...with short explosive thunder ripping the lilac night, #36 began to climb Saluda. She bucked helplessly like a goat, her wheels spun furiously on the rails, Tom Cline stared down into the milky boiling creek and waited. She slipped, spun, held, ploughed slowly up, like a straining mule, into the dark. Content, he leaned far out of the cab and looked: the starlight glimmered faintly on the rails. He ate a thick sandwich of cold buttered fried meat, tearing it raggedly and glueily staining it under his big black fingers. There was a smell of dogwood and laurel in the cool slow passage of the world. The cars clanked humpily across the spur; the switchman, bathed murkily in the hot yellow light of his perilous bank-edged hut, stood sullen at the switch.
Arms spread upon his cab-sill, chewing thoughtfully, Tom, goggle-eyed, looked carefully down at him. They had never spoken. Then in silence he turned and took the milk bottle, half full of cold coffee, that his fireman offered him. He washed his food down with the large easy gurgling swallows of a bishop.
--Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe 1929, Chapter 14.
Thomas Wolfe wasn't a rail writer, but he sure could have been!
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