What’s the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.

It fills a few hollows,

And makes banks for the swallows,

It sets the sand a-blowing,

And the blackberries a-growing.

Henry Thoreau, who wrote those lines, was a student of railroading. He was a devotee, though seldom a passenger. He lived, of course, in the morningtime of America’s railroads. He was less concerned with where the railroad ended than with what the railroad meant, and his remarks on the Fitchburg seem fadeproof in the strong light of this century, their liturgical quality still intact.

And what’s the railroad to me? I have to admit that it means a great deal to me. It fills more than a few hollows. It is the link with my past, for one thing, and with the city, for another—two connections I would not like to see broken. The railroads of Maine are eager to break these connections, having found them to be unprofitable, and are already at work on the problem. They hope to discontinue all passenger service within the state, and although they failed in their first try, in 1959, they may do better in the year ahead.

Bangor is the second-oldest railroad town in New England; a steam train pulled out of Bangor, bound upriver for Old Town, on November 6, 1836. The running time for the twelve-mile trip was two and a half hours, the conductor’s name was Sawyer, passengers were aboard, and the fare was thirty-seven and a half cents. That was the first steam train to roll in Maine, and the second to roll in New England. Soon Bangor may set another mark in rail history; it may watch the departure of the last train, and as this sad hulk moves off down the track (if it ever does), Maine will become the first state in the Union, except for Hawaii, to have no rail passenger service between its major cities.

What’s the railroad to me? It is a lingering pain in the heart, an old friend who has tired of me and my antics. Unlike Thoreau, whose rail adventures were largely intellectual, I do go to see where the railroad ends. On some occasions—as on next Monday, for instance—I have no choice but to go; I will pay the tariff cheerfully and stare at the bare blackberry vines with affection. But the sleeper I had planned to take, the sleeper out of Bangor, has been pulled off, and I will have to find another one, a hundred and forty miles to the westward. (The distance to the depot gets longer and longer.) I live in the twilight of railroading, the going down of its sun. For the past few months I’ve been well aware that I am the Unwanted Passenger, one of the last survivors of a vanishing and ugly breed. Indeed, if I am to believe the statements I see in the papers, I am all that stands between the Maine railroads and a bright future of hauling fast freight at a profit. It makes me feel like a spoilsport.

But I have other sensations, too. I bought this house almost thirty years ago, confident that whatever else happened to me, the railroad would always pick me up and carry me here and there, to and fro. This morning our village lies under several thicknesses of snow. Snow has fallen almost without interruption for a week, beginning with a northeast storm, tapering off to dull weather in which the low clouds spat snow day and night, and today another storm from the northeast. The highway is a ready cake mix of snow, ice, sand, salt, and trouble. Within the fortnight there has been the greatest rash of air disasters in my memory. And on top of everything the railroad, which is my old love, is sick of me and the likes of me, and I feel that my connections have been broken, as sharply as by the man in coveralls who crawls between the cars and knocks apart the steam line with his hammer. My thoughts, as they sometimes do on sad occasions, revert to Concord and another railroad in another century.

“On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance,” wrote Thoreau, “which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England north-east snowstorm. . . .” How different my village from his village, my century from his century! The only bell that is audible to me in this snowstorm is the one that rings inside my head, which announces that the cars are going—soon, perhaps, to be gone for good. For although the passengers’ dilemma here in Maine is still unresolved, there is a strong suspicion that we are living on borrowed time; the railroads would like to chop my head off instanter and be done, but the Public Utilities Commission, after looking at all sides of the matter, has given me a stay of execution, on good behavior. It stipulates that I must travel more often and that I must not go first class.

Maine has two railroads—the Bangor & Aroostook and the Maine Central. One serves the north country, hauling potatoes and newsprint from field and forest; the other serves the midsection, hauling mail and packages of bonbons between Portland and Bangor, with an occasional sortie to Vanceboro. Both roads carry passengers when any show up. A third road, the Boston & Maine, dips into the state as far as Portland. A fourth, the Canadian Pacific, comes in briefly across the border.

