A Night in a Freight Car

SOME persons, most persons it may be, would set down as crazy any man who should declare that an ordinary box freight car is a more pleasant conveyance than the best appointed “ Pullman.” And yet this is the thesis which I am prepared to maintain. What is it that makes railroad traveling exhaustive to the nervous system ? It is not the jarring of the train. Modern roadbeds are so well ballasted, tracks are so smoothly laid, car-springs so cunningly tempered, that passengers not only read but write, and even have their beards shaved with comfort. Fifty miles an hour with a razor at your throat, and no harm done; that is one of the triumphs of modern ingenuity. No; it is the close, bad air that makes the traveler dull and headachy; and the more costly the train, as, for example, a “vestibule” train, the worse the ventilation.

Traveling in a passenger car means a horrible community of unwholesomeness. Mentally, you can ignore your fellow sufferers. You can treat them with a silent contempt bordering upon insult; but what does that avail so long as you are obliged to pool your physical condition with their physical condition ? Their fatigue becomes your fatigue; their germs of disease become your germs. A recent writer in the London Lancet states the case as follows: —

“The business man is more liable than the agricultural laborer to become run down, not so much because he works harder and more monotonously, and therefore personally manufactures more waste products, but because his tissues are more liable to become saturated with the waste products of himself and others, derived from the confined atmosphere which he habitually breathes. We all know how tiring to most of us is a long railway journey, more especially if the compartment is crowded and the windows are closed. . . . The effect is due to the saturation of the tissues with waste products taken in through the lungs.”

Is it luxury to become “saturated with waste products,” even though your seat be comfortable, and you are surrounded with triumphs of the upholsterer’s art ? Give me, rather, the unadorned freight car with the winds of heaven blowing through it. If they blow too hard, you can shut the door, make everything snug, wrap yourself in an ulster, and lie down on a good bed of hay. To be sure, your feet may become cold, but if they do, there is no law against getting up and walking about for a while. You have the whole car at your disposal.

Another advantage of the freight car is that it contains fewer objects to fatigue the eye and brain. This, in a lesser degree, is also the advantage of the drawing-room car, but the latter, with all its luxuries, is an over-heated apartment occupied by persons reading “society” papers or bad novels, and haunted by a mercenary black man. For real privacy the freight car is preëminent. It is even superior in this respect to those private cars, so called, which are owned and used by a favored few, commonly described as “magnates.” The magnate lacks absolute privacy. Custom obliges him to share his car with servants. Conductors and brakemen have a right of way through it. But in a freight train the only method of communication is by the overhead route; and no one is entitled to poke his nose inside of your car. Tramps sometimes attempt to force themselves in, but if you prevent them with a carriage wrench it is not murder nor even manslaughter.

What the modern world needs as much as anything is to revise its notions of luxury. A luxury may be described as a superfluous good, mental or physical. It is something not absolutely necessary to health and happiness, but conducive to both. The same thing, therefore, may be, according to circumstances, a luxury or the very opposite, for it may be detrimental to health and happiness. A fur coat is a luxury to a stage-driver in northern New England, but not to a young man in the city. An electric car is a luxury if by its means you are enabled to live in the country, but it is the opposite of a luxury if you employ it to deprive yourself of needed exercise. A horse is a luxury if you bestride him; a carriage is a luxury to those who are too infirm to ride in the saddle. But when, as often happens, we see a stout man being conveyed in a cab from his house to his office on a rainy morning, we behold a terrible sight, — that of a fellow being deluded by false notions of luxury. Calling once upon a rich old gentleman, I noticed on a table in the front hall five high hats, and, in front of each hat, neatly folded, a pair of kid gloves. Hats and gloves were all about alike, and the superfluity of them impressed me so strongly, having always been accustomed to what are called “moderate circumstances,” that I could not help making some allusion to it by way of discovering how the matter lay in the owner’s mind. “Ah, yes,” he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, “I am a very lux-u-ri-ous man.” But the old gentleman’s ideas of luxury were confused. A superfluous hat is not a luxury any more than two meals are a luxury for the man who can eat but one.

As a rule, the possession of wealth tends as much to diminish as to increase real luxuries. A servant is a luxury, if he saves one from mere drudgery, but quite otherwise if his employment deprives the master of healthful exercise or pleasant adventure.

