NEW:  Essays from AMW's files.
TRAIN WATCHING AT WEST FALMOUTH

When I was child in the 1920’s and 1930’s I went every summer to my grandmother’s house in West Falmouth on Cape Cod. We left New York by the Fall River Line and completed the journey by car or by train depending on whether we had a car that year or not. One of my great pleasures in those summers was watching the trains on the single track branch line of the New Haven that stopped at West Falmouth on its way to Woods Hole from Boston. It was an ideal small time railroad operation with stations three to four miles apart and just enough trains to make it interesting.

The place was wonderful for a child’s vacation: the beach, the house in the woods, the pretty village, the exciting larger villages of Falmouth and Woods Hole not far off. But the focus of my pleasure was the trains.

There were four passenger trains in each direction each day. My sisters and I on the sleeping porch in the woods would hear the first train of the morning down by the shore, coming up from Falmouth and going fast before slowing down for the West Falmouth station. The northbound trains had a different sound from the southbound ones. They had had time to develop speed since leaving Falmouth and their rods made a loud clanging sound; the southbound trains were always puffing as they accelerated after leaving West Falmouth.

Every morning we went to the beach, stopping at the post office on the way. I tried to get my parents to time our trips so that we could go by the station and see the morning train from Boston. There were a steam engine and two baggage cars and two or three passenger cars. The engine blocked the road while the train stopped, and mail bags were unloaded onto an open wagon which was hand pulled from the post office by an extremely ancient man. In certain summers this train and a northbound train would meet at West Falmouth. The southbound train would stop before reaching the station; it would then be switched onto the siding, where it unloaded its passengers and mail. (Passengers had to step over the rails to get to and from the train.) Then it would move down the track to beyond the station where it would wait for the other train to come in.

At other times of day we would go to the beach by a grade crossing about a quarter of a mile from the station. This was guarded by a man who stayed in a shed and came out to hold up a white stop sign when the train approached. If the train was far enough away he would wave us through, but I could usually persuade my folks to wait anyway.

The track merged inconspicuously into the countryside. It passed by the back yards and gardens of the village houses and crossed the marshes and lagoons behind the beaches on Buzzards Bay. It crossed fields and entered woods where the trees hung close over the trains. Coming down from the Cape Cod Canal passengers had frequent vistas of the bay shining on the right until the final stretch after Falmouth, where Vineyard Sound suddenly appeared on the left and the train ran along the water’s edge before entering the woods for the final approach to Woods Hole.

Sitting in the sun on the West Falmouth beach I would listen for the train on the shore. I would go up to the dunes and soon I would see a plume of steam moving through the trees beyond the marshes. I would peer across West Falmouth harbor trying to get a glimpse as the train passed behind the houses and the vegetation. The engine would appear for a brief moment and I would try to read the gold number which was always too far away, and I watched the dark green coaches as they passed through the gaps in the view. Everything in the scene was calm and still. The beach was silent except for the slurping of water on the sand. The village across the harbor was still. The two water towers on the low ridge back of the village where my grandmother's house was were silent, as was the sky, and the moving train itself was silent except for its occasional whistle and (if I listened carefully) some distanced aural residue of engine and wheels.

Peak experiences were the times I rode on the train myself. My father put me aboard at Woods Hole; I rode in a green plush seat in the big oiled coach, past Falmouth to West Falmouth, eight miles up the line, where he picked me up. Or we went together in the other direction. Or up toward Buzzards Bay or down from there. Once when I was deemed old enough I went all the way to Boston by myself; there I changed to the Comet, except that on this particular day the Comet was replaced by a two-car train behind I-1 #1018, which took me to Providence, where my family met me in the car on our way back to New York. I timed the trip on the substitute Comet and discovered to my delight that 1018 kept the Comet’s schedule precisely, which pleased me since I was especially fond of the I-1 engines.

I remember waiting for the train at the West Falmouth station. A few cars and station wagons gathered in the little parking space. There was an evocative coal smell inside the station, which was divided into two small rooms, the public waiting room and the ticket and baggage office. I waited out on the dirt platform. The track from the north was straight for a considerable distance rising gently as it approached the station. To the south the track curved out of sight behind houses and trees. Across from the platform a flat car with a load of coal was usually parked on a spur. The wait was quiet, people idling, chatting by their cars, patiently waiting. Schedules were approximate not exact on that line in those days. Eventually we heard a distant train whistle, and the group of people would stir and buzz a little. Then we would see a curl of steam over the tree tops to the north before the engine appeared. It came into the rising straightaway approaching the station and now seemed to stand motionless on the track, a black engine with a centered white headlight, except that as you watched you saw the whole thing growing in size, the growth indicating how quickly it was approaching, until we could see the cylinder heads and the smoke stack and the number plate under the headlight and finally the number itself before the engine came rushing by with a tremendous noise, bell ringing and steam shooting up and rods driving, so fast you wondered how it could stop, while the baggage cars went by and then the passenger cars. They finally did stop, and the conductor stepped out and put down his stool for the passengers coming down from that exotic interior.

