ALL ABOARD THE B&H;, A KID’S CARRIER OF MAGIC

Rummaging through a desk drawer the other evening I came upon my permanent pass on the Bath & Hammondsport Railroad. It was a joke item, carrying on one side the line’s alleged slogan: “Not as long as the others but just as wide.” (Not original either, I suspect, but it still makes me smile).

It also bore a warning: “Not good for passage if the bearer is sober,” which confirms my suspicion that the passes were issued for the noisy party and hooting ride that celebrated the reopening of the B&H; after the disastrous flood of 1935.

For the inaugural, which for the village small-fry was an event almost as exciting as the flood itself, a couple of flatcars were fitted with chairs, yards of bunting and sufficiencies of the local champagne and other grape byproducts. Dignitaries and train lovers from far and near were invited to the ceremonies.

The triumphal voyage began at the Bath end of the line, where the B&H; connected with the Erie, and Delaware, Lackawanna & Western tracks, and proceeded the eight miles down the valley to the lakefront depot at Hammondsport, the whistle blowing all the way.

The distinguished visitors included the New York Herald Tribune columnist, railway buff and all-purpose dilettante Lucius Beebe, a vision of urban elegance in a beige top hat and what I now imagine was a morning coat, suitable for Ascot or a royal nuptial.

The engine was steam of course; the colorless and functional Diesel switchers the B&H; still uses came later, after I had moved away from the town and was spared having to listen to the blatting new whistle that replaced the mighty scream of steam. (The B&H; trains, hardly ever as many as 10 cars, were not as long as the others in that sense, either, but in their steamy prime they were just as loud.)

The B&H; came into being late in the 19th Century, when railroads and progress were synonymous, to carry the local grapes and wines up the valley (a stiff grade, rising 800 feet in the eight miles south to Bath) for transfer to the through lines.

In the early days the line carried passengers as well, and the veteran film producer Hal Roach, who grew up in Elmira, N.Y., remembers as a child taking the Erie to Bath with his family, riding the B&H; to Hammondsport and boarding one of the lake steamers for a daylong excursion up Keuka Lake to Penn Yan and back again, then taking the trains back home again, sleepily.

The last of the steamboats had burned at its dock some years before I was born and the train never carried passengers again. But once in a while the stationmaster, parents consenting, would let some of us youngsters make the trip in the caboose, on a Saturday. If you were lucky, a couple of through freights would roar past the B&H; spur while you were switching in Bath.

My brother used to ride the B&H; every week when his age was still in single digits. He was a town sight, striding down to the depot early Saturday mornings with a lunch bucket and a trainman’s cap and overalls, to keep his faithful log of boxcar serial numbers.

Some of the older residents of Hammondsport still tend to think of Joe as the apprentice engineer instead of the monsignor, and I have no doubt at all that the dreamy simplicity of those distant Saturday mornings appeals to him as it does to me.

I don’t ride trains often any more. Hardly anyone does, and the rational side of me, as well as the sentimental side, says it’s foolhardy to let them go. We’ll need them again, as we’ve already discovered.

I did ride Amtrak down to Del Mar for an interview a few months ago, marveling at the embattled dignity of Union Station, engrossed by the changed perspective the train windows give you on a city and a coast you thought you knew, glad for the time to read instead of watch the speedometer. I thought of the B&H.;

The truth is that I dream of the B&H; all the time. It is sometimes unbelievably prosperous, highballing down from Bath with a hundred cars and achieving unparalleled speeds. (The fragile roadbed has never allowed for more than a sedate crawl.)

Very occasionally I dream that the B&H; has derailed. It was probably something I had for supper, and there are never serious injuries or damages.

Once in a while the B&H; leaves the tracks, but simply to tootle about town where there are no tracks, like a toy train that doesn’t need rails. A psychologist friend, who spends his life wrenching out the deep meanings out of dreams, was baffled by this one. Trains off tracks are supposed to suggest disorder, chaos, disorientation, panic, he said, eying me quizzically.

Then again, the psychologist had never lived in Hammondsport and had missed the opportunity to run alongside the flatcars with the bunting on them, and hear the whistle blowing and the band playing and to understand in that thrilling moment that the B&H; was a carrier of magic. It could do anything it wanted to, go anyplace it chose to. It was not an overaged steam engine reduced to working in the minors after more glamorous experiences elsewhere. It was an item of power and majesty, and up at Bath it linked us with the wider world and the yet unseen splendors of New York and Buffalo and beyond.