Patch Blog: The Romance of Trains

Things were slower during the great days of train travel, but more romantic. Most of the long-haul passenger trains had names: the Super Chief, the Twentieth Century Limited, the City of New Orleans, the Black Diamond. Yes, airlines sometimes name their planes, but it's not the same. You could take days getting somewhere on a train, and only hours on a plane (if you're lucky.) It's comparable to spending a week with your family, or a day with a stranger who serves you cold food and whose bathroom runs out of all forms of  paper.

People wrote songs about trains, which sometimes sang back to them: "Good morning, America, how are you? Don't you know me, I'm your native son?" Or, "The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road, the Rock Island Line is the road to ride!" Famous engineers merited songs, but seemingly only after disastrous crashes (Casey Jones). There must be tunes about airplanes but I can't remember any. And please, pilots, don't try to copy Casey just to get a song of your own. At least, not if I'm on your plane.

Trains had wonderful, evocative names: the Abraham Lincoln (went to Illinois, of course), and not to be sexist, the Ann Rutledge (once a sweetheart of Abe's), the Hiawatha, the Midnight Special, the Albany Mail (from the time when trains were the great carriers of our letters), the Kansas City Mule, the Booth Tarkington (once a leading American novelist).

The Rock Island Line mentioned above offered both the Choctaw Rocket and the Choctaw Rockette. The latter went nowhere near Radio City Music Hall, nor was the crew composed of high-kicking showgirls, so don't ask me to explain.

It was great on trains until the railroads decided they'd rather haul coal, grain, or potatoes than human beings and stopped deserving those romantic names. But that's only in the USA. Other countries still have titles like the Golden Chariot, a luxury train in India that runs out to Goa, the country's richest state. I suppose that only a golden chariot can live up to that job.