Several months ago, the two principal railroads petitioned the commission to be allowed to quit carrying passengers and thus free their talents for the exciting and rewarding task of moving freight and mail. Public hearings were held; for the most part they were poorly attended. While the commissioners listened, the railroad men told grim tales of ruin and utter desolation. At one hearing in Portland, a lawyer for the Maine Central summed up the disjointed times when he said, “We are right now engaged in the diagnosis of a very sick patient.” At another hearing, a man speaking for a cat-food factory in Lubec—makers of Puss ’n Boots cat food—rose to say that unless the Maine Central could wriggle free from the stifling grip of its passengers, Puss ’n Boots might have to move on to a happier and more progressive territory. The future of America’s cats seemed suddenly at stake.

All in all, the year 1959 was a schizophrenic time for Maine’s railroads. On Monday you would open your morning paper and find a display ad seeking your patronage and describing the rapturous experience of riding the rails. On Tuesday you would open the same paper and get a tongue-lashing from an impatient spokesman for the fine, pointing out that the railroad would be bringing prosperity right this minute if only you, the passenger, would stand to one side and allow the freights to roll. “I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me,” wrote Thoreau. So, without any question, is E. Spencer Miller, president of the Maine Central. And so, for that matter, are all of us refreshed, though for a different reason, when, after a long wait in a motionless car on a silent siding, we hear a freight train at last rattle past us, hauling its cartons of food to faraway cats and releasing us hungry passengers for the continuance of our journey.

To the lay passenger, or to the traveling layman, the bookkeeping of railroads is as mysterious as the backing up of a train in the night. Even to a public-utilities commission the account books of railroads are something less than perfectly transparent. The Maine railroads’ books were, of course, opened to the commission, and some of the figures got into the papers. Every railroad, I gather, keeps two sets of books, one on its freight operation, the other on its passenger operation; and every once in a while the books themselves manage to draw close together and a sort of seepage takes place from one set to the other, so that to the unpracticed eye, it is hard to tell how deeply a profitable sack of potatoes is being eaten into by those rats, the passengers. But there is no question that we passengers, of late years, have been gnawing away at the potatoes. Some of us do it in desperation, because we are starving to death between station stops. No food is carried on the train that brings me up the Kennebec, and a passenger must live by his wits off the land. At Waterville, on the eastbound run of the State of Maine, there is a midmorning pause, and while mail sacks are being tossed about in the genial and relaxed way that has characterized the handling of mail since the beginning of time, the engineer and the passengers (all six of us) gather at the snack counter in the depot, where we huddle over coffee and doughnuts, some of us passengers breaking a thirteen-hour fast that began 456.6 miles to the westward in the cornucopia civilization of Grand Central. These late breakfasts in Waterville come to an end as ritualistically as does the President’s press conference in Washington when one of the reporters rises and says “Thank you, Mr. President.” In Waterville, it is the engine driver himself who breaks up the party. He simply steps down from his stool, adjusts his cap, and walks away, which is the signal for us passengers to climb back into our places behind him in the train.

I suppose the very quality in railroads that has endeared them to me all my life, their traditionalism, has helped bring them (and me) to our present plight. England is about the most traditional institution I know of, but American railroads run a close second. “What has always been shall always be” is their motto. For almost a hundred years the Iron Horse was America’s mount; the continent was his range, and the sound his hoofs made in the land was the sound of stability, majesty, punctuality, and success. “Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping at some brilliant stationhouse in town or city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country.” It was all true. And gradually the railroads fell in love with the sound of their own whistle, with the brightness of the saloons and the brilliance of the station houses, and even after the whistle dwindled to little more than a faint pooping in the hills and the saloons were withdrawn from service and the lights in the station houses went out, the railroads stubbornly stuck to their accustomed ways and the ways of the horse. Some of the station houses were so solidly built they still stand, monuments to darkness and decay. The depot in Bangor, built in 1907, is a notable example of a railroad’s addiction to the glorious past. Give it bars at the windows and it could as well be a federal penitentiary. Give it a moat with a drawbridge and it could be the castle where the baron lives. (On wet days it actually acquires a sort of moat, through which we surviving passengers wade and plunge with our luggage to gain the platform.) Reduce it to miniature size and it could be a model-railroad station built out of beautiful tiny blocks by yesterday’s child. It is, in short, everything except what it ought to be—a serviceable shelter for arriving and departing passengers—and any railroad that hopes to attract customers and survive as a profitable carrier would certainly have to raze it as a first step toward the new day. Come to think of it, the depot at Bangor, although fit for a baron, was at one time the property of a hustling railroad called the European & North American, whose dream was to bring Europe closer by rushing people by rail to St. John, where an ocean liner would speed them on their way. The property in Bangor on which the present station stands fell into the hands of the Maine Central in 1882, when that railroad leased the European & North American. The lease was to run for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, and although the European was dissolved a while back, there seems a good likelihood that the depot will still be standing in the year 2881, its men’s room still well patronized and its freight office ablaze with lights.

