Lament for the High Iron

a sentimental journey aboard the elegantly romantic trains of our youth--now highballing toward oblivion

There were giants upon the earth when the earth was young. Enormous fire-breathing giants they were, with voices of thunder and a tireless stride that carried them across continents. And people feared them, because they were the most powerful creatures that ever existed; but they loved them, too, for they served the needs of man.

The creatures were called trains. They are not gone from the earth yet, but they are going. Inexorably, they are passing into extinction, like the giants of another time, the dinosaurs. Yet they will never be forgotten. Like the dinosaurs, they will also pass into legend. And, one day, a thousand years from now, a schoolboy will be asked to describe this time of ours and he will begin an essay titled The Railroad Age.

If the essay is thorough, it will open with a study of America, for this country owes its expansion to railroads. Over a period of almost a century-and-a-half, our land was a veritable webwork of railroads, of main lines and short lines, of standard and narrow-gauge lines: a reticulum of steel ribbons along which rushed the mighty iron monsters -- and they were the corpuscles in the lifeblood of our continent. If they had stopped, the arteries would have collapsed and America would have withered and died. That is how important they were.

The past tense is shocking but only slightly premature. While our eyes are on the jets, the missiles and the space capsules, the glory and the grandeur that was railroading is quietly fading from the contemporary scene. Unimaginable but true that all the lore, the romance and vivid lexicon of an era will utterly vanish, and all in our lifetime; that for a while, before it is elevated by heraldry, the train will be consigned to the Quaint Artifact section of the museum, somewhere between the Conestoga wagon and the oxcart.

So let us sing the giants to their rest now, while yet they can hear us; and let us sing loudly, without tears, if we can. We are not, after all, mourning a sickly friend whose face we have forgotten, nor sighing for a bit of childhood lost: the song is for giants.

Think of them. Think of how it was when you went down to the depot to see the One-O-Four, not because It Was There but because it would be, soon. Remember how you walked the track, pretending it was a hundred feet up, and tried not to fall, and did? How you knelt and put your ear to the steel and waited. For miles ahead nothing could be seen but the diminishing tracks, but you knew it was coming, and you went on waiting. Any moment. Now! The steel began to vibrate. You looked up; still nothing in sight; then back down, quick, bare ear pressed onto bare steel, and the vibration turning into a hum. You could hear it truly. Another couple of moments ("Get the hell away from there, boy! You wanta get yourself killed?") and up, scrambling over the cindery gravel. Still nothing ahead. Then a far-off scream and a black dot, and your heart beginning to jump. The One-O-Four! Another shrill scream, the dot becoming larger, taking on shape, the rails shaking, the ground trembling, and you, edging just as close to the track as your courage allowed. Watching the great iron beast approaching, you felt again the crazy urge to throw yourself in front of it, but you only felt this for a split second, just long enough to be thrilled. No time for anything else, anyway, because here it was, thundering past you, great wheels turning, (continued on page 132)Lament for the High Iron(continued from page 127) pistons pumping, brakes screeching, and you were lost in a pure white cloud of joy and steam.

The province into which the One-O-Four moved was yours, but you were humbled. You'd stand there in the middle of the open, staring at the strange people -- strange because you had never seen them before and you would never see them again -- and they would stare back, as aristocrats in a peasant land: patronizingly, pityingly, scornfully; or so you fancied. Those in the dining car gazed out with a particularly jaundiced eye, seeing you not at all but, instead, the distance, beyond this unimportant town, beyond you and all that made up the world you lived in. You often wondered if they even knew the name of the town. And you hated them a little for their obvious superiority, and this made you want to throw a stone lightly at the window to attract their attention, to let them know that you, too, somehow counted in the scheme of things. But you never did this. They were the gods, the lucky ones, these diners, sitting before tables covered with whitest linen and sparkling silver, with the shapes of waiters hovering at their sides. They were a people apart, moving from one Olympus to another, people from a world apart, people from a world you'd never know, from another time and another place, people who started their soup 50 miles up the line and finished their last cup of coffee 50 miles down the line. Where were they going, and where did they come from? And by what right did they move into town, bisecting it with a railroad car, stopping traffic and commerce? Of course, you knew. They did it by the Divine Right of Railroads, for they were, in this brief passage, part of the railroad, and as such they were immune from the ordinary rules of life.

