DOWNSCALE?? Shadow of Mt. Hollywood discovers railroad fiction, including a site highlighting some of the great classics. These are not for the Thomas the Tank Engine set, nor for the avant-garde photo enthusiasts. Good railroad fiction has in common with good sea stories the opening line, "No s***, this really happened." The stories in the anthologies I've read tend to fall into a few broad categories: the rigid manager who has a humbling experience, the dispatcher or telegrapher that keeps 'em rolling despite natural or man-made problems, the maintainer that comes up with an inventive if not quite by the book fix. There are also stories that border on the Twilight Zone in which the ghost of a dead railroader may or may not be present when danger is around the next turn.

Could be some stuff for the cultural studies types as well.

The railroad story as a subliterary genre disappeared, I would think, right about the time the US proletariat disappeared as such -- Tom Wolfe puts it during World War II and the postwar period. And I can even tie this to Leslie Fiedler and his theories of the American novel (which I'll continue to examine in due course when I get to misogyny). Poor Fiedler at the end of Love and Death in the American Novel laments the disappearance of the Dashiell Hammett-Raymond Chandler "proletarian" private detective (baloney) as due to the decline of Popular Front liberalism. (That happened, of course, because the US proletariat got rich, something Fiedler missed along the way.)

So now Linda Niemann has a literary place as a pioneer woman in a job that used to be "proletarian" (but, despite hard working conditions, pays quite well). Railroading is possibly even avant-garde, though, as with many upscale things, with a certain hint of archaism. But then, on the other hand you had Lucius Beebe, who in many ways made Liberace look restrained, a New Yorker writer who had to use a pseudonym to talk about his consuming interest, and now an outed lesbian -- maybe there's something that will never be quite compatible between railroading and the upper-middle-class noncontroversial straight life. There may be something to revisit here.

There is still plenty of good material for a short story based on reality. The O trains discussion list on Yahoo.com (Downscale indeed, have you priced ready-to-run brass lately?) included some tales of real railroading including one of an engineer who wanted to make a point with a local vandal. The vandal liked to stand on an overpass and toss rocks at the train. The engineer brought along a pistol loaded with blanks one day, and figured he'd scare the kid. What the engineer didn't reckon with was that the kid had a loaded pistol of his own. Now, how shall I continue this story, and should I use it as a flashback as part of a story much later, when the engineer's kid, or perhaps the vandal's cousin, or perhaps both, are working on the railroad?