The speaker blares to life and startles me back to consciousness. It has been just under a year since traveling in a Muslim country and being woken by one of the five daily calls to prayer.
Today’s freight train explosion happened just a few kilometers from where I live. I didn’t hear or feel the blast, but those exact same tracks run along the end of my block and the train would have passed by me a few minutes later on its way south. So it got me thinking about trains.