You thought these things if you lived in a town where the trains stopped. And you thought more: When the mighty high wheeler at the head end gave two long blasts of its whistle and the heavy steel wheels began to turn, the immense train moved, proud and defiant; to the accompaniment of angry clouds of smoke and steam, it moved, down the track, and dwindled into the mysterious distance; and your heart moved with it, for you'd made the promise again. Someday you would be an aristocrat. Someday you would sit at that table and stare out at the poor kids. But you'd remember to smile and, maybe, if you felt expansive, step outside and shake their hands.

How different this was from those occasions when you would hike over to the airport! From a world of regularity and establishment to one of near madness. No schedules here, no certainty. You might see something and you might not; it depended, for the most part, on the whims and caprices of a few daredevil fliers; if the weather wasn't right, your long walk was for nothing.

Flying was for the wildly adventurous -- or for the very rich, who bought great clumsy-looking crafts and kept them in the hangar. And as you watched, the best time being sunshiny Saturdays and Sundays, you saw the ugly-engined crates jounce lumberingly by, their wings shuddering and bending, eventually wavering between earth and sky, belonging to neither, and then, amazingly, move upward in a great noisy spasm. You weren't envious of the pilot or passenger, despite your ambition to become another Baron Von Richthofen. There were many thoughts, many feelings, but one thing you surely did not consider: that one day somewhat modified versions of the bloodless birds you were watching would, in partnership with trucks, buses, passenger cars and improved hard roads, all but destroy the venerable institution of train travel.

In fact, if you had any thoughts about the future of train travel, they were to the effect that it was here to stay. The sight of giant locomotives roaring across the countryside, trailing their pearled plumes, with a cut of 50 cars in tow, or more -- this was so commonplace, their thunderous snorts in heavy labor so ordinary, their polyglot whistles so much a part of the American scene, that you did not bother to appreciate them consciously. It was only the children who stood and wondered. They were always let out of school once a year and escorted down to the station for a close look at the leviathans, and invariably they stood in awe of what they saw: a black looming mass of high iron capable of achieving whatever it chose to, a taller-than-the-tallest-house colossus, with its human masters, or servants, in attendance. There was the striped uniform of the engineer, the bandanna neckerchief, the bright copper oil can; and the man himself, looking every wrinkle and seam the King. There were the brakemen with their flashlights, examining the wheels and boxes, as though anything could ever go wrong. And there, the shiny dark-blue-suited conductors with their omnipresent railroad watches, to which they continually referred, and by which the world kept time; and the red lanterns they always carried, if they were at the rear of the train, signaling mysteriously to the engineer. These were not sights for you; you were older than the children, very blasé, for you had seen it all many times before. Still, did you ever become too old, too blasé? No, indeed; it was merely that your pleasure had been deepened, moving from brain to blood.

Certainly you would never be so old that you would not thrill to the moment when, in response to the chuffing of the engine, the coach you were in started to move, almost imperceptibly, gaining speed, the train snaking its channeled way precisely out of the yards and into the wide, bright world.

Didn't you always press your forehead against the already smudged glass the better to see the old buildings go by, the ones with the car wheels and the lanterns, the signal lights and the switches, to watch the towers and poles glide by until you were truly out in the country, rolling along, lulled by the satisfying clickety-clack of the rails and the Doppler effect of the clanging railroad crossing signals? On warm days, when the windows were open, you might even get a cinder in your eye, or draw into your nostrils a whiff of the sulphurated smoke direct from the monster's throat.

You didn't care: the dream had come true: you were an aristocrat now.

The railroads were at their zenith then and time was standing still. Their proud engines and cars displayed heralds that were bywords of the day: Santa Fe, Rock Island, Great Northern, Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Great Western, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, Baltimore & Ohio, Missouri-Kansas-Texas, Denver & Rio Grande, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe -- the list is endless, each name distinct and more stately than its predecessor. Even the trains themselves were adding color to the literature: Twentieth Century Limited, Hiawatha, City of San Francisco, Broadway Limited, Panama Limited, Super Chief, Sunshine Special, Capitol Limited, Sunset. And the cars that made up the trains: Pocahontas, Blue Feather, Helene Modjeska, Prince Rupert, Rose Creek.

