1940s Archive

Along the Boulevards

Originally Published December 1947

Life and travel on the cars have for many years preoccupied the imagination of this department, both as a way of going and as editorial copy, and it takes but the least provocation to set us off on trains and railroads, the people who ride and maintain them, and the individual character which each of the several hundred railroads of the land comes to assume in the minds of thoughtful as well as imaginative persons.

The occasion offered itself the other day for us to embark on a trip on the venerable Baltimore and Ohio, an urbane and mannered railroad which, over the decades, has contrived to attract to itself a considerable body of sentiment and personal good will. Indeed, should the B & O ever find itself in need of a catch phrase or slogan for advertising purposes, it could do worse than to refer to itself as “The Gentleman's Railroad.” Travel on its various trains has about it a good deal of the quality of a well-upholstered but by no means gaudily maintained gentleman's club; and good manners and hospitality, often mentioned and infrequently practiced or encountered on its closest rival road, are practically universal on the B & O. This department knows a fairly numerous company of travelers who go to some inconvenience to ride the B & O out of New York as a gesture at once positive and negative. They like the B & O and they heartily dislike the entire character of its closest competitor on the runs to Washington, Cincinnati, Saint Louis, and Chicago.

For one thing, the diners on the B & O are so superior to those of any other railroad in the East as to warrant no comparison. The menus are long and various and notably lacking in the types of entrees with which other stewards' departments like to affront the taste of travelers. There are always plenty of steaks and chops and good cuts of beef on a B & O diner with wonderful hot breads and rich desserts to match. Lunch or dinner there, while rolling through the mellow countryside of Maryland or Pennsylvania, is an event, not an expedient.

Then, too, experienced voyagers know that it is usually easier to get aboard a B & O train. The quality of urgency and hustle is lacking from its schedules, and the brash and hurried commercial trade goes elsewhere, leaving the B & O's facilities to the knowing and perceptive travelers, who are also, happily, less numerous. When they want to ride the cars in comfort, voyagers within its territory take the B & O as a matter of course. After all, what other railroad in the fifth decade of the preposterous twentieth century maintains rocking chairs in its depots?

There is talk now and then, and all of it frightening, of decentralizing the motion picture industry and transplanting it either partially or in its entirety to the east coast of the United States, presumably somewhere near New York. However admirable the notion may be so far as Hollywood is concerned, the idea is a nightmare to New Yorkers, and Manhattan authorities had better take urgent steps in the matter unless they are reconciled to seeing life on a constant and everyday basis conducted as it even now is revised several times a year when film prestige needs the benefit of civilization and when what is known as a “premeer” subjects Gotham to the mannerless capers and absurd posturings of film folk and their rented admirers.

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