The Vagabond

The Vagabond might just as well admit it right now--he is train-whacky. Other people can have their airplanes, their boats, their dogs, their cameras, their movie queens, their horses. But give Vag a train every time. There is something about trains which gets this sentimental old fellow. It isn't the mechanical end that lures him, for he is an awful dud at such things. It must be some bit of the romance and glamor of the "high iron" in his blood. His mother tends to blame it on his Uncle Rome who is a conductor and a mighty fine man. Uncle Rome might have been a big shot in some line, but he liked trains and never got around to anything else.

Anyhow, long, long ago, in the sleepy hamlet where he was born, Vag learned to love trains. The whole atmosphere of the town was railroadish. It was a division point on a large system, and the train-smell and train-noise filled the air constantly. Petit Vag used to watch the heavy freights groan out of the yards, shout defiance to nature and the elements, and attack the mountain grades--and many times his heart rode the cowcatcher of a mighty 16-driver Mallet engine, or nestled in the cupola of a caboose. Every night at 8.30 he lay in his bed and slept not until he heard the roaring exhaust of the Limited as it snatched its Pullmans westward. By the time he was in the second grade, his father was unwillingly escorting him each Saturday afternoon to the roundhouse and shops of the railroad where Petit Vag examined everything with the careful eye of a visiting official. The railroaders were alternately amazed, amused, and flattered by his youthful attentions. Then, after an expensive ara of toy electric trains, which were never really realistic enough, Petit Vag was shipped off to prep school, bribed into going chiefly by the fact that it entailed a long train ride.

But he never forgot with passing years. To him, New York centered not around the Stork Club and Minsky's, but around Penn Station and Grand Central. And now at Harvard, Vag can occasionally hear the engines shifting in the yards across the Charles. The sound comforts him in his lonely penthouse.

Only recently, Vag has discovered a new out let for his train-love. To him the Massachusetts Model Railroad Society's hangout on Atlantic Avenue is a wonderful place--even better than South Station, his erstwhile favorite. A second-rate poet whose name Vag cannot recall likened the world to a room in the house of the universe. There in three rooms on Atlantic Avenue, the Society has got the world--or at least enough of it to accommodate a fine, microscopically complete railroad. There the Vag has found the mountain grades, the yards, the freight trains, and the Limiteds of his childhood again--and he sees not just one isolated mile of the "run but the whole thing, hundreds of miniature miles of it. There, too, are the men he loves, the hoggers, the scoop-swingers, the men of the punch, the wipers, the brakies--a score of Uncle Romes enthusiastically puttering around their little system, running it with loving appreciation of its operating difficulties. It is more than play to them. The M. M. R. R. is operated too similarly to the real railroads to be a toy. Its very complexity and completeness makes it exciting and real to those men. There service and ability have their reward: the hardest worker is the head man, and a Boston and Albany switch engine hostler may "run" the M. M. R. R.'s crack express if he shows "the stuff."

Yes, Vag is very happy now. He would like to live there among the model trains. Of course, someday, when he graduates, Vag would like to be an engineer. Not the clever kind they turn out by the thousands at Tech, but one of the real heman kind of engineers on locomotives of trains throughout the world, who know daily the indescribable thrill of easing the throttle open, gradually nursing the Johnson bar into the center notch, and letting the mighty monster rock over the high iron. Until that lucky day, Vag is going to try to get work as an extra yardman for the M. M. R. R.