“Good morning America how are you? Don’t you know me I’m your native son, I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans,I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.” – Steve Goodman & Arlo Guthrie, “The City of New Orleans”
Romance & Mystique
From its humblest beginnings, there has always been a kind of mystique and romanticism that has surrounded the Railroad. Its machines are large and powerful, its tracks beckon toward places far away, its rules strict and unflinching, and its people are tough and able. Its got people, goods and cargo to move from one place to another. It has schedules to keep and money to make. And there are only so many trains that can safely share one track and only so many ways to ensure their arrival. The railroad has evolved over time into a tough and hardy type of organization ready and able to meet nearly any transportation challenge. It is that way because it has to be that way.
With such powerful and evocative imagery and operations, its no wonder that the “Railroad” and “Railroading” have become deeply ingrained and embedded into our popular culture. Included in countless stories, legends, songs, poetry, big screen Hollywood movies and small screen television productions, the railway has become an integral symbol of our nation’s vitality-- from its birth and growth, throughout all of its great struggles, and included in the desires of its citizenry for prosperity and freedom, the railroad has carried its people and transported their hopes and dreams and literally secured its unity spike-by-spike, rail-by-rail. The railroad symbolizes our national sense and pride as much as anything can in its great iron b
The greatest era for railroading’s “romance and mystique” in the public’s eyes without question centers around the war years of the 1940’s and the decade immediately thereafter, even though during the latter half of the 1950’s railroads were already in serious decline.
The great name streamliners, the last hurrah of majestic mainline steam power, the daily goings and comings of trains in towns small and large taking soldiers away and bringing them home again to loved ones, the almost universality of the public having to use trains for travelling any distance and the adventure aspect of those travels, all combined to create an atmosphere looked upon with a totally unique nostalgia in all of American history. Little wonder it gave rise to the amazing public interest in Lionel and Flyer toy trains, as well as the explosion in scale model railroading (making it for a time the second most popular hobby in the United States!), experienced in the 1950’s.
I’m afraid that today’s dramatically truncated rail systems, used almost exclusively for freight movements to which the public doesn’t relate, their disfigured rollingstock sans caboose, their being viewed as nothing but an inconvenience to motorists at grade crossings, all combines to make them regarded as a antiquated element, almost a public nuisance, in our society and one that is better overlooked than to be cherished in any way. The romance of the rails lives on in our society today only in the hearts and minds of hobbyists such as ourselves.
I don’t disagree with your assessment, however I wonder whether or not there could or would be any revival when / if passenger trains begin to make a comeback, particularly with improvements in Amtrak’s lineup and additions to its schedule, if they don’t over-regulate it to death and milk the corpse for every last cent-- do you think there’s any chance that passenger trains, and by extension trains in-general could re-enter the public consciousness and regain their former prominence and respect (romance & mystique)?? Or has that part vanished forever?
For a century, railroads were the embodiment of all that symbolized America, good and bad. They represented the absolute cutting edge in industrial technology, locomotives were the largest and most powerful devices most people would see during their entire lifetime, and they were constantly reaching toward and beyond the horizon. They brought expansion and unity to a vast, growing, and still-being-discovered nation. Plus, if you needed to travel or ship goods over any significant distance, the train was your only real option, so everybody’s lives were touched in some tangible way by the railroad. Railroads also had the reputation of being ruthlessly aggressive businesses run by greedy ultra-rich barons who built their fortunes on the backs of abused, overworked, and underpaid laborers and through unethical and illegal business dealings. Railroads were synonymous with America’s emergence as a powerful nation. It was inevitable that they would attain a mythic aura.
I would argue that most of that aura has dissipated today. Railroading is much more regulated and sterilized, it’s not a growth industry, and it has to compete with other transportation modes for its very survival. Particularly as the mighty steam locomotive fades farther into the shadows of history, so too will railroading’s legendary place in the American psyche be diluted.
I wouldn’t bet on it not being a growth industry. With burgeoning populations wanting goods shipped to them economically, and with eco-commerce getting decided preference in many communities where charismatic leaders are encouraging such thinking, the railroads are sure to be here for a while, and probably have to expand in one or two ways.
I don’t think railroads have managed to keep, nor are interested in retaining, any mystique that might have accrued to them when the public relied on them as they did in the years between 1900 and 1950. The population of the country has quadrupled in that time, maybe more, and most of those people do not think of trains when they think of ways to move themselves or products they desire/need. Trains are those weird and long strings of dirty cars you see in vast expanses near the rivers when your mom and dad take you in the car over the local suspension bridge. You see small trains far below, most of it static, and no real dynamic to take away as a vision or compelling seed for ‘mystique’.
Instead, when many of us do come up close to a train, it is merely an impediment to our process of exercising our autonomy in travel. I mean, of course, the ubiquitous level crossing.
