At random 6/1

"One of my most vivid memories," recalls Nick Carraway, the narrator of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o"clock of a December evening . . . the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate." I, too, still harbor vivid memories of a similar train ride, nearly half a century ago, from Columbus, Ohio, to New York City, for Christmas vacation, sailing swiftly over a crisp and snowy landscape in a darkened Pennsylvania Railroad coach filled with drowsy college undergraduates. I, a college freshman, shared my seat and body warmth with Libby Strock, a much more sophisticated college junior. The lulling, rhythmic "clickety-clack of the railroad track" under a tattered old football blanket. It was a memorable trip. Think of how many American movies of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s featured significant sequences that took place on trains. In a recent letter she sent me about her memories of Cottey College, a woman from the class of 1943 wrote of her time during World War II, "Travel was more difficult -- I remember riding on the train from Kansas City to Omaha with troops, and sitting in the baggage car." It took a war to democratize American travel. Most of my long-range train travel was spent sitting up in passenger coach, but when I was very young my mother took me to Ohio by Pullman. Whatever the season, the Pullman car seemed very cozy and secure. (Do you remember the hilarious Pullman car scenes in Billy Wilder"s Some Like it Hot? with Jack Lemon and Marilyn Monroe? Or the scene in the Marx Brothers" is it Animal Crackers (?), where nearly every passenger on a train gradually gathers in a single Pullman car until the moment when a sudden, violent disgorging of human bodies is inevitable? ) At dinner time, my mother and I visited the dining car, which was elegantly appointed, with a crisp, fresh linen table cloth on each table, together with a single, fresh red rose in a thin glass vase. The Negro waiters (in those long-past days they weren't yet "servers" or "African-Americans" and they had no first names) carried themselves with a parade-ground precision. Like most food eaten in extraordinary circumstances, the food on this trip tasted delicious. Later, back in our Pullman car, my mother pulled down our two beds from out of the walls. Since I was too young to stay up later than about 8 p.m., my mother saw to it that I got undressed and into my pajamas, and that I climbed into the lower berth, where the rhythm of the car must've put me to sleep immediately. Real New Yorkers know only the various subway systems (BMT, IRT, etc.) . Suburban cheaters used to know the feeble railroads that traveled between Pennsylvania Station or Grand Central Terminal and the various outlying towns. The New York, New Haven, and Hartford trains must've been very old (they had woven straw seats and grimy windows that slid open instead of air conditioning). On the way home in Larchmont, the Stamford local always stalled for fifteen minutes or so at some indeterminate spot between Grand Central and Larchmont because of a "hot box." Since I never bothered to ask the conductor what a "hot box" was, I never found out, and to this day remain ignorant of the reason I spent a total of, I imagine, three days waiting pointlessly. When I got married and moved to Kew Gardens, on Long Island, I generally went to and from work in Manhattan by subway (subway tokens were 15 cents) But if I were particularly tired, I went to the Kew Gardens station of the Long Island Railroad and splurged for the 75 cents it cost to ride above ground. The Long Island Railroad had a reputation as "the country's largest parking lot," but I never found it lacking. Until a few of generations ago, there was not a single boy growing up in the U.S. who, when he heard the whistle from a distant steam locomotive (in those silently pre-diesel decades), didn't think of the romance of long-distance travel. For that's what it had meant to the American novelist of the 1930's Thomas Wolfe, spokesman (in his Look Homeward, Angel) for a whole generation of coming-of-age boys. That sound has virtually disappeared from the American scene. To be replaced now by . . . what?

Dr. Nash is planning to set up a large-gauge model railroad system inside the farm house at his 10-acre farm on County Road BB.