Let us suppose, then, that the reader, desiring to transport his carriage or saddle horse, or, better yet, his pair, for horses like to travel in company, to his summer home, and not being blessed or cursed with an English coachman, decides to go with them himself. He will not be quite alone, for the family dogs agree to accompany him. The familiar horrors of that last day in town need not be dwelt upon here. A thousand things should be done, and you try to accomplish a few of them. It is a day of rushing about, of nervous fatigue, of a wilted collar. At last, however, about five o’clock, you renounce the devil and all his works, and call at the stable for your horses. They are quickly harnessed with the halters on beneath the bridles; and you take a hasty inventory of your outfit, which should include blankets of various weights for the horses, oats, hay, a pail for watering, a lantern freshly filled, with a new wick, and plenty of straw, sawdust, or other material, for the horses to stand upon. This not only prevents them from slipping, but forms a cushion which mitigates the jar of the freight train.

For yourself, you need only an overcoat, a box of provisions, a drinking cup, a bottle of water or tea, some matches and plenty of cigars not too good to give away. Railroad men are great smokers, and tobacco administered in proper doses, especially to engineers and firemen, has a wonderful effect upon the operation of brakes and levers. A skillful engineer, when he backs down to make a coupling, or when he starts his train, can do so as gently as if he were cracking eggshells, or he can do it with a jerk which throws your horses to the floor; and the gift of a cigar will sometimes make all the difference between the two methods.

A suitable car, that is to say a clean one, with a high roof and good springs, has been bespoken, we will assume, and the horses are coaxed into it with many fears and misgivings on their part. The dogs, on the other hand, are the first to enter, and having thoroughly inspected the car, their tails wagging with curiosity, they sit down in an appropriate corner, and fix their eyes upon their master, prepared for anything so long as they are not separated from him. The horses are placed side by side in the rear of the car, facing toward its centre, and are strongly fastened to a rope stretched across the car in front of them. As a precaution against injury from kicking, their hind shoes may be removed, or a pole placed between them. Great care should be taken to secure the separate parts of the carriage and all other movable objects, for the motion of the car has an astonishing effect in setting even heavy things afloat. Nails are driven here and there for hanging harness or other matters, and the lantern is safely suspended from the centre of the roof. At last everything is stowed away, and we are ready to start. It has been a hot piece of work, and the horses, worried by their strange surroundings, and alarmed by the noise of a “shifter” which puffs back and forth upon a neighboring track, sweat profusely, paw and stamp, and glance about with frightened eyes. One door, that on the side where trains will pass, is closed and fastened. The other door is left open, and you can regulate it according to the weather and other circumstances.

But now it is time to take a seat on the hay, or you will be thrown off your legs, for the shifter is backing down upon us. “Here she comes!” cries the foreman of the freight house; and bang! she strikes us with the force of a small collision. The shifter, as doubtless the reader knows, is a little but powerful locomotive, very fussy, jerky, and irritable in its movements, and much given to snorting and panting. In the days when locomotives bore names, and not simply numbers, there was an especially nervous shifter to which some railroad man who knew his Dickens had given the appropriate name of “Pancks.” The shifter and the shifter’s crew of brakemen “make up” the train, collecting the cars from the various freight houses, and leaving them in one long line, ready to be hauled away by another locomotive.

Motion travels slowly; and everybody has observed how, when a heavy train starts, the mysterious force is communicated by slow degrees to the different sets of wheels, accompanied by a succession of rattles and crashes, as one car after another begins to move. The horses learn the meaning of this sound with astonishing quickness ; and you can see them, when they hear it, bracing themselves to withstand the anticipated shock. These are trying moments, but at last the through freight is made up, and our car is attached to it with “live stock ” chalked on the outside, in token that we are to be sent forward as speedily as possible.