Poets were inspired to sonnets by these names, and novelists put them into their books, just for the music of them. But it took a giant to write properly of the giants, and he did. Over and over again, Tom Wolfe plunged his great hands into the lore and brought out gold, as though he knew that this was the crest of the wave, this time, a culmination of all that had been high adventure, the beginning of the end of the color and romance that had seen through the years a flowering of wheel and track, a century of ever-reaching fingers of steel across the country, over the fields, into the valleys, through the very mountains. Now there were steam engines capable of running at speeds in excess of 100 miles an hour with complete safety, trains that could take curves at 70 without spilling more than a few drops of your coffee, trains that passed each other as a matter of routine at speeds of over 90, the point of passing brief and savage, an instant's blurred lightning bolt that for this moment obscured the onrushing scenery and set your heart rapping.

(continued on page 208)Lament for the High Iron(continued from page 132)

The beginning of the end? Ridiculous thought. Why, the trains were modernizing all the time, streamlining, and there was the diesel-electric on the horizon. The golden age of railroading had only just begun, we told ourselves. And it seemed so.

The country could point with pride to the New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, probably the most famous train in all the world, powered by a locomotive described as a Hudson-type Class J-3A, which developed a cylinder horsepower of 4700 at 75 miles per hour, a completely air-conditioned beauty, all rooms deluxe, with a bar lounge, two diners, and an observation-lounge car. This was the train for which the long red carpet was laid at Grand Central Station and at La Salle Street in Chicago. This was the train that represented an investment of $1.384,000 and made its run of 960 miles from New York to Chicago at an average of a mile a minute including stops. That was luxury and speed, and there was an army to see to it that both were maintained -- eight enginemen, eight firemen, three conductors, six brakemen, three baggagemen, a train secretary, barber, tailor and maid, one Pullman conductor and as many porters as sleeping cars. The two dining cars had a crew of 24 men. This was a train that, in the 40 years of its running, brought in more than $142,000,000. Where else could it go, with its constant improvements, but on to bigger and better things?

There were other great lines, some fit to challenge the Twentieth Century, or, for that matter, Europe's fabulous Train Bleu and Orient Express. The Broadway Limited, for example, was the favorite child of the Pennsylvania System, a speed train, all rooms, offering complete privacy over the shortest east-west route between New York and Chicago with a running time of 16 hours. The Pennsy had 10 great trains between these two cities, six to St. Louis, three to Detroit, seven to Cleveland, 24 to Pittsburgh and 50 to Philadelphia every 24 hours. The road would offer the Trail Blazer, a low-cost, high-speed train between New York and Chicago with reclining-seat coaches, all seats reserved, including observation-buffet-lounge cars, club-lounge cars and twin-unit diners with popular-priced meals and refreshments.

The Southern Pacific Company had the Daylight streamliner between San Francisco and Los Angeles, a Saxony-red-and-orange train with aluminum striping extending over its entire length, including locomotive and tender. The interiors were of varying color schemes, shades of apricot, jade and Nantes blue, with ceilings of warm ivory. The reclining chairs were upholstered with curly mohair and cushioned with soft sponge rubber; they could be swiveled to face windows of exceptional width, from which position one could view the Camino Real, which linked the chain of early California missions, the rich Santa Clara Valley, the Salinas valley, the Santa Lucia mountains, and the sheer cliffs and blue waters of the Pacific Ocean for more than a hundred miles.

Wherever you went there were fine trains to take you. The Louisville & Nashville offered the Pan-American and the Azalean between Cincinnati and New Orleans, the Southland and Flamingo (Cincinnati to Atlanta), the Dixie Flyer, the Dixie Limited and the Dixiana (Evansville to Nashville), the Jacksonian and the Florida Arrow (Louisville to Montgomery). There were others: the Crescent, the Piedmont Limited, the Dixie Flagler, the South Wind, and many, many more, all great.

