Trash on the tracks

This is just some of the garbage I found on a brief trespass across one backyard in Taylor's Landing and over to Farmview Drive on a brief Sunday stroll with my son.

I completely respect the railroads and want to know what we can do to clean this up together with them. I also know that railroads are an imposing entity which governments such as Watkinsville cannot always cope with, but I think we can work with them to try to find a solution to keep our backyards beautiful.

The litter is primarily caused by the people tossing garbage and not necessarily anything to do with the locomotives on the Norfolk Southern leased to Benny Anderson line. He has every right to park his cars anywhere he wants.

I also realize there is a great deal of garbage generated by the railroads such as with old cross ties and spikes themselves but that also people whose property abuts the tracks use them as a place to dispose of their unwanted belongings.

I hope we get it removed as painlessly as possible. Railroads are part of our culture vanishing more and more every day, and my Grandfather William Collins Matthews of Dublin, Georgia was an engineer on the trains in Georgia in the 1940s and 50s. My dad got to travel all over the country as a child because of his father's employment.

I would love for passenger trains to return to Watkinsville, but I know Bogart is the only likely link of any lines to Atlanta from Athens.

Riding on the City of New Orleans

The City of New Orleans
by Steve Goodman

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin' trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we'll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
And all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.