And now comes a brief respite. Six o’clock has struck; the shifters are stabled in the roundhouse; the freight houses are closed, and tranquillity settles down upon the yard. Men are going home in twos and threes; and presently the crew which is to take us on the first stage of our long journey appear, pipe in mouth. These men are as different from the shifting crew as the shifting locomotive is different from the long-distance one. They are heavier in build, more stolid and more taciturn, somewhat rough and brusque in manner, but almost always good-natured and obliging. You are apt to begin by quarreling with them, and to end by liking them. Railroad men are, to use an expressive Americanism, “very accommodating. ”

At last the huge black locomotive which hauls the night freight on its first stage looms into view, and slowly backing down upon us, sends a shiver through the whole train. Then comes a brief pause. The long, dark train lies motionless on the rails, like a snake, with the engine for its head, and the headlight for its big, single eye. Nothing so dead, so absolutely quiescent as a train of loaded cars standing on the track, — but how fearful its momentum when in motion! It is astonishing that the poetry of the railroad has been felt so little. There is Turner’s magnificent painting called Rain, Mist and Steam, and there are some stories and verses of Kipling’s; but the field is as yet almost unworked. Perhaps our poets travel too much in sleeping-cars.

But hark! Three warning whistles come from the monster which has us in tow, and the engineer, puffing at the good cigar which you have given him, gently turns on the steam, and we are off with only the slightest of shocks. Vacation has begun, and a thrill of pleasure seems to run through the train. Once clear of the city and its suburbs, the railroad for some distance almost touches the water; and, standing at the open door of your car, you watch the sun, an immense red ball, sink into the ocean. Cool, salty, and invigorating is the air which the tide brings in from the sea, and it acts like magic upon your fretted nerves. Now you begin to appreciate the luxury of traveling by freight. What has become of those professional or business cares which were worrying you no longer than a single hour before ? Even the horses seem to feel the spell. They are less excited; their heads droop, and you can safely loosen the rope, so as to give them more freedom.

Smoothly the night freight wends its way across the marshes, and thunders over crossings where the gate-tender stands with his hand on the crank, and his evening pipe in his mouth, a reposeful sight; and presently in a lonely spot, we stop, and back on to a siding, where we are to remain until a certain passenger train has gone past. Here is an opportunity to alight, and perhaps to have a little talk with the “con,” as tramps call the conductor, who strolls up in his shirtsleeves, with way-bills bulging in his hippocket. Some inside facts about railroading crop out in these chance conversations.

Soon, however, the express train for which we were waiting has rattled disdainfully past; the conductor waves his arm, the engineer responds with three toots of the whistle, we scramble aboard, and the huge train is in motion again. We are now approaching a large town or city, and in the gathering twilight it is pleasant to observe family groups enjoying the cool of the day on their doorsteps. Electric lights begin to multiply, and in a few minutes, with an agreeable sense of superiority, — for we also are an express, — our train rumbles and clanks through the principal station without stopping, and we catch for a brief moment the wondering eyes of persons standing on the platform who have discovered with astonishment that one of the freight cars is inhabited.

We are soon out in the open country again, and as night falls we light the lantern, recline on our couch of hay, and pulling a horse blanket over our feet, settle ourselves for supper, with the dogs in very close attendance. In cold weather carminative food is to be recommended, for the want of hot victuals and drink is keenly felt, and may partly be supplied by gingerbread and alcohol in some form. The writer remembers one trip in midwinter when, having forgotten to take a flask along, his only drink, through a long shivering day and night, was water out of a tin dipper. Cold tea, not made too strong, and tempered with whiskey, is a suitable freight-car beverage.

The horses are now quiet and nodding with sleep, and in the cool night air they are likely to experience that slight chill which usually follows excitement and profuse sweating. Feel of their ears now and then, for the ear is the horse’s thermometer ; and if their ears are cold, let the nags be covered up, as we say, more warmly.

And now, as night closes in, you begin to taste the real sweets of privacy and solitude, — a condition which cannot degenerate into loneliness because you have the dogs cuddling against you, and the horses close at hand. If you happen to be near the centre of the train you can please yourself by reflecting that something like a quarter of a mile of freight cars separates you from the men on the locomotive at one end and from those in the caboose at the other. Only those who have felt it can understand the mysterious charm of solitude, can realize how, from being a mere taste or inclination, it grows by indulgence till it becomes a passion. We have all heard, and some of us fully believe, the story of that Western pioneer who became so enamored of solitude that he found himself under the painful necessity of shooting at sight any stranger who presumed to come within twenty miles of his stamping-ground. John Boyle O’Reilly used to declare, with some exaggeration it may be, that the seven years which he spent in solitary confinement in Dartmoor prison were the happiest years of his life.