Even freight trains were not excluded from the romance that pervaded all phases of railroading, as a partial sampling of names will show. An all-freight from Columbus to Chicago was called The Big Smoke. Another that moved between Buffalo and Harsimus Cove was known, simply, as Guts. Others bore such euphonious designations as The Speed Witch, The Blue Goose, Cock of the Walk and the Cornucopia.

For every big line, there were hundreds of smaller ones, entirely independent railroads offering passenger service. The Doniphan, Kensett & Searcy in Arkansas ran twice daily between Kensett and Searcy, a distance of six miles. The McCloud River line transported people from McCloud to Hambone, a distance of 32 California miles. They ran on schedule, these tiny lines, and they made money.

There was all of this, and diesel-electric around the corner. You thought, Sure, maybe the roads will lose some of their charm with the new engines; and you knew you'd miss the delightful cindery small of the steamers; but a train was a train, and nothing would ever change it.

With only slight apprehension, you watched the march of progress. Railroads which had kept the status quo for more than 20 years began to modernize. Passenger trains became air-conditioned, lines adopted tight-lock couplings, rubber draft gears, interlocking signal systems and centralized traffic control. They did go to diesels, most of them, and to streamlining. They grew quieter and smoother. At first the face was unfamiliar, along with the build, but you got used to it. Of course you mourned for the smokestack and that old black magic of the big iron, but you knew that all things must bow before progress. You were happy when, little by little, the roads began to recapture some of their glory and luster, inching back to the splendor of other years, with superluxury cars complete with barber shops, motion-picture theaters, doctors, radios, showers, wall-to-wall carpeting, maids and manicurists. There were new cars called "slumber coaches," strata domes and vista domes, passenger cars with names like Silver Lake and Silver Arrow to suggest, if not to match, the Silver Palace Cars of another generation. Progress had not licked trains; it had joined them. Now, available for everyone, were drawing rooms, compartments, double bedrooms, duplex single rooms, roomettes and parlor cars, the last at one time the pinnacle of solid, stately elegance for the daytime rail traveler. For the dreamers, there were, still, the observation platforms, where a man could stand with his head in the wind and his hands about the brass rail and watch the miles clicking away.

Then something happened.

Out of the scrub pine and conifers, the railroads came to the bare top of the long, lovely haul; and the road ahead was not level. It sloped downward in a gently lowering curve, so gentle, so smooth that the passengers did not even know they were descending. Revenues, however, knew very well.

Railroads had always been taxed high; that started when they were young, powerful and wealthy. But when business slackened, restrictive legislation, which had been imposed upon them when they were indeed a monopoly, plus the high taxes, remained; and they were soon losing as much as a million dollars a quarter. Naturally the railroads became frantic. They cut service, after all appeals had been denied. They cut lines. They cut what personnel they could. And they developed an inordinate passion for mergers, dropping branch lines, cars, offices, stations, sidings, yards and whole sections of track. In 1926, the railroads logged 40,000,000,000 passenger miles; in 1960, with the population doubled, they toted up only 20,000,000,000, and recorded a deficit in passenger traffic that totaled nearly three fourths of a billion dollars. The Transportation Act of 1958, which allowed them to abandon service where losses each year could be proved, was too little and too late.

Why did it happen? What caused it?

For the movement of goods, the semi and the truck trailer were responsible; for passengers, the automobile and the airplane.

That a superior means of transport should develop and, because of its benefits, displace the old, is logical. One cannot argue that trains are still ideal for shipping freight. The facts prove otherwise. But what of the matter of human beings?

That matter, I think, is debatable.

Assuming the destination to be a continent's length away, how does this generation's traveler choose to go? By car, most often. Unless he is in a hurry, he will gas up the family sedan and embark upon what he fancies will be a leisurely, inexpensive, relaxing journey. Of course, he fancies wrong. He will embark upon a journey fraught with danger, taking his chances on clogged highways and city streets, blinding himself to the extravagant price he pays for propelling his vehicle, for fuel and oil, for repairs, for depreciation, for the inevitably frazzled state of his nerves. He thinks nothing of hidden taxes; in fact, he ignores them. He has a compulsion to be self-steered; after all, it's an auto mobile he's driving, isn't it? Now he's free, with freedom to go where he will, down that side road, up that hill, into that town with the funny name, and freedom to stop whenever and wherever he wishes and for however long.

