MISUNDERSTANDING RAILWAY PRESERVATION. The good news is that the Flying Yankee may be made railworthy again. The bad news is that the main press doesn't get railway history.

It was sleek and shiny, strangely silent and impossibly quick--an unprecedented vision dropped into the grime and hopelessness of the Depression like a visitor from the future.

The train known as the Flying Yankee caused the kind of sensation cynical 21st Century commuters can hardly imagine. It drew crowds of 10,000 when it first visited Portland, Maine, and Nashua, and 25,000 turned out for its debut in Boston in the winter of 1935.

Powered by diesel and electricity instead of steam, the Yankee flew between Boston, northern New England and New York for 22 years, dazzling passengers with its quiet, cushioned ride and speeds of more than 90 miles per hour.

I'd hesitate to call it "impossibly quick." Boston-Portland in two hours with steam was not impossible. But the train never ventured south of North Station on business. Troy, New York, perhaps, and rarely faster than 75 mph. Perhaps the writer is thinking about the East Wind, itself worthy of a post some day, or the all-Pullman Bar Harbor and Downeaster that did link the Official Region to the Maine coast.

Then, in the 1950s, car ownership exploded. Train ridership collapsed. The Flying Yankee was retired after nearly 3 million miles of travel and left to sit at a Carver rail museum for almost four decades, as vandals pocketed bits of its sleek Art Deco features and rot settled into its once-plush seats and carpets.

That the train was, by 1957, a bit clapped out as well as subject to the limitations of a fixed consist might have had something to do with its being retired. That some railway preservation societies have more will than they have wallet is a reality. I can think of a few Burlington Zephyrs of that era that are still extant but real basket cases. (Union Pacific's streamliners of that era, with their aluminum construction, were worth a lot more to the scrap merchant than preservationists could come up with.)

Commissioned by the Boston & Maine Railroad, the Flying Yankee was built by the E.G. Budd Co. of Philadelphia. It cost $280,000 and was modeled after the Pioneer Zephyr that caused a stir in Chicago in 1934.

The Yankee offered unheard-of amenities, including air conditioning and clam chowder. It opened travel between Boston and Maine with an aggressive 732-mile daily schedule that looped from Portland to Boston to Bangor and back.

The Yankee is the second-oldest Budd motor train. The Pioneer Zephyr, preserved underground at the Museum of Science and Industry, stayed in service until the early 1960s on Burlington secondary lines west of the Missouri River. The details about the schedule are correct. Air conditioning, however, was already in place on some Boston and Maine and New Haven dining cars as well as the Pullman-Bradley lightweight coaches that went into service before the Yankee did. And it would be a wicked pathetic New England railroad that didn't offer clam chowder in the dining car.

The ride experience, however, is different from the old steamcars.

Curved lines dominate the Yankee, which was partly designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret in the opulent Art Deco style. So dramatic was the difference between the Yankee and other trains, even a short trip left an impression. Charles Downing rode the train in 1936 from Boston to Portsmouth on his way home from the circus.

"It was like sitting down in your Morris chair in your living room--the chair leaned back, the lighting was indirect, and there was no noise, no clanking," said Downing, 88, of Maine. "The doors closed with a little hiss, and the only sound was the click-click of the air brakes. On the old steam trains, the brakes were always slamming and squealing and grinding. I remember thinking, this is elegant--I'm so glad I'm in here."

And with a little help from the Yankee's friends, the train will roll again.