BY brian doyle
In 1946, as the Second World War ended, railroad
was king. There were 137 railroad companies in the United States, webbing
the nation with more than a quarter of a million miles of track and
employing more than a million workers—trainmasters, crewmen, signalmen,
station agents, roundhouse men, yard clerks, trackmen, freight agents,
coalers. The railroad system had performed magnificently during the
war, moving incredible numbers of men and material in service to President
Franklin Roosevelt's "arsenal of democracy." (Indeed,
the railroad system often moved FDR himself, in his private railroad
car, the Ferdinand Magellan.) While wartime restrictions on gasoline
use and nonessential travel had slowed the prewar surge of automobiles
and airplanes as new modes of travel and shipping, every rail line carried
freight, nearly every line carried passengers and mail, and most towns
of any size had a station, a freight agent, or both.
The year 1946 was, in short, a pinnacle of American
railroading—and the first year of its modern decline, as Dick
Carpenter '55 notes in his new book, A Railroad Atlas of the United
States in 1946, Volume 1: The Mid-Atlantic States, which sets out,
with admirable directness and startling scope, to map every aspect of
railroading in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia,
West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
Carpenter's labor of love might seem a remarkable
but obscure feat of amateur cartography and scholarship—a "foamer's
delight," as Oregon railroad scholar Lauren Kessler says, using
the term railroad professionals apply to railroad fanatics—but
it has earned both sales and salutes. It rose as high as 8,739 in Amazon's
sales rankings (out of more than a million books listed) and drew praise
from the New Yorker ("surely one of the most appealingly
eccentric publishing ventures of the year"), the Baltimore Sun
("nothing short of a miracle . . . the kind of work that only a
gang of monks would consider undertaking"), the business magazine
Fast Company ("his maps have style . . . a point of view,
a voice . . . elegant, wistful . . . compulsively detailed and artistically
rendered"), and scholars like the geographer John Hudson at Northwestern
University ("the finest railroad atlas ever published . . . he
has invented his own style of cartography") and the historian Maury
Klein at the University of Rhode Island ("an amazing piece of work
. . . it answers questions you didn't even think to ask").
Click map to view a larger image
A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946
is an honest but essentially misleading title for the vast American
visual poem Carpenter and his publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press,
are composing—a mapmakers' nirvana, time machine, poignant literature,
paean to the Marvy Brush Marker pen set. From the shore of Lake Erie
in Pennsylvania to the banks of the Elizabeth River in Virginia, Carpenter
records, by hand, in 10 Marvy colors, every scrap of mid-Atlantic railroadia
in 1946: lines (in service and abandoned), stations, bridges, tunnels,
towers, coaling points, water troughs, mileposts, ownerships, crew change
points, canals (in service and abandoned), rivers (including direction
of flow), and the boundaries of states and counties.
"Took me about three years,"
says Carpenter, now retired after a 40-year career as a city and regional
planner in Connecticut. "I've always been fascinated by
railroads, and much of my work as a planner involved saving and expanding
commuter train service in southwestern Connecticut; I was also very
interested in freight trains from a planning standpoint, to see if we
could reduce some of the incredible truck traffic on Interstate 95.
About 20 years ago I began to think 'wouldn't it be nice
to have a really thorough American railroad atlas, as the British have,'
and about 10 years ago I started to draft maps, and I found that I was
enjoying every minute.
"First I would draw a preliminary map in
my study [Carpenter works in a small room off his bedroom, with many
windows and a view of Long Island Sound], and then I would check every
source I could find for more details—employee timetable books
in 1946, The Official Guide of the Railways, all railroad maps,
Moody's Steam Railroads 1946, topographic maps, anything—and
add those details. Then I'd draw a final map on archive-quality 109-pound
paper. My maps are 30-minute quadrangles between each full degree of
longitude and latitude, and they're easily cross-referenced with U.S.
Geological Survey maps and Hammond and Rand McNally state maps. I wanted
to convey what you would have actually seen in 1946—signal
towers, coaling stations, everything.
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"The railroad was and is such an integral
part of our story, of our culture and character, that I resolved to
tell it clearly. I suppose some of my friends wondered what in heaven's
name I was doing up there in my little studio, but my wife and children
encouraged me all along, and they are thrilled to see this first book
published."
While the book is mostly maps, Carpenter
also includes voluminous notes and indexes: of the railroads themselves
(such New World poetry, such a flurry of ampersands: the Bare Rock,
the Conemaugh & Black Lick, the Eagles Mere, the Mount Hope Mineral,
the Patapsco & Back Rivers, the Kane & Elk, the Scootac), of
coaling stations, of extant and former signal towers (O lost Callicoon!
O Paxtang!), of stations and tunnels and viaducts and water troughs.
And his opening essay is both eloquent and poignant, noting the smell
of creosote preservative in wooden railroad ties, the ways that bells
and gongs and buzzers announced the specific directions and origins
of trains, the "venerable wooden baggage carts in passenger stations,"
the "sublime stretches of summer-evening silence on the prairie
. . . marked by the unmistakable throaty moan of the steam-engine's
whistle."
"I drew my first railroad map when I was
a kid in Hartford," says Carpenter. "It was the track layout
of the Greater Hartford Society of Model Engineers, and they liked it
so much they let me be a member. I never really stopped drawing after
that. I was a sports cartoonist for BC's student newspaper, the Heights,
and I drew track layouts when I was in the Army, and maps during my
career as a planner. I still draw scenes and tracks when I ride the
train. I happen to like riding and watching and mapping trains and tracks,
and now I spend two to six hours a day drawing maps, so I figure I am
a lucky man. Lucky too to be doing such a project in the computer age,
because I can sit here in my study, staring out at Norwalk Harbor and
Long Island Sound, and call up U.S. Geological Survey maps on the Internet."
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Carpenter has just finished Volume 2 of
the atlas (covering New England and New York), is headlong into Volume
3 (Ohio, Indiana, and lower Michigan), and plotting Volume 4 (Illinois,
Wisconsin, upper Michigan, and maybe Iowa). After that? "Well,
I should turn south, into the Carolinas, but there's something
alluring about the West, although I'd certainly have to change
the scale of the maps to reflect the vast acreage out there. And sometimes
I think it would be fun to map one railroad line in its entirety, all
the way across the West—the Union Pacific or the Santa Fe, for
example." His publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, has agreed
to publish at least three volumes.
And what would Dick Carpenter's favorite
railroad moment be? "My favorite railroad memory of all,"
says Carpenter, "is from a childhood trip with my dad—standing
and watching a New Haven Shoreliner Hudson 1400 locomotive pull a passenger
train through Kingston, Rhode Island, at dusk. There was a long straightaway
there before the town and you could see the whole train coming, blowing
its whistle at grade crossings. The Shoreliner had a beautiful steamboat-deep
whistle, a sound that filled the world."
Brian Doyle, editor of Portland Magazine at the University
of Portland, in Oregon, is the author most recently of Leaping (2003),
a collection of essays.
Photo: Dick Carpenter in his study. By Gary
Wayne Gilbert
All maps copyright © 2003 the Johns
Hopkins University Press. Reproduced with permission.
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