I made my first rail journey into Maine in the summer of 1905, and have been riding to and fro on the cars ever since. On that first trip, when I was led by the hand into the green sanctuary of a Pullman drawing room and saw spread out for my pleasure its undreamed-of facilities and its opulence and the porter holding the pillow in his mouth while he drew the clean white pillowcase up around it and the ladder to the upper and the three-speed electric fan awaiting my caprice at the control switch and the little hammock slung so cunningly to receive my clothes and the adjoining splendor of the toilet room with its silvery appointments and gushing privacy, I was fairly bowled over with childish admiration and glee, and I fell in love with railroading then and there and have not been the same boy since that night.

We were a family of eight, and I was the youngest member. My father was a thrifty man, and come the first of August every summer, he felt that he was in a position to take his large family on a month’s vacation. His design, conceived in 1905 and carried out joyously for many summers, was a simple one: for a small sum he rented a rough camp on one of the Belgrade lakes, then turned over the rest of his savings to the railroad and the Pullman Company in return for eight first-class round-trip tickets and plenty of space on the sleeper—a magnificent sum, a magnificent gesture. When it came to travel, there was not a second-class bone in my father’s body, and although he spent thousands of hours of his life sitting bolt upright in dusty day coaches, commuting between Mount Vernon and Grand Central, once a year he put all dusty things aside and lay down, with his entire family, in Pullman perfection, his wife fully dressed against the possibility of derailment, to awake next morning in the winy air of a spruceclad land and to debouch, surrounded by his eager children and full of the solemnity of trunk checks, onto the platform of the Belgrade depot, just across the tracks from Messalonskee’s wild, alluring swamp. As the express train pulled away from us in Belgrade on that August morning of 1905, I got my first glimpse of this benign bog, which did not seem dismal to me at all. It was an inseparable part of the first intoxication of railroading, and, of all natural habitats, a swamp has ever since been to me the most beautiful and most seductive.

Today, as my thoughts wander affectionately back over fifty-five years of railroading, the thing that strikes me as most revealing about that first rail trip in 1905 is the running time of the train. We left New York at eight o’clock in the evening and arrived at Belgrade next morning at half past nine—a thirteen-and-a-half-hour run, a distance of four hundred and fifteen miles, a speed of thirty-one miles an hour. And what is the speed of our modern Iron Horse in this decade as he gallops through the night? I timed him from New York to Bangor not long ago, divided the mileage by the number of hours, and came up with the answer: thirty-four miles an hour. Thus, in fifty-five years, while the motorcar was lifting its road speed to the dazzling rate of seventy miles an hour on the thruways, and the airplane was becoming a jet in the sky, the railroad steadfastly maintained its accustomed gait, between thirty- and thirty-five miles an hour. This is an impressive record. It’s not every institution that can hold to an ideal through fifty-five years of our fastest-moving century. It’s not every traveler who is content to go thirty-four, either. I am not sure that even I, who love the rails, am content. A few of us visionaries would like to see the railroad step up the pace from thirty-four to forty, so we could leave New York after dinner at night and get home in time for lunch next day. (I’ve just learned that the Maine Central has a new schedule, effective early next month. Soon I can leave New York after dinner and be home the following afternoon in time for dinner. There’s to be a four-hour layover in Portland, an eighteen-hour trip all told. Thus the speed of my Horse has just dropped from thirty-four miles an hour to twenty-eight. He’s a very sick Horse.)