Ideally, he's right; practically, it is nonsense.

Today's highway traveler suffers from a complex which reveals itself in his comments at the end of each traveling day: "Covered 852 miles today!" (with pride) or "I don't understand it; we've only gone 420 miles" (with shame). This complex, even more than the increased traffic congestion, robs him of his touted freedom. He doesn't take that side road, he doesn't go up that hill, and he never finds out about that town with the funny name.

The plane traveler is hardly better off. Whereas the price in dollars is low, the price in peace of mind is astronomical. He pretends, this traveler, to take comfort in the statistics, and will be happy, after claiming that planes are the safest means of transportation ever invented, to quote them. "You're a lot better off in the sky than you are on the highway," he will say, and he will be correct -- statistically. But there will be an edge to his voice as he tells you of the x-million passenger miles flown and the mere x-hundreds of fatalities. Perhaps he is thinking of last week's headline (Airliner Crashes! All Passengers Perish!), or of the sweat on his palms when the big jet took off with him aboard; or perhaps he isn't thinking anything at all. But the edge is there.

Tell these people about trains and they will chuckle and ask if you are serious. Point out to the driver that he would save money in the long run, and have far more actual freedom; tell the air traveler that if he is so fond of statistics he should investigate those regarding train travel -- or, better still, quote them; they're easy to remember: not one passenger fatality on pullman car trains in 10 years.

Advise them that on trains they can have utter privacy, if they wish it, or social intercourse; that they will be living in a sort of castle away from home, a room on wheels where they can relax, read, sleep, do anything they want. Shout to them that a train, unlike an automobile or an airplane, moves in bad weather and good, it doesn't matter, that ice on the tracks is no hazard at all. Tell them that they can now look at the face of America, view mountains without the intervening clutter of billboards, look into back alleys and back yards, across fields and valleys. Try to show them that for the first time they can reach their destination truly and completely relaxed, if only they will make a slight adjustment in their thinking; relaxed, refreshed and ready to enjoy themselves.

But don't try with any hope of success. The complexes are too deep, the thinking too rigidly formed. A train trip for the modern man would, after the first hour or so, evoke nothing. He would probably tap his feet with impatience, crack his knuckles, read all the magazines, look at his watch, ruminate that if he'd only used his head and gone by plane he'd be there by now, and hate the idiot who suggested this outmoded rattletrap. He wouldn't enjoy it.

The principal reason is that modern man has never cultivated the art of leisure, which used to be acquired on trains and nurtured ever afterward. He almost never finds himself alone with himself for two or three days; certainly never by choice. There is, he thinks, nothing profitable in it. That it could be the most profitable two or three days in his life is unimaginable.

That is why there is rust instead of silver frost on the steel rails. That is why the old depots and stations are boarded up and overrun with weeds. That is why ties are disintegrating, why there are deserted spurs and decaying rolling stock, corroded wheels, boilers, tracks, signals, engines, towers and switches. And that is why ghosts walk the right of ways, the long high trestles, the dark, curving tunnels, the empty, forsaken platform out to the semaphore that isn't there anymore, waiting, hoping, listening for the melancholy wail of old One-O-Four as she rounds the bend and puts on steam for the grade.

Trains that once were living things, pulsating and vibrant with life, exist now in the minds and hearts of those who knew them. We were profoundly moved by what we saw and heard and experienced, and so were whole communities whose characters were changed by the trains that stopped there, all the financial and personal roots of them going deep into local history and pride.

For that future schoolboy, and his question: What was a railroad, anyway, that it could mean so much?