Perhaps the main charm of solitude is that it emancipates one, for the time being, from all human relations and obligations. It is one thing to be alone with the possibility that at any moment some friend or some enemy — it is all the same — may knock at the door; and quite another to be alone without that possibility. The latter state is solitude. The solitary man is secure. The universe exists for him alone. He has no duties, except perhaps in thought. He is like a god, aloof from all human concerns. Mere existence suffices for him; and though solitude is to be sought chiefly in woods and fields, yet the devotee will find it also in his dimly lighted freight car, rushing through the cool air of the summer night, now thundering past stations and freight houses, all silent and deserted, now rumbling over a drawbridge, beneath which flows the swift, black water of a mysterious river, pierced by a single star, now roaring through a wood where even the birds are at rest, and then out in the open country again, past hamlets and scattered farmhouses, buried in darkness and slumber, huge masses of black on the landscape.

Yet signs of life are not wanting altogether, for, at rare intervals, a dull light gleaming in the windows of some sickchamber will make the passenger wonder, not without a thrill of sympathy, what tragedy may be enacting there, and with what hopes or fears the patient and the watcher at his bedside await the morning. Little do they imagine that even a moment’s thought has been expended upon them by a traveler flashing past in the night; and it does not seem a wild surmise that, equally without their knowledge, some all-seeing God should record with pity the sufferings of that isolated sickroom.

So much is to be seen and felt that one is hardly inclined to spend even a part of the night in sleep; and, to tell the truth, sleep is sometimes difficult to woo in a freight car. The Sybarite swings a hammock in the car, and is independent of its motion; but for an able-bodied man, a bed of hay is sufficiently comfortable, except, indeed, for a brief half-mile or so, here and there, when you strike a rough spot in the track. (Traveling by freight qualifies one to render an expert opinion upon the character of the roadbed.) Every stoppage is a diversion. Sometimes it is to take water, sometimes to doctor a hot-box, sometimes to let a passenger train go by; and if you happen to stop at or near a station, you will perhaps see two shadowy figures appear suddenly from the train, and move stiffly off into the surrounding darkness. They are tramps who have been riding on the couplings between two cars.

Not infrequently, especially if the cars are heavily loaded, a train will break apart; and bad accidents sometimes occur if this happens just before reaching a down grade, — the rear part of the train crashing into the forward part. A few months since, a well-known Connecticut dealer who had just started for England in charge of a valuable stallion was killed in this manner within five miles of his home. One winter night, coming from “down East” in a violent snowstorm, the couplings broke three times, the caboose and a few other cars at the rear end being left on the track each time, while the locomotive with the rest of the train forged ahead for two or three miles, coming back again, of course, when the mishap was discovered. The last time that the couplings were broken, we were hurrying to reach a siding in order to leave the track clear for a passenger express, supposed to be not far behind. As the train parted, and the rear end of it began to slow, everybody in the caboose made haste to jump off, and especially a brakeman with a red light, who, running back as fast as he could, was just in time to signal the express. It came to a stop only when the cow-catcher of its locomotive was in contact with our caboose. Indeed, it seems to be the case, and I mention it here for the benefit of nervous travelers, that there are many narrow escapes on the railroad which passengers never hear about.

The caboose (on some roads they call it the “ buggy ”) is a social centre, and being warm and comfortable, it is a pleasant place on a cold night. Dealers who are in the habit of carring horses seldom stay with them, — they go back to the caboose. Here, most of the time, are the conductor and two brakemen, the third brakeman being on the locomotive. Here, also, ride the drovers who have cattle and sheep on the train en route to market; and these men are unmistakable, for they have a brutality of expression, in comparison with which the face even of a horse-dealer is that of an innocent cherub. The explanation is simple: drovers deal continuously with dumb animals, but never hold any kindly or unselfish relation to them. Their business is to buy and sell the poor creatures at so much a head, and between these two operations, to goad and shove them into freight cars, packed as closely as the law will permit, and sometimes more closely. If everybody were familiar with drovers, saw their faces, heard them speak, and watched the translation of a cow, calf, or lamb from the farm to the slaughter house, the world would probably give up eating flesh in six months.

