Guaranteed to Make You Late
There is a particular kind of dread that settles over you when you are driving through the Bywater and you see the crossing gates start to lower. The lights flash. The bells ring. And you realize, with the sinking certainty of a person who has been through this before, that you are about to wait. Maybe three minutes. Maybe thirty. The Bywater train does not operate on a schedule that is available to the public. It operates on a schedule that is available to God and the railroad dispatcher, and neither of them is sharing.
The freight trains that run through the Bywater, Marigny, and Holy Cross neighborhoods are a constant reminder that New Orleans is a port city, that commerce flows through these streets as surely as the Mississippi flows past them. The tracks cut through residential neighborhoods at grade level, meaning there are no overpasses, no underpasses, no way around the train except to wait for it to pass or to turn around and find another route, which in the narrow streets of the Bywater is easier said than done.
The Three-or-Thirty Gamble
The cruelest aspect of the Bywater train is the uncertainty. Sometimes it is a short train — a dozen cars — and it passes through in a few minutes. You wait, you grumble, you move on. But sometimes it is a long train. A very long train. A train that stretches so far in both directions that you cannot see either end, moving at a speed that suggests it is in no particular hurry to be anywhere. And sometimes — and this is the moment when seasoned New Orleanians begin to question their life choices — the train stops. It just stops. On the tracks. Blocking the crossing. For reasons that are never explained and probably never will be.
When the train stops, time ceases to have meaning. You turn off your engine. You check your phone. You watch other drivers execute complicated U-turns on streets that were not designed for U-turns. You call whoever you were supposed to meet and deliver the two words that require no further explanation in New Orleans: "train stuck." They will understand. They have been there. Everyone has been there.
A Port City's Price
The trains are here because the port is here, and the port is here because the river is here, and the river is the reason all of us are here. The freight that moves through these neighborhoods — grain, chemicals, containers, petroleum products — is the lifeblood of an economy that has sustained this city for three centuries. The Port of New Orleans and the Port of South Louisiana together make up one of the largest port complexes in the world. That commerce moves by rail, and those rails run through neighborhoods where people are trying to get to work, pick up their kids, or make it to happy hour before the specials end.
There have been discussions about grade separations, about rerouting, about scheduling trains to avoid peak hours. These discussions have been happening for decades. They will probably happen for decades more. The railroad has been here longer than most of the houses, and it has the right-of-way in every sense — legal, physical, and temporal. You do not negotiate with a freight train. You wait for it.
The Zen of the Crossing
Some New Orleanians have made peace with the Bywater train. They have accepted it as a meditative exercise, a forced pause in a city that moves too fast in some ways and too slow in others. When the gates come down, they turn up the radio. They roll down the windows. They watch the boxcars pass and read the graffiti on the sides and think about where those cars have been and where they are going. It is almost peaceful, if you let it be. Almost. Right up until you remember that you were supposed to be somewhere fifteen minutes ago and the train shows no sign of ending. Welcome to the Bywater. You are going to be here a while.
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