"Seldom Willing" refers to the South West Kansas Railway, one of the components of a fictitious Central Pacific Railroad with Chicago - Omaha - Denver and Chicago - St. Louis - Kansas City main lines; the South West Kansas and the Omaha & El Paso provided Omaha - Kansas City - Denver service. Mr Frailey is coy about how Central Pacific came to be, the railway mania of the Gilded Age not turning in reality into all manner of superfluous lines west of the Missouri River the way it was east of there; and in this fictional world, Union Pacific and Burlington have their Omaha - Denver service, whilst the Santa Fe thwarted promoters of the South West Kansas at every turn, with Seldom Willing's promoters giving up any hopes of reaching Santa Fe and turning toward Denver instead.
Those tracks are still in operation in the 1970s as the promoter of the South West Kansas was more successful than the promoters of the New York and Ontario Midland were in getting potential online communities to subscribe to their stock sales; whilst the Omaha & El Paso made it as far as McPherson, Kansas before investors thought better of it.
So much for the transportation history lesson. Seldom Willing might be the first novel since Fiddle Hill to use the railroad as the setting for the business and political machinations and human interactions that distinguish a novel from a picture book. And any story that begins with a train wreck in the Marais des Cygnes River has the requisite drama. Would you, dear reader, film a vodka commercial in the Swamp of Swans?
The machinations begin when the longtime president of the fictitious Central Pacific, who has created a prosperous railroad in the fashion of Ned French's Boston & Maine or Walter Tuohy's Chesapeake & Ohio in a difficult territory, and hived off the passenger trains before the coming of Amtrak, dies in office in late middle age. With no obvious heir apparent, the directors turn to one of the corporate turnaround artists that came into vogue in the declining years of the American High: think a composite of "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap and "Neutron Jack" Welch with the railroading philosophies of Patrick McGinnis and William Deramus. The new head guy is Buzz "Chainsaw" Whitaker and his special assistant is Matthew Conefey, and the covfefe follows.
Yes, before and after the Staggers Act, railroad companies railroads did conserve on track and crew expenses by lengthening trains and sending goods via what looked like more circuitous routes: consider all the westbound consignments from Detroit that Conrail sent to Toledo rather than either over the Michigan Central or the Jackson to Elkhart "Air Line." But when Central Pacific proposed to send grain from western Kansas either to Denver or Omaha before it headed to the Mississippi River or to Texas ports, the politically-connected owner of several grain elevators got involved. Thus the Seldom Willing became, in good Providence & Worcester fashion, its own railroad again.
Then came the Rock Island's liquidation, and the Seldom Willing became the designated operator and later owner of the Joliet to El Paso portions of the Rock Island. Now the intrigue comes, fast and furious. You have railway workers who take exception to their terms of employment being subject to short line labor relations, rather than those of the Class I railroads. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the United Transportation Union have their turf wars. Then there are the spies, some of them alerting crews to upcoming signal tests, some of them alerting thieves to the trailers with high-value consignments. There's a South West Kansas management team into which Mr Frailey introduces all sorts of early twenty-first century sensibilities. And the girls catch the guys. At story's end, though, the Central Pacific is still with us, but the covfefe has been taken out.
Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.
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