The slowness of rail travel is not because the Horse is incapable of great speed but because the railroad is a gossip; all along the line it stops to chat at back porches, to exchange the latest or borrow a cup of sugar. A train on its leisurely course often reminds me of a small boy who has been sent on an errand; the train gets there eventually, and so does the boy, but after what adventures, what amusing distractions and excursions, what fruitful dawdling! A railroad has a thousand and one things on its mind, all of them worthy, many of them enchanting, but none of them conducive to swift passage for a seated customer. I think if a railroad is to profit from a passenger run, it will have to take the word “run” seriously and conquer its insatiable curiosity about what is happening along the route. Some railroads manage to do this, and I notice that when they do, their cars are usually well filled, and their pockets, too.

There are other reasons the Horse is so slow-paced. The State of Maine leaves Portland in the evening and trots along briskly till it gets to Lowell Junction, around midnight. Here it leaves the main line of the Boston & Maine and goes adventuring on a stretch of single track toward Worcester, fifty miles away. This piece of track is well known to sleepy passengers snug in their beds. It was built by a Girl Scout troop while on maneuvers. The girls felled the trees for the ties, collected gravel from abandoned guppy tanks for the fill, and for rails they got hold of some twisted I-beams from condemned buildings. Even the engine driver has a healthy respect for this remarkable section of roadbed; he slows the train to a walk, obeying his instinct for self-preservation as well as the strict safety rules of the railroad. For about an hour, the creeping train is contorted in the most violent way, and the patient passenger slats back and forth in his berth, drugged with sleep, fear, and pain.

Tomorrow night, the last sleeping car leaves Bangor for New York. I shall not be aboard but shall be thinking of it and wishing it well as it rolls through Etna and skirts the swamp. When, the other day, the news broke that the through sleeping car was to be dropped, the papers carried a statement from Harold J. Foster, our traffic manager: “The service was, we hoped, one which would built railroad patronage between Maine points and New York City on an overnight basis. The sleeper has been poorly patronized, although we advertised its convenience in a consistent program in newspapers and on radio.” Mr. Foster’s words are true; the sleeper was poorly patronized, except on the occasions when bad weather grounded the planes, and except by a few eccentrics like me, who enjoy railroading and patronized it well. The convenience of the service was advertised, but not, of course, its inconveniences, which the traveling public was familiar with anyway—its high tariff, its low speed, its luggage problems, and (in my case) its depot fifty miles from home.

Not all sick railroads die; some have been known to make a starding recovery. The Long Island recovered when New York State forgave it its taxes. (I don’t know whether its sins were forgiven, too, but at least its taxes were.) The Chicago & Northwestern recovered when someone thoughtfully equipped it with comfortable cars and modern conveniences, and when it was permitted to drop a few unprofitable trains. In Philadelphia, a nonprofit corporation formed for the purpose of improving passenger service is even now blowing new life into the rails that carry people to the city. This amounts to a municipal subsidy, and may easily benefit the community far in excess of its cost. About a year ago, the Rock Island Lines tried an experiment; it reduced first-class fares instead of raising them. The test lasted several months, and during that time there was a twenty-five percent increase in passengers carried.

Several other roads reduced fares and found that business picked up. I believe that a number of things are happening that will bring passenger trains back into favor and into the profit column, which is where everyone wants them to be. America’s growth is phenomenal, its habits are changeable and unpredictable, its people are always on the move. Railroads, which commonly look backward, should look ahead. Already some cities are experiencing death by motorcar; Los Angeles is the most noticeable one, where the fast-breeding automobile has had a population explosion comparable to the lemming’s and will soon have to rush into the sea to make room for oncoming generations of fertile automobiles and to save the people from stagnation and asphyxiation. Railroad men should take heart when they gaze at the automobile in its area of greatest concentration and its hour of greatest triumph.

