The Great American Railroad Novel
The Great American Railroad Novel
By Thomas Richards
It takes a lot of history to produce a very little literature, Henry James once said. Yet sometimes, even when history is abounding, it can still fall short of producing even a single work of great literature.
The American railroad is at the center of our history, but its literary remnants are marginal. The railroad dominated the country, geographically and imaginatively, for a hundred years. The lines strung across the country created what we now think of as American space. But the more frail lines of literary affiliation have always evaded it. Ships on the sea have Moby Dick. Steamships on the river have Life on the Mississippi. Cars on the highway have On the Road. But the best our literature could do for the railroad was Frank Norris’s The Octopus, a portrait marred by how much he hated the Southern Pacific Railroad, and Harry Bedwell’s The Boomer, an authentic railroad voice compromised by thin characters and a clumsy plot. There are thousands of railroad short stories, but most of them read like they were written for Popular Mechanics. It is worth asking why.
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Literature takes literacy. For literature to reach into areas that are not highly literate, it takes something amounting to a rare and precious accident. Rudyard Kipling is one of the few to penetrate the voice of the British military. The reach of most literature extends into the middle classes, but the reach into working class life is far more tenuous. Jack London and Charles Dickens tried to give voice to it, but narratives as authentic as Alan Stilltoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner are rare. Among railroaders, the telegraphers were the most literate, having to write out messages before they tapped them along their way, so it comes as no surprise that they are responsible for most railroad storytelling. The Boomer is the story of an itinerant telegrapher. The best of the genre of popular railroad stories, as well as memoirs, are told from the perspective of telegraphers, dispatchers, and station agents. The Casey Jones stories of trains ramming trains on the high iron are mostly relegated to myth, anecdote, ballad, and song—the stuff of an oral culture.
So it should come as no surprise that there is no Great American Railroad Novel. The summa of the line was never written. Writers often sharpen their craft by writing short fiction before they write long fiction, so I found myself going back and reading railroad stories to see what was in them. Why were they so end-stopped, when the larger mythos of the American railroad seemed to cry out for a great novel?
The answer does not lie in the stories themselves, which are often summaries of typical events on the railroad. The answer lies, rather, in the events themselves. Compelling events on the railroad tend to be quick, sharp, drastic, and short. Accidents, derailments, explosions, bridge collapses, crashes of all sorts. In these kinds of events, all is well until, suddenly, everything is wrong. There is little buildup to a climax for those on the line. For those back in the offices, who can tell by telegraph or signal indication that disaster is happening or about to happen, there is usually some suspense. But most railroad stories are sudden blows. Something bad happens and it is over before anyone knows what happened to them, or why. This kind of sudden event lends itself well to the form of the short story, which is mostly what Harry Bedwell wrote before he put together The Boomer. But it should comes as no surprise that Bedwell’s novel is mostly a sequence of small sudden events strung along into a picaresque narrative, moving on from one railroad to another as the telegrapher, Eddie Sand, drifts around the country. But there is no pressurization of plot. Bedwell seems to have know this, and to extend the narrative he borrows a melodrama from the Victorian stage, a story of a villain who, for unspecified villainous reasons, is trying to destroy the railroad. His telegrapher foils the villain’s designs, and is duly praised by the President of the Road at the end of the novel.
For all the bad mechanics, the real presence of the railroad manages to come through. Though the plot is flawed, the trains themselves are beautifully drawn:
“You felt at home in a caboose… there were the smells of a dozen brands of tobacco… all mellowed day by time and the milder mixtures of old leather upholstery and signal oil. It was a snug, tight feeling with the wash of the rain at the little window and the brisk rhythm of the wheels of the wheels clicking at the rail-joints. Dim lamps in brackets and lanterns, red and white, by the back door.”
And Bedwell clearly knows the pressures that railroaders are under:
“A tight nerve coiled in the back of Eddie’s head as he reckoned time from the train sheet. The lone engine was due at Auburn within seventeen minutes. You didn’t realize how brief that amount of time could be until so much depended on it.”
Everything is there—except for a mastery of the form of the novel. This is Bedwell’s only novel. He does not seem to have been a great reader of novels, so he had no sense of literary tradition to draw on. No, he simply extended a sequence of short stories until it went too far, at which point he took a simple device from the popular stage—melodrama, here a madman plotting to harm the railroad for no reason other than his own malevolence, to bring a conclusion to a story that basically has none, for at the end, his telegrapher goes back on the road again, back to the picaresque life of the boomer, the roving telegraph man, presumably to experience more short and to-the-point railroad stories.
The technology of the railroad also works against the railroad novel. It was new. Novels, despite the name implying novelty, are built on established imagery. The ship is a well-established image of society and the state (as in “the ship of state”). It is also an old technology with a rich history of representation and modification (Twain’s steamboat is yet another kind of ship.) The car feeds into the picaresque narrative of small groups of men (who used to be on horses, but are now powered by horsepower) who roam around the country in search of adventures (road and biker novels are closely related to this old form). But there is nothing in literature remotely resembling the linear layout of the railroad, a self-contained physical plant reliably linking places over long distances. Asking why it never lend itself to a form of representation would be like asking why there is no literature of Roman aqueducts, or Dutch canals. Genres thrive by adapting previous forms, but in the case of the railroad, there was no existing literary form to turn to new purposes. So railroad storytellers were left only with the long insulated line of railroad culture, which, for the workers, were mostly stories of accidents, or, for the passengers, were mostly stories that happened to unfold on at the railroad (Murder on the Orient Express, Strangers on a Train) but which involved little that was intrinsic to railroad technology.
