could clearly see four or five cars of the train. There was one odd-looking car at the end of this train, in the