As for planes, planes have broken the speed of sound and are reaching for the speed of light to see if they can’t smash that, too, and soon we will fly to the coast and get there before we start and so will be cheated of the journey—a dreamlike transportation system that gradually gets to be nightmarish, with people whipped so rapidly from point to point that they are in danger of becoming a race of waltzing mice. (I see that 1960, according to the Chinese calendar, is the Year of the Mouse, but I think it may turn out to be the Year of the Waltzing Mouse, so feverish have our lives become.) If our future journeys are to be little different from flashes of light, with no interim landscape and no interim thought, I think we will have lost the whole good of journeying and will have succumbed to a mere preoccupation with getting there. I believe journeys have value in themselves, and are not just a device for saving time—which never gets saved in the end anyway. Railroad men should take courage when they look at a jet plane, or even at a poky old airliner circling at two hundred miles an hour over an airport waiting for the fog to lift or for its nose wheel to lock into position. The railroad has qualities none can take away, virtues that have never been surpassed. A well-driven train moving smoothly and strongly over a well-laid roadbed offers a traveler advantages and conveniences not to be had in any other form of transportation. Unlike the motorcar, the train does not have to be steered. Unlike the plane, the train can slow down in thick weather. Unlike the bus, the train does not have to pull over to the left every few minutes to pass what is up ahead.

Maine’s railroad men are perhaps more downhearted than most, because this state is relatively unpopulous and is for that reason a tough nut for a passenger line to crack. Even Maine’s largest cities are not yet large enough to show much urban sprawl, and a motorist does not ordinarily encounter serious traffic delays in the outskirts. In good weather, it is usually more convenient for a resident of Bangor to drive to Portland than go by rail. In my own case, I can drive from my house to Portland in four hours, assuming that I can drive at all, but to get to Portland by train I must first spend an hour and a half getting to the depot in Bangor, then four hours on the train—a total of five hours and a half.

One of the jokers of railroading in Maine is the mail contract. In this neck of the woods, passengers and mail are usually found riding the rails together, and the schedule of a train is geared to the delivery of letters, not of people. The Bangor & Aroostook has just been working on a schedule designed to satisfy both the Public Utilities Commission, which insists that passenger be carried during 1960, and the Post Office Department, which insists that any letter posted in one part of Maine before five o’clock in the afternoon be able to reach any other part of Maine in time for the morning delivery next day. Today the new schedule was announced; a passenger northbound for Caribou will take his departure at twenty minutes past one in the morning from a rendezvous called Northern Maine Junction, just outside of Bangor, presumably clutching an alarm clock in one hand and snowshoes in the other. I suppose this is the best train the Bangor & Aroostook could work out under existing conditions, but I doubt whether it will attract customers to the rails in great numbers, although I’d like to make the trip once myself just for the richness of the experience.

The railroads want and need mail contracts, but the job of carrying the mail turns a railroad into the creature of the federal government. Uncle Sam can put the finger on any train in America and order it to carry the mail. He pays for this, of course, but he also runs his own show. A train’s scheduled departure can be delayed indefinitely by the mail. Furthermore, the postal department determines how the mail is to be handled; the railroad has no say in the matter. A train stop becomes an interlude for mail sorting—sorting of sacks, that is. The reason my engine driver can take a coffee break at Waterville is that each mail sack is thrown out separately, and the pitcher keeps filling in the catcher. Twenty-five sacks of mail, if they were palletized, could be removed from a mail car in twenty-five seconds, but that’s not the way the government wants it. Instead of twenty-five seconds, the operation takes twenty-five minutes. It seems to me that if the government has the power to immobilize some trains for the benefit of the mail, it has an obligation to speed up other trains for the benefit of the passengers.

