Highways and Byways: Broad Street Diamond, Griffith, Indiana

By Maik Strosahl

I saw a picture recently in an Abandoned Railroad forum. It was identified as a crossing in Griffith, Indiana, that was one of the busiest in the nation.

    Griffith is just outside of Gary, which is just inside the Indiana state line across from Chicago. Their nickname was “the town that came to the tracks,” but looking at the picture, I wonder whether perhaps it should be reversed to “where all tracks came to town.”
    According to notes actually in the picture, the Grand Trunk came through here, and the Michigan Central, the Elgin Joliet and Eastern (also called the “J”), and the Erie raced through this labyrinth of tracks. A little research led to more names passing through this 13-track crossing: the Chesapeake (C&O), the Erie and Kalamazoo, Conrail, the New York Central, the Penn Central, and others. I watched a video showing many different trains passing through.

 

     I remember in my childhood hating to wait at crossings for a train, or sometimes several trains, to pass through the rails in Moline by the Mississippi, playing different made-up games with my seven siblings to pass the time crammed into my parents Ford LTD Station Wagon. This crossing would have been a nightmare—unless it was delaying us from some chores or one of my father’s many fixit jobs, where he was already getting too stiff with arthritis and we mostly followed his directions in various awkward positions (under, over, standing on a table, reaching into wiring we were assured was not hot, falling flat to the table’s surface after what felt like a bolt of lightning ran through the body of whichever one of us was helping at the time), getting the fixit job done before we could be released to go running around the neighborhood or to the nearby baseball field.
    Sadly, many of these lines have been ripped up through the decades, but there are still several historic sites at the crossing, including a museum in the station, that watched as the country came rumbling through.
    In a prose poem, here is my view through the windshield of a 1975 wagon at the Broad Street Diamond, Griffith, Indiana.

Broad Street Diamond, Griffith, Indiana

Dad parked the wagon as he first heard the Chessie rolling, cranking the window down to listen a bit to the trains, leaning the bench back into another Saturday morning’s lumber, taking a rest while waiting for the others to eventually make their way through—the Michigan Central, the Erie, the J, the Grand Trunk—mom surely wondering about our delayed arrival while we both enjoyed the moment rumbling, the cold October sun rising to the point where my visor actually helped to deal with the flashing between cars.

Dried leaves scattered westward with screeching wheels were brought back east by another engine pulling across the steel and cement, swirled again northbound until the next train blew their horn, the cross-buck shaking Dad awake from a snooze.

I was just glad to have a few minutes to play: blinking my eyes with the crossing lights, marking each train with tongue-made bell clangs rather than working with the hammer, straightening out yet another bent nail, cutting sheet rock and smearing spackle for the baby’s room, for the porch addition, and probably working the shingles next weekend if not for these few moments spent waiting for the freight to pass through Griffith.

During a break in the action, Dad would scootch the bench-back forward, added the wagon’s blue exhaust to the smells at the crossing, pulling back into the road, bumping slowly over each rail, clearing them all and taking us home, where our work was about to get started and the trains were just distant whistles blowing through our afternoon, continuing on through the years we lived in Indiana, where the freight never stopped and the chores were never finished.

Copyright © 2022 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.