The Pennsylvania consists of 600 former short lines, but railroads in toto are more than short lines, more than sections of track and engines and equipment. Railroads are songs the balladmakers sing: The Wreck of the Old 97, The Wabash Cannonball, In the Baggage Coach Ahead; songs we used to sing: The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe and Chattanooga Choo-Choo and Alabamy Bound. A railroad was the smoker up front with its leather seats and strong smell, its floor etched with spittle and its air blue with smoke, where beardstubbled men in overalls rubbed shoulders with sports and dandies in loud striped suits with gigantic stickpins in their ties, where drummers and brakemen played a few hands of seven-up as they deadheaded back home. A railroad was an influence, a maker of public opinion; and it was drama, high and low: Under the Gaslight, the Ninety and Nine, a Mile a Minute, the Midnight Special, Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, Twentieth Century and the Honeymoon Express. It was the Great Train Robbery, also, and Night Train and Union Pacific. These were dramatic events that nourished the consciousness of trains and travel and are not likely to be forgotten, even if every foot of track is torn up and overgrown with weeds.

But trains per se we forget. Today stress is placed on getting there, on being right, on the profit of a given action, on the IBM. It is an age of weighing and measuring and proving.

But a train cannot be weighed or measured, nor can anything about it, in terms of the human equation, be proved. How do you reduce an experience to black and white and make it something that can be totaled? How do you weigh or measure the human, pleading wail of a train whistle heard on a rainy night, or convey to someone else what it means, or explain why it lured so many out into the world, into trails west, into the big city? How do you equate the elegance of a brightly lighted diner and the delicious aroma of the coffee being poured there by an immaculately attired waiter, or the way he sure-footedly rocks with the train, like an old sea captain, as he maneuvers down the aisle with a full tray of soup bowls? And how, in the name of Progress, do you analyze the slumbering quiet of a Pullman sleeper at three in the morning with you sitting in the porter's quarters, looking out at the mysterious myriad lights as the Pennsy rounds the big curve at Altoona?

What is disturbing about the disappearance of the railroad train, then, isn't so much the train itself, but what it means and has meant to Americans, and to people everywhere. When we think of the Overland stage, we also think of Indians and cowboys and what the stage meant to the people of the Old West. When we think of the Mississippi River steamer and side-wheeler, we envision dandified slick-haired gamblers, and wide-eyed belles with beauty marks. We do the same sort of reconstruction with packets and clipper ships. We identify the times and the people with them, rather than regarding the objects for themselves. So what will it mean when the trains are gone?

It will mean the end of an era, of course; but it will also mean the end of the kind of leisure and escape that nurtured men's souls for a good many years. The elegance of rail travel, along with the concomitant necessary break in routine, made one feel expansive and romantic and, for a little while, content. It was a way of life. It had class, the very concept of which is becoming quaint.

Airplanes are quicker and cheaper, but they offer nothing else. What is romantic about being catapulted through the air from one end of the continent to the other in five hours? What is genteel and relaxing about being strapped to a seat, or being served food in pink plastic containers? True, the sight of a city at night from 20,000 feet is enchanting, but it is not really a city you see; it is an abstract painting of lights. And your fellow passengers are abstract, for you can never really get to know them in the short time you are together. And you are together, because there is no such thing as privacy on a plane, except in the washrooms.

Contrast this aerial bus ride with a trip on a train, assuming, always, that you are not compelled, except by your complexes, to get there in a hurry. The train is yours. You move through it like a king. Servants stand ready to do your bidding, ready to please you; just ring the bell. Your bed is made, your slightest whim catered to, your appetite is magnificent, the scenery is unsullied and just outside the window. You can have a second martini, because you are home, and a third, too, if it pleases you. Perhaps you will have dinner sent in to your room, or perhaps you will prefer the diner. There's always the chance that the steward will seat you beside that remarkable blonde who seems to be traveling alone. If that is the case, you can look forward to an acquaintanceship ripening over a period of days, not hours. If you're seated, instead, beside the jolly fat man, you can always excuse yourself, return to the room, maybe take a solid whack at that Chardin book you've been trying to read, or simply retire to the crisp double-mattress bed.

What can equal this for traveling -- not "getting there" -- traveling? Should we not be sad at its passing?

No dishonest tears are shed on the graveyard runs. Many stations and walks of life are represented in the common commemoration of the death of trains. These people have come to love trains, and the last trip is always a time of despair, a time for cherishing what will soon be history. Unhappily, these final one-way trips have been occurring with increasing frequency the world around.