If Maine’s railroads are to stay alive and haul passengers, they will need help from villages, cities, the state, and the federal government, and I think they should get it. A state without rail service is a state that is coming apart at the seams, and when a train stops at a village depot anywhere in America and a passenger steps off, I think that village is in an enviable condition, even if the lone passenger turns out to be a bank robber who does nothing better than stir the air up for a little while. But I think railroads will have to help themselves, too. They should raise their sights, not their fares. And they should stop sulking in their tent, and, instead, try to beat the motorcar at its own game, which, if I do not misread the signs, should get easier as the years go on. There may even be a way to divorce the rail passenger from that fat wife of his, the mail sack—a marriage that has been unhappy all along. I believe that if railroads would improve their services by ten percent, they would increase their business by twenty. They must tidy things up. “This closed car smells of salt fish,” wrote Thoreau, sniffing the air as the train rushed by, and his words were echoed by several Maine citizens at the recent hearings when they got on the subject of the untidiness of day coaches.

Railroads are immensely complex, and they seem to love complexity, just as they love ritual and love the past. Not all sick roads die, as I have pointed out, but a road can sometimes put on a pretty good show of dying, and then its ritual seems to be part of the scheme of dying. During 1959, because of some sickness of my own, and of my wife’s, and of other members of our two families, she and I patronized the railroad more often than usual, observing its agony while using what remained of its facilities. There was one memorable night last fall, when, sitting forlorn in the deserted waiting room of the Portland depot, waiting to take the sleeper for New York, we seemed actually to be the principal actors in the deathbed scene of railroading in America; no Hollywood director could have improved on the thing. For reasons too dull to go into, we were taking our departure from Portland instead of Bangor. The old station hung tomblike above and around our still forms, drear and drafty. (No social crowd was gathered here.) The only other persons in the place were the ticket agent, at ease behind his counter, and a redcap in slow conversation with two friends. Now and then the front door would open and a stray would enter, some fellow to whom all railroad stations are home. Shortly before train time, a porter appeared, dragging a large wooden table and two chairs, and set the stage for the rites of ticket-taking. The table looked to be the same age as the depot and to have been chewed incessantly by porcupines. Two conductors in faded blue now walked stiffly onto the set and seated themselves at the table. My wife and I, catching the cue, rose and approached the oracle, and I laid our tickets down in front of one of the men. He grasped them, studied them closely, as though he had never seen anything quite like them in all his life, then turned to his companion and shouted, for all to hear in the room where no one was, “B in the Twenty-three!” To which the other replied, in a tremendous voice, “B in the Twenty-three!” (and seemed to add, “for the last two passengers on earth”). Then he tore off the stub and handed it to me.

The words of the ceremony, spoken so loudly, although familiar to us seemed unnaturally solemn and impressive, and we felt more as though we were taking marriage vows than taking a train. After the ceremony was over, we followed the redcap with our luggage, walking slowly out, the last two passengers, into the cold train shed, and picked our way across the tracks toward our waiting sleeper. Halfway there, we passed an ancient trainman, his arms full of kerosene lanterns, on his way to harness the Horse with the honored trappings of the past. There was something ineffably sad about the departure of this train; death seemed in the air.

When I came to live in Maine, the depot was twenty-three miles away, in Ellsworth. Then the depot got to be fifty miles away, in Bangor. After tomorrow night, it will be a hundred and forty miles away (for a sleeping car), in Portland. A year from now, there may be no depot in the whole state—none with a light burning, that is. I cannot conceive of my world without a rail connection, and perhaps I shall have to pull up stakes and move to some busier part of the swamp, where the rails have not been abandoned. Whether I move away or stay put, if the trains of Maine come to a standstill I will miss them greatly. I will miss cracking the shade at dawn—and the first shafts of light in the tinted woods, and the old excitement. I’ll miss the Canada geese in the Kennebec in the seasons of migration, and the breakfast in bed, drinking from the punctured can of grapefruit juice as we proceed gravely up the river, and the solid old houses of Gardiner, and Augusta’s little trackslide glade with the wooden staircase and the vines of the embankment and the cedar waxwing tippling on berries as I tipple on juice. I’ll miss the peaceful stretches of the river above Augusta, with the stranded sticks of pulpwood along the banks; the fall overcast, the winter brightness; the tiny blockhouse at Fort Halifax, at Winslow, mighty bastion of defense; and at Waterville the shiny black flanks of Old No. 470, the Iron Horse that has been enshrined right next to what used to be the Colby campus—the steam locomotive that pulled the cars on the last prediesel run from Portland to Bangor.