The fact is that a new and unprecedented technology exists in a raw and untested space of representation in which the newness of the technology mitigates against the presence of traditional literary forms. In this way, railroad fiction had nothing to go on, no mythology other than the rudiments of its own. This mythic emptiness could have been a strength if a writer of sufficient stature had come along, but a new experience in literature usually needs to be built up to. A slow path of approach has to be carved out. It often happens in bits and pieces, in small scenes that break new ground in the corners of established fiction, such as the battlefield scene in the Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma, which then radiate outwards, leading, in this case, to Tolstoy, Crane, and Hemingway. Such a process never got underway here. For most of its history, the railroad existed so much in its own world that it was unlikely to generate a writer except among its own, as in the case of Harry Bedwell. It is a sad fact that most railroad stories written by railroaders are bad literature, while most railroad stories written by non-railroaders are bad fact.
There are nevertheless some suggestive moments in American literature that show how it could have been treated by a great writer. For richer, here is F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, on the Milwaukee Road:
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That’s my middle west—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. ”
And for poorer, here is Jack Kerouac, in The Dharma Bums, on the Southern Pacific:
“Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffle bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara. It was a local and I intended to sleep on the beach at Santa Barbara that night and catch either another local to San Luis Obispo the next morning or the first-class freight all the way to San Francisco at seven p.m. Somewhere near Camarillo where Charlie Parker’d been mad and relaxed back to normal health, a thin old little bum climbed into my gondola as we headed into a siding to give a train right of way and looked surprised to see me there. He established himself at the other end of the gondola and lay down, facing me, with his head on his only miserably small pack and said nothing. By and by they blew the highball whistle after the eastbound freight had smashed through on the main line and we pulled out as the air got colder and fog began to blow from the sea over the warm valleys of the coast.”
Fitzgerald gets the sociability as well as the sense of protective enclosure that comes with being on the line, while Kerouac gets the association of the railroad with marginal areas and people. Both capture the distinctive landscapes of their respective roads, the Milwaukee and the Southern Pacific. The details are all there, and the great writers bring a cadence of feeling that is lacking in the self-involved technical world of railroad fiction. A certain number of poets, among them Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin, also heard the cry of the line, but the overall picture remains quite fragmentary. Though I must admit, as a writer, I learned more from these fragments than I did from the vast archive of technical writing the railroads deposited in America’s libraries. Here are the opening lines of Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings:
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
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Other than these conventional railroad stories, plus these few wonderful but scattered literary fragments, I had precious little to go on. Railroad memoirs are mostly full of local color and tend to be published by regional presses. I read dozens of them with gratitude. My grandfather and great-grandfather both worked for the Milwaukee Road, but my great-grandfather died before I was born and my grandfather died when I was eight. My father couldn’t remember anything specific his grandfather told him except for a single gesture he once showed me, a moving of fists up and down, which meant something like, Uncouple the cars. I loved trains as a boy, but it was a boy’s love of model railroading, not of real trains. I never went out and looked at the modern diesels pulling their long consists across the Minnesota prairie. Rather, I dragged my family to remote locations in Colorado and New Mexico to look at the remnants of some narrow-gauge lines that were so small and narrow that they almost were themselves models of some larger railroad. And when, as a teenager, it came time for me to build my own model railroad layout, I chose perhaps the most model-like of all prototype railroads, the two-foot lines of Maine.
Somehow I kept at it. As an adult I mostly stopped modeling and started reading. I read and collected railroad engineering manuals, station agent manuals, guides to timetable and train order operation, almost all the stories in the old Railroad magazine, which could be picked up for pennies, all the memoirs I could lay my hands on, and the longer fiction about the lines, sparse as it was. The literature was blunt and laconic. From time to time, the sense of a voice came through, but it was more like a Freudian slip in a technical literature, there not by design but by an unconscious pressure coming from a need originating somewhere else.
To write the railroad novel I wanted to write, I felt I had to find where that somewhere else was. The voices of workers on the line were scattered among a thousand formulaic stories. But the voices of the owners of the line were another matter entirely. The workers on the line fought nature. The owners fought each other, fought the government, and fought, in the end, a long losing battle against the automobile. Trackage in the United States peaked in 1931 and went into a slow decline. I begin to see that to write the Great American Railroad Novel, I would not be writing a large picaresque narrative full of small stories, the miscellaneous sorts of narratives commonly written during the heyday of the railroad, where everything somehow turns out all right. Rather I would be writing about a time when everything was going all wrong. I would be writing a tragedy. In railroad fiction, nothing so terrible ever happens that the railroad can’t overcome it. The only thing the railroads could not overcome came much later, in my time—their decline. I came to see that I would not be writing about the beginning of the line, or even about the heyday of the line, but about the end of the line.