In July 1961, 90 people on the platform of Paris' Gare de 1'Est boarded the Orient Express for the last time. It is not difficult to guess the thoughts of those passengers as the great train roared across France for the final time; over the Rhine, down the Danube, the shrill whistle signaling its surrender as it whipped past castles and cathedrals. Those people sat back in seats that were once velvet and fringed in Brussels lace, and they remembered other years, before the windows had begun to rattle, before the cars had become worn and dirty; they remembered the oysters and the chilled wine served by waiters in blue-silk breeches, white stockings and buckle shoes: luxury beyond luxury. Perhaps, also, they thought of all the mystery stories that were written about the Express, and the characters in those stories: the glamorous woman spy who wore mink and nothing under it but her flesh; the one who always carried a tiny pistol in her handbag; the smooth diplomats who were really working for several governments at the same time; the sturdy hero with a sardonic smile and an attache case, full of secret papers, locked to his wrist. And the passengers may have wondered if the ghosts of these characters were not, in fact, riding with them. Mostly, they were surely thinking: This is the end. This will be no more. The Orient Express, which made its first run June 5, 1883, will run no more.

The splendor of old-time rail travel was not, however, confined to Europe. As far back as 1911, American trains knew how to live. The Santa Fe DeLuxe, which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, carried a complement of 70 persons, including a barber, a lady's maid, a manicurist and a public secretary. It provided a library, telegraphic news reports, stock quotations, tubs and showers, electric curling irons and stereoscopic views of the passing scenery along the line. The breakfast menu was more than substantial, offering such delicacies as calf's liver sauteed, grilled French lamb chops, corned beef, roast beef, buckwheat cakes, griddle cakes, Rocky Mountain trout and French toast.

An antelope dinner was offered on the Overland Limited, after which passengers would be invited to raise their window sashes and take pot shots at buffalo.

All of the rolling stock then was gaily varnished to a high gloss, rather like mobile country estates. The trains were immaculate, from the high-wheeled locomotives to the canopied observation platforms. There were covered bridges, water towers, hand-operated switches and bearded engineers in derby hats. The engines never wore out, even after as many as 50 years of service; and those in the know maintain that the steamers were more dependable and every bit as fast as the later diesels. The introduction of the diesel seems, in retrospect, to have been merely an economy move. Nonetheless, it took over, and that is when the luster began to tarnish.

Who can forget the stories and pictures of conductors in muttonchop whiskers and blue tail coats, the thunder and fire that exploded from the tall stacks of Taunton-built engines with crimson-and-gold lettering on their tenders, the time when station agents' and dispatchers' offices buzzed with telegraph keys and batteries of telephones? All along the right of way it was freedom scented with coal smoke or wood smoke, and passengers answering the friendly waves of fieldplowing farmers and barefoot children.

Fittingly, locomotives were accorded the same respect as ocean liners. They were ladies, whereas the diesels, like airplanes, were neuter genders. Everybody loved the high iron with its proudly polished brass, not merely the railroad people but everybody. It was natural. A steam engine, panting hoarsely as she climbed a grade, or breathing sweetly as she ran along an open stretch, or crying in the night, a cry of pain or joy, depending, was no thing of metal. She was alive.

She was also many things. On some lines she was the girl next door; on others, a queen. In 1870 she was an empress, her drive spokes fire-red, drive rods silver, the iron on her boilers iridescent-blue, the scrollwork on her engine cabs and running boards emblazoned with gold leaf. And that was only right, for she was pulling the luxury palace cars.

Those cars reached a point of elegance undreamed of before or after. They had rosewood paneling, chandeliers of purest crystal, velvet hangings, fringes, draperies, inlaid wood in sleeping apartments, drawing rooms and connecting staterooms rich with brocades, divans with cushions and hassocks, dressing rooms and bevel-edged mirrors.

Anyone at all could enjoy these cars on a cross-country jaunt, provided he could afford to rent the entire train. And in that turn-of-the-century time, when Mr. Astor made his democratic remark ("Anybody with a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich!"), no small number could do exactly that.

