THE MYTHMAKERS

Perhaps one of the finest pieces of railroad folklore in song form, and I would argue Willie Nelson does it better than the Arlo Guthrie original.

In the mid-20th century the railroad lost it’s cutting edge status. While there would still be plenty of business reports and technical journals to come, the imagination of people drifted looking for the cutting edge drifted from the rails to the jet, space and atomic ages. Railroading began to attract a sort of traditionalist, a nostalgic eye which wanted to relive a glorious (if exaggerated) past. Several authors embraced this, prominent among them Disney animator Ward Kimball and socialites and photographers Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg.

It is hard not to look at a Beebe and Clegg book, with it’s thick hardcover (which always seems to last very well through-out the ages) as a sort of authority on railroad matters. The books themselves are genuinely beautiful pieces, and were sold to last for a long time; and Beebe and Clegg’s photos were evocative of the dying railroads they wrote about. The problem is the same effort put into photography and presentation was lacking in historical research, and the pair embraced the folklorist approach. It was an approach to railroad myth making that would have been more at home on a shelf alongside Tolkien, Lewis and Renault than it would have been alongside serious historical research; a sort of historical-fiction labeled as historical fact.

Take for example Beebe and Clegg’s writing on Virginia City “Madame” Julia Bulette. As the railroad authors depicted her, Bulette was a wild-west heroine; a whore with a heart of gold, living in a fine palace surrounded with fine things, as greatly skilled as a silver miner with equal prowess with dynamite and with her customer’s in bed; and all of that leading to her tragic death murdered at the age of 35. Somewhere in that story is truth, indeed the real Bulette was a recognized prostitute who died young, but beyond that much of it is a fabrication of a gilded life that seemed to fit the silk and lace fabrications of the Beebe-Cleggian vision of the Wild West. Truth exaggerated, but it sold magazines and books. Railroads, people, business all part of shaping an American Mythology.

Limitations in access to library archives, geographic constraints, and a sort of “follow the leader” tone kept many railroad authors following the established precedence laid out by the successful railroad authors. Folklore and myth got mistaken for canon, and tall tales became gospel. There would be some railroad authors who tried to buck the trend, compare for example the John Signor books on the LA&SL with their thick hardcover pages and meandering texts, to the leaner and punchier Mark Hemphill book on the same railroad which borrows extensively from Hemphill’s real railroading experience to present a text that manages to lift-the-curtain on real railroading practice in a way few books can (wryly and derisively, Hemphill’s book suggests to look at Signor’s books for their “beautiful pictures”). But for every Hemphill who manages to elevate railroad history above myth and back into the realm of fact, there are a dozen more tomes with their hardcover backs that present a false sense of authority.

The 21st century has accelerated this. The Images of Rail books are a blessing and a curse, opening up hundreds of rarely published photos from small town museums to the wider public. There have been golden additions to the series such as those books by Don Strack and Andrew Brandon which carry with them a solid historical approach alongside the illustrative photos. There have been many Images of Rail books though published by novice authors unfamiliar with the subject at hand, and even with the best intentions the authorial errors creep into the text. The result is wildly uneven quality, and one book in the series may be a historical cornerstone while the next might be a new time author’s first fumbling foray into railroad history.

Spilling over into the digital space, we see this continued dichotomy of fact vs. fiction waging in Wikipedia edits and the comment sections of poorly A.I. colorized photos. An interesting case study can be pointed at between two narrow gauge rail simulator games, Railroads Online and the in-development Century of Steam, which feels like a pointed rebuttal to the approach taken by the prior game.