In 1935 when I was 12 I began to record the numbers of the engines I saw. I don't know where I got the idea. I kept it up through 1940, after which, going to college, I quit since my friends thought it was a childish occupation and teased me about it. Why did I do it? The attraction is difficult to explain, or maybe it can’t really be explained. It was a way to individualize the locomotives and this perhaps served three purposes. It enabled me to learn something about the operations of the railroad, much as banding birds might enable you to learn the habits of birds. The other purposes were more personal and private, ways of creating private dramas to give me a sense of participation and suspense in my observation of the trains. Numbering the engines enabled me to pick a favorite engine and watch for it. It also enabled me to spot engines I had never seen before, to create an excitement like the birder’s discovery of a species he had never seen. Such adventures focused the excitement I felt in watching the trains, just as the trains themselves focused the pleasure of vacationing on the Cape. The whole scene was rich with a conscious enjoyment of being alive; this enjoyment was enhanced by the action and drama of the trains, which was enhanced in turn by individualizing the engines. Each activity helped create an adventure in which I could live.

I learned such facts as the following about the operation of the Woods Hole line. Each train had a particular engine assigned to it; the engine would return on that train day after day. But every so often a substitute engine would appear, usually for one day. That substitute might well appear on another day as a substitute on a different train. Thus in 1935, the morning train from Boston was usually hauled by I-1 #1014; the early afternoon train (the big one that returned to Boston about 6 o’clock with passengers from the Islands and a parlor car) was I-1 #1027. The “Islander,” the late afternoon train down from Boston, with a return to Boston early the following morning, was I-1 #1016. The fourth train was a section of a few coaches cut off at Buzzards Bay from a train to Hyannis; the engine for this train, which went back and forth between Buzzards Bay and Woods Hole, was either G-4a 818 or 834. Substitute engines I noticed in 1935 were 1004 and 1000. In 1936 the cast had changed: the morning train was 1022; the afternoon train was now an I-2, 1348; the Islander was 1009 (which I had seen the previous year on the Fall River Line Special to Boston); the Buzzards Bay engine was 842. In 1937 the morning train was 1030, the afternoon train 1317, the Islander 1007, the local 814, 817, or 1011. In 1938 the morning train was I-2 1312 for part of the summer, replaced by 1028 late; the afternoon train was 1304; the Islander 1017, replaced later by 1015; the latter two engines also served as the Buzzards Bay engines at different times. Freight on the Woods Hole line was handled by such engines as F-5 151 and 161 and K-1 403 and 429, although freight trains were scarcer than passenger trains.

There were big doings on weekends, when the Woods Hole yards were crammed with engines and coaches filling up all the tracks. Even bigger were the holidays, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. One holiday train in 1938 came into Falmouth with a double header, two engines whose numbers unfortunately I didn’t record. And in 1939 my record shows an I-4 (1352) in Falmouth, the only one I ever saw on that line.

My favorite was I-1 1001, perhaps because this was the first engine number I ever noticed, some years before I started collecting. I saw it (so I supposed) backing onto a train that I was to ride from Woods Hole to West Falmouth in 1932 or earlier. Once it became my favorite I never saw it again, nor ever saw a picture or reference. Its elusiveness during all those years gave it a symbolic aura, leading me to wonder if I had been mistaken in my original sighting, with the possibility that it really didn't exist, that the engine was a myth. This mystery was eventually dispelled by a picture which J.W. Swanberg kindly gave me a few years ago.

That’s all gone now. After 1940 the Cape Cod trains vanished from my life. When I returned to West Falmouth in 1947 the steam trains had been replaced by dieselized self-propelled coaches. After that I did not return for many years. Now the railroad yard at Woods Hole is a parking lot for the Island ferries. The track from Woods Hole to Falmouth has been replaced by a bicycle path, which I guess is as nice a way as any to dispose of old trackage. The rest of the line has bushes and trees growing up between the ties. A few years ago someone scrawled LIONEL TRAINS on one of the railroad bridges.

I noticed when I joined the NHRHTA that people interested in railroads are often interested in engine numbers too, so my interest may not have been so peculiar after all. The captions of most pictures of steam engines in the Shoreliner and most railroad books give the numbers, as do articles in the Shoreliner. I have heard other people speak of favorite engines. I have learned that “trainspotting” is a fairly popular hobby in Britain, supported by guidebooks in the same way that guide books help bird watchers. (Warning: the movie Trainspotting, whose title supposedly refers to this hobby, is actually about druggies in Scotland and makes no reference at any point to the hobby or to trains; the hobby does however appear in a short story by Margot Livesay that appeared recently in the journal Tri-Quarterly.) Apparently also the composer Anton Dvorak collected engine numbers on a trip to the United States at the end of the last century. So maybe it isn’t entirely crazy. It’s a way to participate in something where one is restricted by human limitations. Bird watchers can’t fly so they keep life records of birds seen. Train watching serves a similar function.