Beside drovers and horse-dealers, a few miscellaneous persons frequent the caboose, and notably potato men. Potatoes are brought to market in winter as well as in summer, and the stove-pipe which one occasionally sees projecting from a car marked “Ogdensburg,” “Canadian Pacific,” or “Bangor and Aroostook,” means that a man is inside to keep up the fire, lest the vegetables should freeze. The car is chilly, despite the stove, and it is probable that after a day or two the exclusive society even of the Early Rose or the Beauty of Hebron begins to pall upon the solitary occupant. One stormy night a potato man entered a certain caboose, and was rudely accosted by the conductor, a humorist and a cynic upon a rough and gigantic pattern.

“ Who are you ? Where’s your pass ?" he thundered.

“I haven’t got any pass,” was the reply.

“You have n’t! What do you mean, then, by coming into my private car ? Don’t you know that you can’t ride here ? ”

“I know one thing,” said the potato man with the firmness of desperation, as he sank into a chair and warmed his hands at the huge stove in the centre of the caboose; “ I mean to stay here until you throw me out.”

“ Well, stay and be d—d,” said the conductor, pleased with his little joke.

It was the same man who amused himself, and incidentally amused me, by extracting from a handsome, desperado sort of brakeman a long account of the latter’s recent courtship and marriage, an account which the conductor freely punctuated with caustic remarks upon the folly of the woman who could marry such a scamp.

You will find a great deal of coarseness in the caboose, more, perhaps, than in a fashionable club, but its moral tone is certainly not lower than that of the club, and its impulses are sounder, more national, and more patriotic.

The caboose is not only an office for the conductor, and a saloon; it is also a sleeping-car. containing at the rear end half-a-dozen bunks for the trainmen, who will turn in here about midnight or later, when we have reached a certain provincial metropolis, the end of the road on which they are employed, and the halfway point in our own journey. No city could appear more beautiful of a summer night, for we approach it by crossing upon trestlework a wide river, the farther bank of which is marked by a long line of electric lights reflected in the water. Here we run in upon what seems to be the single unoccupied track in a forest of freight cars; and as soon as our wheels have ceased to turn, we are visited in succession by three or four functionaries, each with his lantern on his left arm. First comes a man who takes the number of our car, then another who notes in his book our contents and destination, next an inspector who plays a few bars upon our wheels with his hammer, and, finally, the agent of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, who is employed to see that cattle and sheep are not overcrowded.

The big locomotive which has drawn us thus far now goes off to the roundhouse to rest and prepare for the return trip; and in its place a little shifter, insulting the night with its puffing and whistling, knocks us about for a while, and finally leaves us in what appears to be a long-disused and deserted part of the yard. The tracks end here, running against a hillside. On our left is a snowplough, not likely to be wanted much before Christmas; and on the right is a worn-out caboose, which, to judge from the rust upon its wheels, has been motionless here for many years. Shall we not share its fate ? Will anybody know or remember that a car marked “live stock” was tucked away in this remote corner ?

However, it is only twelve o’clock, and as we are not “due to leave” till two A.M., we have in this quiet spot, as deserted as a graveyard in the dead of night, an opportunity to feed the horses and to take a nap ourselves. But, in the first place, we must sally out for water, unless indeed, as is the better way, we have brought with us water for the horses in a keg or in two pails with tight-fitting covers. Horses are very squeamish about drinking water to which they are unaccustomed, and they are particularly so under the nervous excitement of a railroad journey. They drink with even less appetite than they eat; and this is the main reason why they shrink up and lose weight in the cars, especially upon a short trip. During a longer journey, they usually become reconciled to the situation, recover their appetites, and are prepared for surprises in the water pail.

If, however, you are in search of water you will find a faucet in a kind of employees’ waiting-room, where, in semi-darkness, on dingy benches ranged around the wall, men are taking naps or eating their midnight meal. While thus employed you are not unlikely to meet other travelers having horses in charge, and you may even be induced by some enthusiast to accompany him through a maze of tracks and trains to his distant car, where he will show you an animal most remarkable, as he thinks, for beauty or speed. Possibly you will encounter a certain interesting person whose whole time is spent in carring horses for a Western beef company from the metropolis, where the horses are purchased, to the various smaller cities and towns, where they are to be used by the agents of the concern.