Less plutocratic citizens made do with the privately owned railroad car. Almost unknown today, the private car was at one time the dream of every American, for it was the touchstone of success, the supreme symbol of having Arrived -- as opulent and luxurious as the age that created it. For 50 years these cars moved splendidly over America's rails in a wake of sighs and heartbeats. Any millionaire, socialite, industrialist or national figure who did not own at least one had not succeeded in any real sense. But ownership was only the beginning. One had to have the best car; and this led to bitter competition. Period furniture was installed, and pipe organs, rare paintings, solid-gold and silver dinner services, marble plumbing fixtures, ceiling murals, gigantic mirrors and costly upholsteries. The first air-conditioned railroad car was privately owned; it belonged to Major Max Fleischmann, the yeast tycoon. Mrs. J. P. Donahue's car, called the Japauldin, had solid-gold lighting fixtures, quartered oak beams that ran the length of the drawing-room ceiling, and a wood-burning fireplace. Ignace Paderewski had his own car, the General Stanley, and of course it contained a piano. American Presidents from Lincoln's time forward rode grandly on campaigns and official tours aboard private cars -- but today, United States Railroad Car Number One, the Magellan, is rented to the Government by the Association of American Railroads for a dollar a year for the use of the President. It was built during Franklin Roosevelt's time and is approximately as ornate as a stockbroker's office. Not that it matters: our Presidents travel nowadays by plane.

The private car usually included an observation drawing room that opened out onto the brass-railed open-air platform. The rest of the car consisted of several sleeping apartments, a salon for dining, accommodating eight or ten, a galley, pantry, store rooms, iceboxes and sleeping quarters for the crew.

The ultimate in private-car ownership was achieved during the time of George Gould (Jay's son), the railroad tycoon. His guests were expected to appear for dinner in full formal attire.

For most of the more than 350 varnished masterpieces, the end came long ago on the rip track. Jay Gould's fabulous Atalanta, built in the 1880s for $50,000, faded away as a yardmaster's shack on the Missouri Pacific in Overton, Texas. The car that hauled the Prince of Wales about the U. S. during his tour here in 1924 is the home of a Pennsylvania coal-stripping gang.

Only two private cars are in use today for the pleasure and convenience of their owners: the Helma, home of Bruce Dodson, a Kansas City insurance magnate, and The Gold Coast, owned and operated by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg. The Gold Coast has two master bedrooms, a 24-foot-long drawing room, crystal lighting fixtures, Venetian mirrors, antimacassars and lopped and fringed draperies which re-create the interior of Leland Stanford's Stanford, built in the 1870s.

It was George Pullman who engineered most of the elegant palace cars, but he left a broad stroke across the canvas of railroading when he developed the folding upper berth. Perhaps his sleepers were a departure from the Victorian elegance of his previous inspirations, but they were immensely popular. By 1916 the Pullman Company operated 7500 sleeping cars over 137 railroads; and 260,000 persons occupied those berths every year.

The next change, as noted, was the replacement of steam engines with diesels. We even tried to engender some kind of affection for the oil eaters, giving them nicknames like chugglebugs, hinky dinks, galloping geese and bungaloos; but it wasn't the same. The punkapunk, punka-punk of the diesel seemed too efficient, too utilitarian. It had none of the warmth and majesty of the steam engines. The full-speed sound it made was powerful, but contemptuous; and we bitterly missed the stirring, spiritual cry of the steamers.

And now the diesels themselves are going, and their contempt is honorable. That of the personnel of all but a few trains is not. Aware that they are dying, the porters and conductors and news butchers and dining-car stewards are behaving like cranky nonagenarians. They are rude, inept, surly and impatient. The best of them would have been dressed down and summarily fired in the old days. The same would happen to them today on the Twentieth Century Limited, the Broadway Limited, the Super Chief, and a half-dozen others. But these men probably wouldn't care. Their pride is gone.

That is the unbearable loss to railroad men, and they know it. Our loss is greater, but we don't know it. We fancy that we have rid ourselves of an inefficient means of transportation. Instead, we have rid ourselves of one of the two remaining refuges, one of the two sanctuaries where a man can retreat from the maelstrom and become acquainted with himself.

And how will ocean liners fare when the 2500-mph airship is perfected?

How will man fare?