This was my intention, but it took twenty years for me to make it viable as a design. There were five failed novels before I began to sort things out. The first got the North Dakota setting right. The second added the plot, which came to pivot around the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. The third deepened my characters and added elements of the Bildungsroman. The fourth tried to tell the story divided up into the conventional unit of the railroad short story, a useful exercise because I was able to master the underlying form of all railroad stories. In the fifth and final draft, I cut fifty percent of what I had written and condensed the rest. After many experiments with chronology, I decided to tell the story as a frame narrative, with a beginning and ending set just after the war, and most of the story told from the perspective of an evolving, urgent present just before and during the war. Once a firm sense of chronology was established, I found I was able to weave in various flashbacks, interpolations, and a coda. I also put in some railroad short stories, an homage of sorts, one told in a prison camp to pass the time, and another told almost by way of explanation after the climax of the novel.
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One last point. It may seem strange that my take on the Great American Railroad Novel is set mostly in the Philippines.
There are several reasons for this. First, the novel had to take place within the realm of what Henry James called reachable memory—about sixty or seventy years. The early days of railroad building took place in a past too far from me to wrap my mind around it. But the railroads of the fifties were part of my childhood, and the feel of the railroads in the thirties and forties survived, at least weakly, in my own family. Second, I needed my characters to be trying to build a railroad—or at least to imagine trying to build one—which was not being done then in the United States. And third, though they were in the Philippines, my characters all remember the railroad and tell its stories. Being far from home heightens this, as it often does. The sense of the American railroad comes through all the more strongly because of the contrast with the conditions of the Philippine railroads. Memory is always strong in the railroad world, which holds onto experiences that rapidly-advancing technology leaves behind. An elegiac tone is also pervasive in the railroad world, where defunct railroads are referred to as fallen flags. This sense of a heroic past that is about to be lost is everywhere in The End of the Line, and is of course integral to the title. The line is ending, but it somehow goes on.
And on. I was nineteen years writing it. I think the novel took me so long because I wanted to do a lot in the novel without making it gigantic, one of Henry James’s “loose baggy monsters.” At one point it ballooned to over eight hundred pages. I seemed then to be writing in all directions at once, trying to include the complete world of the railroad much as Melville had tried to include the complete world of whaling in Moby-Dick. But it was too much for me. I found that I lost formal control of the narrative when it passed, roughly, the five-hundred-page mark. The doing of events replaced the being of prose. The seduction of narrative is that almost anything can be narrated, and the form of the novel lends itself to overstatement, which often means, to the reader, that what is being read could have been said in ten other slightly different ways with equally satisfactory results, or even omitted entirely, with equally satisfactory results.
In my case, over time, the contrary was true. I began to see that there were probably only one or two solutions to putting all the things I wanted to put in the novel. In draft after draft, each discrete event tended to take off and become its own massive narrative within a narrative, temporarily effective in its own way, but at the sacrifice of a great deal of novelistic form. At one point, I had my two major characters careening into all sort of minor adventures in the Philippines. At another, I packed the narrative with small railroad stories that were supposed to be loosely related, after the manner of Hemingway’s In Our Time. At another still, I resorted to putting railroad telegraphs as little epigrams at the beginning of each chapter (there’s a long history of these in the novel). But in the end there was no substitute for formal unity. I had to work closely with several editors to hammer out a final draft. In no way do I think I could have written it sooner. The final draft has traces of all the other, earlier drafts, and each trace, I now see, adds dimension to the narrative. I’d learned this in writing my Mrs. Sinden, but unfortunately I’d been unable to retain the lesson until I’d relearned it several more times.
By the time I finished The End of the Line, my second novel, Mrs. Sinden, was in press. I felt I needed to wait for that novel to find its own place in the world before introducing another one, which is why The End of the Line is only appearing now, in 2025. My readers will have to decide whether I did what I set out to do, creating a point of leverage in fiction for the American railroad at long last. Looking it over now, I feel I’ve written a kind of American War and Peace, the war being the war in the Philippines with the great defeat of the Bataan Death march (instead of Napoleon’s retreat), and the peace as the magnificent equipoise of the American railroads. The hero, Will Van Severen, is, like Pierre in War and Peace, a kind of superfluous man caught at first passively in the rush of events, but eventually becoming a principal actor in them. Like Tolstoy’s novel, it’s a coming of age story with a death march at its center. My style may not be modeled on Tolstoy, but in it I can see clear traces of Flaubert, Camus, Hemingway, Conrad, E. M. Forster, and Malcolm Lowry. I was also fortunate enough, at Stanford, to study Forster under Will Stone, who knew him well, and Conrad under Ian Watt, who, during the Second World War, had been a prisoner of the Japanese at the camp made known by The Bridge on the River Kwai. I still hear both their voices. I used to love to close my eyes and listen to them read out loud.
The End of the Line may or may not me the Great American Railroad Novel I mean it to be. In any case, I won’t be the one to say it is. Time will tell, as it always does.