People don’t understand trains. A now deleted thread in the trains magazine forum next door provided a link to a family trying to cross tracks in an urban setting recently. Trailing, with infant in arms, were mother and child. Thankfully, the video only left the unmistakable conclusion, as the camera and train bore down on them and they dropped from view out of camera arc, that they perished. The woman’s movements suggested to me that she was unable to establish any useful information about the train’s mass, velocity, or manoeuvrability. She’d have known a car’s, a truck’s, or a passenger aircraft’s characteristics, but she didn’t know the train’s. Sad, but
Waiting for the good old times of railroading to come back is somewhat like waiting for the ghost of Christmas past coming. Even if rail travel were to be revived on large scale, it would not be the same as it used to be. Just compare a fast and efficient TGV in France or ICE in Germany with the grand old trains like the Orient-Express or the Rhinegold of the late 1920´s! They are just beyond comparison - tempi passati!
However, there is a growing market for nostalgia luxury trains in the tourist industry. Just look at ROVOS Rail in South-Africa , the Belaruskaja Tschyhunka, the Simplon-Orient-Express and many more trains in UK, Spain, India, Malaysia a.s.o. Why not in the USA? A train with the splendor of the 1940´s and 1950´s would certainly sell!
I think I have to generally agree with that assessment unfortunately, though I am holding out hope that the railroads can regain some of their former lustre with the re-emergence of viable passenger travel. It is already possible now to take the train from DC to NYC and experience a total overall shorter travel time if you take into account the ride to/from the station and the nonsense you have to go through just to get onboard on the silly thing, to say nothing of endless delays on the tarmac at one end or the other.
That is absolutely terrible!! Incredibly sad. But of course you’re right-- how could they know or have any awareness of something they have no real experience with? In that regard there is a very real regression taking place.
Well there was the American Orient Express, a tourist train that tried to capture the splendeur and grandeur of the rail travel experience. And I think by most accounts they succeeded very well in all respects except for profitibility. They even had a pretty good run, IMO, over a decade-- not sure the exact time span, but in the end I suspect it was maintenance that did them in. It was probably a classic case of coulda, shoulda, woulda-- if they’d only had a little more money. Maybe someone else knows the rest of the story and could fill us in on that.
I see no hope for any grand revival of the American rail passenger system. Where high speed trains have been a success, their systems were developed ahead of, and often in place of, highway infrastructure, often in a society where access to personal motor vehicles was somewhat limited, and where short distance air travel was otherwise rather impractical because of a country’s relatively small size. This is the exact opposite of the situation that exists in America today.
Likewise, the construction of a true high speed rail network, even in just a limited region like the Northeast Corridor, would require expenditures and create problems almost beyond imagination. The successful Japanese hig
Sorry to take so long getting back to you, but I got caught up watching the video about the guy in England building the 10 actual mile long OO “train set”.
Romance and mystique are very subjective assessments of something which is basically utilitarian. Did the people living in the “Golden Age of Railroading” (whatever that may be) know they were living in it?
Maybe we are living in what future generations may call the “Golden Age of Railroading” and they will be waxing nostalgic over SD70ACes and double stack container trains.
Who is to say?
As long as somebody, somewhere looks at a train (whatever form it may take) and sees more than the sum of its individual parts, the “romance” and “mystique” will endure!
I think we railfans forget that America has a two-track mind about railroads. Track one is the romance and mystique of railroading. Railroading was progress and the future, cutting edge technology, national unity, and the prospect of fortune and success.
Track two is the railroad as the biggest, most ruthless, and most corrupt of businesses, the trampler on the rights of the “little guy”, the oppressor of working men, and the exploiter of farmers and other small businesses who were wholly dependent on the railroad.
Both of these tracks influenced the American mind, and American public policy, until the massive bankruptcies of the late 1960s forced reconsideration of the latter. And I don’t think either track has wholly dissapated.
For myself, however, modern railroading is not terribly interesting. The disappearance of the vestiges of steam era railroading, and the tendency of the industry to contract into a handful a large systems has somewhat killed it for me. I couldn’t even guess at the model designation of the latest and greatest locomotives that run past my apartment.
But then, a pair of big engines crawled past the complex as I was leaving for work this morning. They sounded like they were working hard. Even a lady who lives in my unit also stopped to watch the show.
One might suggest that part of that mystique arose from being interwoven with communities, both large and small. Access from a branch line to the mighty main track with (relatively) high speed trains was part of social consciousness. The immediate convenience of the automobile outside the house avoided the trek to the local depot, in often inclement weather. I would suggest that the railroad is iconic only really to those who knew it as a necessity, before the ready immediate availability of personal transport. Sadly, I feel that the mystique has vanished, never to return.
I guess I’m too young, I don’t even remember the old steamers and mystique of trains. But what I do remember was trains were part of our lives, I mean… who hasn’t seen a train? They are all around us, they have been all of our lives, how could they become to be a nuesance?
Whenever I always see a train, I think WOW look at that thing!!! With it’s powerfull noisy engines, and blowing horns. Sitting in your car, you feel the vibrations!
Without trains, EVERYBODY would miss them, it would be like eliminating Apple Pie.
As far as mystique, maybe not so much, but definitely a part of our culture, that no way in hell will people of the next generation let die.
