The role of trains and railroads in our popular culture extends into the realm of poetry. Here are three examples of trains described in verse. The first two poems are oft-cited cases; the third example — familiar to many a century ago — will be recognized by very few people today.
Travel
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing;
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.
The Engineer
Let it rain!
Who cares?
I’ve a train
Upstairs,
With a brake
Which I make
From a string
Sort of thing,
Which works
In jerks,
‘Cos it drops
In the spring,
Which stops
With the string,
And the wheels
All stick
So quick
That it feels
Like a thing
That you make
With a brake,
Not string ....
So that’s what I make,
When the day’s all wet.
It’s a good sort of brake
But it hasn’t worked yet.
The Railroad Crossing*
Can't tell you much about the thing,
'twas done so powerful quick,
But 'pears to me, I got a most outlandish heavy lick!
It broke my leg, and tore my sculp, and jerked my arm most out;
But have a seat, Stranger, and I'll try and tell you how it came about:
Y'see, I'as drivin' down the road with that 'ere team o'mine,
A-haulin' a load o' corn for Ebenezer Cline
And drivin' slow - about a day or so before,
The off-horse run a splinter in his foot and made it sore.
You know where the railroad cuts across the lot at Martin's Hole?
Well, thar I seed a great big sign stuck high up on a pole.
I was mighty curious to find out what it said,
So I stopped the horses on the railroad track, and read.
I ain't no scholar, recollect, and so I had to spell
I started kind o' cautious-like, with R-A-I, and L.
That spelled RAIL, as clear as mud. R-O-A-D was ROAD.
Alumptum RAILROAD was the word, and that 'ere much I knowed.
C-R-O, and double-S, with I-N-G to boot,
Spelled CROSSING just as plain as Noah Webster dared to do it!
L double-O-K was LOOK
And I was a-lookin' all the time and spellin' like a book.
O-U-T was OUT,
And there it was: LOOK OUT!
F-O-R and T-H-E
'twas then LOOK OUT FOR THE.
And when I tried the next word, it commenced with E-N-G.
I got this fur when, suddenly, there came an awful whack!
A thousand fiery thunderbolts just scooped me off the track.
The horses went to Davy Jones, the wagon went to smash,
And I was h'isted seven yards above the tallest ash!
Now, 'tain't the pain, and 'tain't the loss of that 'ere team o' mine,
But, Stranger, how I'd like to know the rest of that 'ere sign!
*As a boy, South Coast Railroad Museum Director Gary Coombs heard this poem many times, told by his grandfather, Floyd D. Halferty, who probably learned it as a childhood recitation during his Iowa school days back in the 1890s.
In 1989, Coombs offered a $100 reward to anyone who could help in reconstructing the poem, publishing his challenge in the museum’s Depot Dispatch newsletter. Not two days had passed after the newsletter was mailed before a copy of the missing poem was on its way to the museum.
Joyce Douglas, who supplied the elusive verse, explained that it was her husband, Walt, who called her attention to the newsletter plea. She recognized the poem at once, but admitted that “I had been trying for several years to reconstruct it in my mind, and could remember most of it, but not all. So I phoned my brother, Carl W. Smith, Jr., in Middletown (Illinois), and we worked it out together.” Above are the lines, but without title and author, as Joyce and her brother recalled them.
Mrs. Douglas said that she learned the poem “back in the days of the Great Depression, when we had to entertain ourselves with some activity that didn't cost anything. We would sit around the heating stove in the winter and on the porch in the summer and read aloud to each other, or simply quote the poetry we had memorized. This one our mother knew, and we asked her to say it so often, we just naturally learned it.” She wasn't sure, but Joyce thought that her mother probably picked it up from an older brother or sister who had attended the Bee Grove country school near Middletown before the turn of the century and the family's relocation to the city.
Joyce and Walt Douglas used their $100 reward from the director to become Life Members of the museum.
In 2008, website visitor Robert Stanley kindly sent us more information about this poem, including the title and author, as well as a link to the full text, which is available on the Project Gutenberg website and differs in a number of ways from the lines provided to the museum years earlier by Joyce Douglas.
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