Slow Train to Yesterday

READERS will find in Mr. Robertson’s pages a quick relief from any eyestrain caused by the dazzling first beams of atomic innovations. His slow trains, on a rich assortment of narrow-gauge and short-line systems, will restore them to the gaslight era, or even to the kerosene period, in the twist of a cyclotron. There is no scramble for reservations, no waiting line at the dining car, aboard “Tweetsie,” which meets the railroad needs of Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Here is the author’s description of “Tweetsie”: —

“In the dark, panting from her run up the mountain, stood the shortest, slimmest train I had ever seen. On the three-foot track was a single car carved in four slices: United States Mail, express, and passengers, white and colored. It was coupled to a ten-wheel steam engine with a slender smokestack and a flaring cowcatcher. In the glow from the fire-box green paint shone on the lettering, ‘East Tennessee & Western North Carolina R. R.’ The drivingwheels were painted red, as in a Currier and Ives print. I fingered a wheel-spoke lightly; it was clean as a wedding present.”

Mr. Robertson leads the traveler back to the world of the lavish box lunch where baked ham, fried chicken, and home-baked bread are routine fare. A leisurely stopover may mean an unexpected meal of mountain trout. If the cinders are thick, the conductor is none the less the suave host, and the breeze is fragrant through the open windows. Whether aboard the flyer of the Georgia & Florida or New Hampshire’s durable “Suncook Valley,” Mr. Robertson argues convincingly for the pleasures of low-speed travel. His chapter on pitcher-and-bowl hotels and their fifty-cent ten-course breakfast should make us study our maps with a new interest. Finally, we should be grateful to Mr. Robertson for documenting, in his chapter “The Smoking-Car,” the existence of Thomas W. Jackson, whose paperbound joke books, On a Slow Train Through Arkansas and Through Missouri on a Mule, were best-sellers in every train butcher’s kit in the days when the conductor used to light the lights of an evening with a wax taper.

CHARLES W. MORTON