Essays of E. B. White

  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houses, and even after the whistle dwindled to little more than a faint pooping in the hills and the saloons were withdrawn from service and the lights in the station houses went out, the railroads stubbornly stuck to their accustomed ways and the ways of the horse.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 aband
oned 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, sh
ould 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.