Maybrook is a small village, once an unexpected center of northeastern transportation, seeming now more like the end of the road than the start of it. Long before Eisenhower’s interstate highway system – ironically an idea whose functionality he first witnessed in Nazi Germany – Maybrook was a bustling railyard with a roundhouse, a “Y” for oversleeping engineers, a restaurant and lounge providing services for rail worker passer-throughs and all manner of switches and box cars and locomotives.

While Walden had its knife factories and cutlery workers, Maybrook had the railyard, with the clanging train connections and steam whistles and the rhythmic rumblings of idling diesels. I am not going into all this history of change, but the railyard was replaced with truck terminals that connected the country through the Eisenhower concrete trails rather than rails, and the recent news that Yellow Freight is once again folding in bankruptcy leaves the disemboweled village without a firm center. Transportation is a fickle mistress.

As a kid, I spent as much time in Maybrook as I did in Walden. My mother was born in Maybrook and Grampa Gildersleeve built the first house on Houston Street, and he could walk to the end of the street and be in the railyard where he was a celebrated locomotive engineer with the corduroy engineers’ brimmed cap and the knowledge of all things requiring an oil can. In those days, to be a locomotive engineer meant you could take the whole machine apart and lay it out on the ground and reassemble it piece by piece and it would run, purr like a kitten. The coal cars of steam were replaced with oil tanks of diesel, and it made no difference, the engineer was the mechanic of his charge, his engine.

Gramp had his own machine shop across the street from the house he built; and when home from road trips to Connecticut, or wherever he was sent, he spent his time in this dark, oily, concrete block space with a step down from the outside, with, I think, a dirt floor, a space stocked with metal lathes as big as bankers’ desks and welding torches and a drill press and tools lined on the walls and brass oil cans of all ilk. The machine shop had the comforting smell only burning turning oil on steel can render, and a good grease gun was more valuable than a packed lunch.

My grandfather had a scrapbook of the rail yards full of pictures of train wrecks and people of the yard and different locomotives and a history of the industry. Numerous times he offered to go through the book with me and explain what was in it, and I never took the time, in my arrogance of my youth, with a belief in limitless time to get back to things like that, and, of course, my subsequent regret is something inextinguishable.

Gramp gave the book to his son, Uncle Leo; and Leo, thinking he was doing the right thing, gave the book to Alex Alexander, a Maybrook fixture who helped set up the Maybrook Railyard Museum in the red caboose next to the sewage treatment plant and the now-quiet Yellow Freight truck yard behind on the land once cut by rails. I understand this museum is now in the village hall. If anyone knows where my grandfather’s scrapbook might be, I would be grateful for any information.

I have a lot of memories of Maybrook, and I will get to them, but today the news is a downer. Yet, who knows? What comes next for the venerable transportation village might be more exciting than the rubber of eighteen wheelers. We shall see. The land is still there, the space, the ruins of the railyard under the terminated trucking terminals, like churches built on the site of churches, or over indigenous altars, shimmering ghosts of transportations past.