Early last spring, as my train waited on a siding for another train to go through, I looked out of the window and saw our conductor walking in the ditch, a pocketknife in his hand. He passed out of sight and was gone ten minutes, then reappeared. In his arms was a fine bunch of pussy willows, a gift for his wife, I don’t doubt. It was a pleasing sight, a common episode, but I recall feeling at the time that the scene was being overplayed, and that it belonged to another century. The railroads will have to get on with the action if they are to boost that running speed from twenty-eight to forty and lure customers.

Perhaps the trains will disappear from Maine forever, and the conductor will then have the rest of his life to cut pussies along the right of way, with the sand a-blowing and the blackberries a-growing. I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, for I think one well-conducted institution may still regulate a whole country.

P.S. (May 1962). Death came quickly to the railroads of Maine. The passenger trains not only disappeared “in my lifetime,” they disappeared in what seemed like a trice. The trains are gone, the station houses are gone. I was watching television one day and saw the tower of Portland’s Union Station fall over, struck down by a large steel ball swinging from the boom of a crane. I could feel the blow in the pit of my stomach.

The freights are running as usual, and at higher speeds, but the expected spurt in business and profits has not occurred. At the annual meeting of the Maine Central a few weeks ago, the president of the line told the stockholders that “sunshine and shadow” lay ahead for them. The cat-food factory in Lubec has decided to close down, and this event casts a long shadow over the stockholders by jeopardizing the branch line that runs from Ayer’s Junction to Eastport; it may have to be abandoned unless some business can be taken away from the truckers. I don’t know why the cat-food plant is quitting; perhaps Puss has lost her appetite, or possibly the people who operate the cannery would prefer to live where there is passenger rail service.

A lady in North Belgrade wrote me not long ago and said, “Though the great change has been made, it is still the freight train that we depend on to warn us about the weather. If we can hear the freight come through Oakland at nine in the evening, we know that the wind is the wrong way and there will be rain.” I still believe the wind is the wrong way and there will be rain; a land without rail service is a land in decline, or in suspension.

In the West, railroading still enjoys good health, and a few of the Eastern trains are rolling at a profit, notably the trains that connect Florida with the cities of the North. But in the East generally, the sickness spreads. The New Haven, in a bankrupt condition, filed for reorganization last summer; the Boston & Maine is in hard shape; the merged Erie-Lackawanna is poorly despite the merger; and the B. & O. doesn’t feel good at all.

Railroading in America enjoyed its monopoly status much too long for its own good, and the characteristic American genius for new shapes, new ideas, new ways to exploit demand, although it infects every other business, has been lacking in railroading. Inflexibility is still the trouble with the Iron Horse. I am reasonably sure that there are thousands of car owners who would like to go to Florida or California by train if without any fuss they could drive their car, fully loaded, on board the train, as onto a ferryboat, and drive it off when they reached their destination. This kind of piggyback ride would eliminate the long, arduous drive through what one of my correspondents calls a “homogenized” landscape, it would save spending nights in motels and eating meals along the way, and it would save general wear and tear on man and machine. If it works in Europe, perhaps it could be made to work here, where distances are much greater. The Bluenose, a car-carrying ship plying between Nova Scotia and Bar Harbor, is a sellout every summer; people are willing to pay to avoid the long drive around.

In those last days of the rails in Maine, I remember most clearly the remark of a Bangor citizen, which I read in the paper. This fellow walked downtown on the day after the razing of the depot; he stared in surprise at the new vista. “Hey!” he said. “You can see Brewer from Exchange Street!” (Brewer is Bangor’s twin, a few hundred yards distant across the river.)

In the old days, when the railroads were in their prime, you couldn’t see Brewer from Exchange Street, but you could close your eyes and see the continent of America stretched out in front of you, with the rails running on endlessly into the purple sunset, as in an overwritten novel. I loved it when I couldn’t see Brewer from Exchange Street, the rest of the view was so good.