What Makes a Great Railroad Story?

We read for two reasons, mainly: to learn, and to be entertained. The best writing helps us do both. That’s true of any great story, but how do you accomplish that within the framework of the railroad? Trains magazine’s new book, Great American Railroad Stories, has some insights. 

The book contains 51 stories from close to 75 years of magazines—51 stories selected from literally thousands. The book is highly accessible. Open it to any page, find the nearest headline, and start reading. You will not be disappointed. But what can we learn from a more comprehensive view?

Let’s start with the bookends: “The Traveling Salesman,” by Victor H. White, published in November 1941; and “Where Christmas is Just Another Day,” by Joel Jensen, published in December 2009. On the one hand, they could not be more different, speaking to the great changes that swept through railroading in those seven decades.

White recounts a time when trains were much more a part of everyday life. Set in the 1920s—before widespread commercial aviation and interstate highways—it was only natural for a traveling salesman to go west on Union Pacific’s Portland Limited. The steam locomotive pulling the author’s train was so typical that he never even provides its wheel arrangement.

Contrast White’s railroad experiences to Jensen’s, which occurred more than 80 years later on BNSF’s former Northern Pacific main line around the Montana-North Dakota border. There are no passenger trains, and Jensen is clearly (and sometimes comically) an outsider among the men who keep freight trains running—through national holidays just like any other day.

Beyond those striking differences, though, these two tales share strong commonalities. They pay little attention to equipment. Big steam on the UP and third-generation diesels on the BNSF were both so respectively common that they hardly bear mentioning. White does lavish some descriptive prose on the Galloping Goose of shortline Montana, Wyoming & Southern, but ultimately he is far more interested in the man who runs it, just as he is far more interested in the conductor of the Portland Limited than the engine pulling it. Jensen, likewise, was drawn to Glendive, Mont., not for unit trains or motive power, but for the people who live and work for the railroad there. It is one of the last places in the United States that you could legitimately call a “railroad town,” and Jensen brings it to life by telling us about its people.

It is ultimately the people of the railroad who carry the 256 pages of Great American Railroad Stories—a few executives, some passengers, but mostly rank-and-file railroaders. One of the most entertaining is Paul Schneider in his “What’s the Problem up There, Union?” As the young extra operator temporarily assigned to Burlington Northern’s frenetic Union Avenue tower in Chicago, Schneider mixes youthful bravado with self-deprecation as he shares the excitement and challenges of learning the job at a busy urban interlocking. He is not shy about his affinity for Alco diesels, but this is foremost a story about characters—Larry the sarcastic signal maintainer, Warren the demanding yardmaster, a host of voices on the phone, and Schneider himself. 

Even many of the stories that do focus on equipment (ostensibly, at least) use the narrator or another main character to engage their readers. H. Reid presents his 1944 tribute to “The Caboose” as a yarn by the fictional conductor-raconteur “Old Timer Echolls.” In “The Press Previews the Congressional,” Wallace W. Abbey uses the second-person to put the reader right there aboard the preview run of Pennsy’s glittering new passenger train for the Northeast Corridor. Fred W. Frailey uses the same technique forty-five years later to explore operations on the BNSF Transcon in “Twenty-Four Hours at Supai Summit.”

And what about the dean of American railroad writers, David P. Morgan? Fittingly, Morgan’s is the only byline to appear three times in the book. (With two stories each, Abbey and Schneider are the only other authors with more than one.) Morgan could personify steam locomotives like no other, but his three stories selected for inclusion here touch on broader themes. One is a poetic vignette to his “most scenic site in railroading” (the Royal Gorge). Another looks at the looming passenger train problem in 1950 by asking, through a dialogue with publisher Al Kalmbach, “What’s right with the airlines?” Finally, there is his signature essay, “Confessions of a Train-Watcher.”

In “Confessions,” Morgan asks and then answers the question that faces all of us who favor railroading over other pursuits: why do we like trains so much? Morgan’s explanation touches on nearly every aspect of the business—its technology, engineering, history, places, experiences, and of course its people. But ultimately, this is a story about Morgan himself. All writers face the dilemma of whether to insert themselves into their text. Here, Morgan does so unabashedly. In doing so, he opens himself to you, his reader, and as with all great storytellers, in Morgan you begin to see a bit of yourself.

By the end, you are standing right there beside him when Morgan proudly proclaims, “Even if railroading ended tonight at 11:59, you and I would have been the fortunate ones—those who experienced the great drama, who were close by during one of those rare seasons when man’s genius produced something at once useful and beautiful.”

Amen.

Great American Railroad Stories is published by Kalmbach Books and is available here: http://www.kalmbachstore.com/01300.html

Scott Lothes is a frequent contributor to Trains and serves as president and executive director of the Center for Railroad Photography & Art (www.railphoto-art.org) in Madison, Wis., where he lives with his wife, Maureen Muldoon.