I Travel by Train

俐

I TRAVEL BY TRAIN
"seeing what kind of country it is that I live in."
Rollo 'Walter' Brown
I TRAVEL BY TRAIN
1939

ILLUSTRATIONS BY GRANT REYNARD
D. Appleton Century Company
INCORPORATED
London 4P3P

Preface
IN THE dead of night in the Oklahoma Panhandle country, I climbed aboard a long train from the Pacific Coast that had generously offered to stop at a small town for a solitary passenger. I was still much awake from a busy evening, and while the porter made down a berth for me, I wandered back through the train through two or three darkened sleeping-cars where passengers snug behind green curtains were sound asleep, then through four or five others that were almost as dark, but not made down for the night, and without passengers. In the rear section of the last of these a brakeman--a man of forty or forty-five with an active face sat musing in the dim light of the berth-lamp. The unoccupied cars, he explained, had carried a company of youngsters to a Conservation Camp farther southwest, and were now going "deadhead" back to Kansas City.
For five minutes I stood and talked with him.
"Sit down," at last he begged of me. "I haven't talked to anybody all day."
He seemed a trifle loquacious, and it was late, but I complied. As soon as I was seated, he laughed a little. "I wanted to get you down so as I could ask you a question. If you don't mind, I'd just like to know what you work at. When you came walking back here I hardly thought you looked like a business man."
I let him guess. Then I told him.
"Well, say! A writer? I don't often meet any of them that is, that I know of. But I know a book you or somebody ought to write about trains and railroads and the excitement of them."
I told him that I was soon to go to work on a volume that might not be altogether unlike what he had in mind; that for more than a dozen years I had had to cover much of the United States three or four times each year, and that I meant to write about what I had seen about a trip here and there out of many.
"But you'll be sure to say plenty about trains, won't you? Anybody that ever saw as much water as the Cimarron River has got in it in August writes about ships. And trains are lots more thrilling. Ever stand in the Union Station at Cincinnati or St. Louis, or in one of the big stations at Chicago or Minneapolis, at night maybe, when the big boys with their names on their tails are all lined up to go the Bluebonnet, the Chief, the Corn King Limited, the Katy Flyer, the Viking, the Meteor, the F.F.V., the Flamingo, the Wolverine, the Zephyr, the Columbine, the Golden Arrow? You see, I know some of them, all right.
"And boy! You don't go to sleep while you're working on a train. Can you imagine what it's like jumping off the pilot of a freight engine to run ahead to open a switch, and your feet slip out from under you where there's some smooth ice under the snow, and you fall smack across the rail with the old engine creeping along only about eight feet behind you? Or when everything is covered with ice, slipping down ka-plump between two flat-cars when they're moving? I did that once starting on a night run to Omaha. I had sense enough to keep on running, down in there between the two sets of trucks, but she was already going too fast for me to dodge out across the rails, and I didn't know how long I was going to be able to keep on running, with the engine picking up a little all the time. Then she began to slow down, and finally stopped! Boy, oh, boy! The engineer said his engine didn't feel as if she was pulling just right, and he thought he'd better stop and find out what was wrong before he got going.
"Now isn't that good enough for a book?" "Yes, but you are the person to write that one. Mine will be about the people I see on trains what they are up to, "
He interrupted: "Say, I could write one like that, too if I knew how. I talked once with fourteen movie actresses on this run. And sometimes I see something along the way. There! in that little town the agent's wife is a sour-looking devil--I know that much."
I tried to pull him back to my point of view. I told him that I was interested in the people I saw when I got off trains, too: in the people who produce food, in the people who must go hungry, in