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Reading on the Railroad

the guided way

The route of the railroad...to this day...is a completely uncommercialized passage through the American landscape. As such it is a magnificent instance of both preservation and a counterpoint to the commecialization of everything. Just as in the exclusive path that the reader takes through a book, the railroad route is a "guided way" through strange terraine. The infrastructure has overcome immense obstacle to enable the gliding ride and the ever changing view is the rider's own.

The guided way of the railroad is a reference to the analog print reading mode and its express future. And note the telegraph line built, mile by mile, with the railroad. It was an era to be both analog and digital. Standage, Tom, The Victorian Internet, The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers, Walker & Co., 1998.

"Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. THROUGH the apparatus which moved him through the world." Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railway Journey, The Industrialization of Time & Space in the 19th Century University of California Press, 1986.

"The locomotive was the first great triumph over time and space. After it came and after it crossed the continent of North America, nothing could ever be the same. It brought about the greatest change in the shortest period." Ambrose, Stephan, Nothing Like it in the World, The men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869, Simon & Schuster, 2000.

"In 1906 finished locomotives, weighing anywhere form 4 to 175 tons, rolled from the Baldwin's erecting shop at the rate of one every three hours, twenty four hours a day". These locomotive were hand made without interchangable parts. More amazingly they were built by foremen and their skilled crews of ingenious machinists; the largest locomotive company in the world had literally no salaried middle management. Brown, John, The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831-1915, Johns Hopkins Press, 1995.

While sitting in the diner we coast into Cumberland. I can see a curtained window back lit in a 19th c. railroad hotel. A young person’s head bobs silently to the music during a modern middle age. We leave and the train moves off into the night across the Maryland landscape. “May we recommend the Chardonay?” (and you will relive the moments that you have forgotten). Looking out of the black window I remember the last run of the westbound Rock Island Rocket. That train left after dark in a possessed ice storm. We got beyond LaSalle, beyond Peru to Bureau Illinois with the old Rock Island & Pacific E-unit roaring blindly off into the storm, the Mars light drawing figure 8’s into oblivion.

Dreamt up by a penniless English writer while on a delayed train trip from Manchester to London, Harry Potter is a magical child who has extraordinary adventures.

Then I remember back another whole generation the paired wheels more than two times taller than me. The engine was a living fossil, Chicago and Northwestern class-D, a steam raptor bound for a spring day and the stench of Lilacs in Lombard Illinois. I am riding with my mother on grandfather’s pass; the window sashes opened, panes rattling and cinders flying in. My eyes are squinting in the rush of new territory.

The desert motif curtains from the old Rock Island diner’s run to L.A. flutter and we nibble smoked oysters on a tooth pick. The diner is the last car on the two car train because the others have gone to Peoria as the Peoria Rocket. When I step out into the opened vestibule there is a blinding dance and vortex of ice crystals. I am lifted. We are really going now. There is motion in reverse as the signals disappear the other way.

Train 353 was only 3 1/2 hours late at Albion. Was it coming? - Yes. Was it going? - Yes. Always assume five hours late. Time means nothing when you are distilling all of life’s adventures. Traveling the rails is a way of being places and knifing across all the syllogisms of existence and actually casting the dices of life among strangers. “That’s one thing I didn’t consider.” said the starry eyed lady, “I didn’t bargain on an adventure.” “Does that mean you don’t like me?” returned the dreamy lad. “No, not at all.” glinted the lady.

Train Trivia: The Broadway Limited was not named after its destination in New York City but after the "broad way" of the Pennsylvania Railroad's four track mainline.

Railfanning is: "Stopping and looking both ways before crossing an abandoned right of way." Railfan & Railroad, April, 2001

trains and music

Musicians and composers in the earlier 20th century traveled everywhere by train and in the course of this imposed experience they listened and reconstructed the syncopation of the train in motion. Central and South American musicians, traveling in short and opened trains heard the syncopation of the engine exhausts (i.e.,Villa Lobos: The Little Train of the Caipira). American and European musicians and composers in longer, closed trains traveling at greater speeds concentrated on the syncopation of the car wheels hitting the track joints. The joints were 33' feet apart staggered at random on either rail. The cars had about forty feet between the double stike of the four wheel trucks but this pause in four was echoed by the trucks of the adjoining cars. Add to this the occasional switch frog that explosively interrupted the syncopation and the sound of jazz improvistation is suggested.

Responding to an invitation from Paul Whiteman to write a jazz concerto, Gershwin determined to demonstrate the possibilities of the jazz idiom; in his own words, ‘The Rhapsody began as a purpose, not a plan’. He went on to describe its beginnings thus: ‘I worked out a few themes, but just at this time I had to appear in Boston... It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-bang that is so often stimulating to the composer (I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise), that I suddenly heard - even saw on paper - the complete construction of the Rhapsody from beginning to end’. This doesn’t mean that it is a musical description of a railway journey - ‘I heard it as a sort of music kaleidoscope of America’ For access to the topic look at http://www.uclan.ac.uk/library/musrail.htm

reading on the railroad

The telegraph was built along side the first transcontinental railroad. In years prior to stringing the line pony express riders relayed the mail across between St Joseph Missouri and Sacramento California in the then nearly unimaginable time of eight days. But with the connection of the telegraph no one paused to imagine what it would be like to have the mail delivered in half the previous time. Thereafter the communication would be instantaneous.

Many such paradigm shifts associated with current information delivery actually had their advent in the 19th century. Instantaneous communication, digital transmission, photographic and audio recording, and mass marketing; all had their advent in the 19th century in a context in which these innovations constituted real shifts of paradigm.

What the technologies of the day were unable to provide was an integration of these innovations. The individual and, specifically, the individual reader, was left to compile these various transmissions and interrelate them to accomplish useful work and useful meaning. One setting that illustrates this circumstance is railroad operations and the capacities of railroaders to assimilate conceptually integrate transmissions from diverse technologies and from their separate delivery modes. For example, the digital message conveyed by the telegraph could only be delivered and answered as pure code; “dots and dashes”. The messages were manually written out using carbons to provide dulpicates and these “orders” were hooped up to the crews on the unwired passing train.

The rail network of the US at the turn of the 20th century was an intricate and extensive network. The individual train and its progress and interactions was managed as bundle on the internet. However, no single technology or transmission protocol, enabled this integration. The single train, its single route, its assignments of cars to be picked up or set-out from its fluctuating “consist”, or in the case of a passenger train, its schedule of stops to embark or disembark given passengers with given accommodations and connections had no composite, distributed display, no wide search data base. Each transaction was partitioned by hand written manuscript. This manuscript was conveyed to verbal orders which could be transcribed to telegraphic code which would then need hand written transcription to be handed to crews for visual reading conveyed verbally and integrated, on the fly, with published tables of schedules and governing print rule books which were to be memorized, but were in constant revision and amendment. The only shared data point was time, and railroaders continuiously synchonized their watches to the second.

All the integration was bionic, managed in the mind and memory of the individual railroader. There was no pop-up status of the “flights” enroute layered with all the database richness and contingency response options of an air traffic control system. Such a circumstance of thousands of trains operating simultaneously complex circuits of trackage was dependent on the judgment and response of the individual train crews and their quickness at integration of disparate information.

But what does this have to do with reading? These railroaders developed expertise at a new kind of reading. This was a corporate kind of reading without the technological support we now associate with corporate information management. The individual railroader had to integrate information from verbal, written and print reading modes in a context prior to any thought or hope for composite integration of these reading modes now so well achieved. And all this information had to be interfaced, real time, as the train charged on into the night.