Race horses are great travelers, and many of them average perhaps two days a week on the cars from June till November. It has been discovered, not without surprise, that the shifting and balancing which a horse performs in the cars have a wonderful effect in suppling his muscles. Many a trotter or runner has gone the best race of his life after a long railroad journey followed by one night’s rest. Old campaigners learn to take the noise and jarring of the train with perfect composure, and some of the more intelligent are sagacious enough to lie down on their deep beds of straw as soon as they are put on board, and to remain in that position until the journey’s end. Maud S. is said to have done this.

But it is time to return to your temporary home, especially as rain is beginning to fall, and in your half-asleep condition you are likely to go astray, wandering up and down long lines of motionless freight cars, stumbling over switches, and vaguely wondering whether you are going to be run down and killed by a shifter, or, more heroically, by the Manitoba express. At last, however, you recognize a certain open car laden with granite, — an awkward thing, by the way, to be next to in a collision, — and, upon the box car immediately behind it, you read the now familiar number, 2011, or whatever it may be. The horses welcome you back with a whinny of pleased surprise, the dogs frantically caress you; and, throwing yourself down upon your bed of hay, you fall asleep to the music of the rain pattering upon the tin roof overhead.

Thus passes an hour, the shortest of the night, and then down comes the shifter of the line to which you have been transferred, and awakes you with a crash. And now you have a chance to observe the worst dangers of railroading. In order to make the necessary couplings and uncouplings, the shifting crew are continually obliged to jump on and off moving cars. They have only one free hand with which to grasp a rail, for in the left hand they carry a lantern; and on such a night as this, when everything is slippery with rain, and obscured by darkness, mist, and, perhaps, by steam, the danger is much increased. To stand dry and safe within your car and watch the scene is something like witnessing a gladiatorial show.

A freight brakeman, especially one of a shifting crew, expects to come within a few inches of death every night in his life; and yet in most of our states the common law is still so unjust that if a brakeman is injured by working with defective cars or appliances, knowing them to be defective, although he would doubtless be dismissed if he refused to work with them, he cannot recover damages for the injury. According to the fiction of the law, he has “voluntarily assumed the risk.” One night spent on a freight train would do the bench of judges a world of good.

Let us hope, however, that on this occasion you “pull out” from the yard leaving no lifeless or mutilated body behind, happy in the thought that you have entered upon the last stage of your journey, and pleased that the train, for a wonder, is on time, although, as a church clock on the edge of the city strikes two, you are not quite sure, in your dazed and sleepy condition, whether it is yesterday afternoon or to-morrow morning. At all events, the clouds have dissolved, the stars are out again; and a little later, at 2.45 A. M., to be accurate, as you stand at the door of the car, inhaling the cool, sweet air which already smacks of the mountains, you observe in the eastern sky two or three silvery streaks which might be clouds, but which, as slowly they broaden, brighten, and become suffused with pink, you perceive to be the dawn of a midsummer day. Beholding that, the stars begin to withdraw, the winding river, visible for a mile or more, lazily rolls off the counterpane of mist which has covered him throughout the night, and the whole landscape awakes.

As the sun, getting higher and higher, burns away the freshness of the morning, it must be confessed that something of the glamour which has surrounded your journey throughout the night begins to disappear. Even upon the ascetic mind thoughts of a neat breakfast-table and of a cup of hot coffee (with boiled milk) will intrude. Sometimes — such is the weakness of human nature — a base longing to get into a comfortable bed, and leave the landscape and the horses to take care of themselves, will poison the morning mind of the demoralized traveler. But there is a remedy yet to be tried. Climb to the top of your car, and sitting there, with your back to the locomotive, for the cinders come somewhat thickly, you will feel such a rush of invigorating air, and will enjoy so wide a view of forest and stream, with the mountains rising northward, that fatigue disappears or is forgotten. Before long, from your lofty perch, you begin to descry familiar houses and barns and turns in the road, and at last the well-known, dingy little station, just as you left it nine months ago, with the same old wagons standing in the sheds behind, with the same old stage-driver, dressed in the same faded clothes, and whittling what appears to be the same stick, sitting on the platform.

Profound is the quiet of the scene; fifty years of noisy progress have been wiped out by our journey of a night. This is home. Even the horses sigh with pleasure as they breathe in the sweet, hayscented air; and the dogs, rushing from their temporary prison with screams of delight, are already pursuing one of last summer’s ideals, — a certain fat woodchuck in a neighboring field.