WE TOOK THE TRAIN, edited by...

WE TOOK THE TRAIN, edited by H. Roger Grant (Northern Illinois University Press: $29.50; 175 pp.) Once upon a time, America had a love affair with the train. In 1912, passenger volume hit the 1 billion mark, and by 1916, more than a quarter of a million miles of track laced the land. But today, while almost every even nominally civilized country has a crackerjack railway system, we are reduced to reading about the good old days in books like this delightful anthology, which features 21 accounts of the varieties of American railway experience. The most bemused passenger had to be Charles Dickens who, in 1842, passed through remote stations “where the wild impossibility of anybody having the smallest reason to get out is only to be equalled by the apparently desperate hopelessness of there being anybody to get in.” Most surprising selection is from a hobo named Brownie, who noted in 1930 that a fellow traveler will always “wash up the cans and frying pans that he has used and leave them in good order for the next fellow.” Those really were the good old days.