Freight and Passengers

A freight train stops the traffic in Jakin, GA.  "The traffic" = me.

When I was first planning this trip and decided that I wanted to travel around by train, I thought that there was a connection, if somewhat tenuous, between my subject matter and my method of transportation.  Trains, after all, used to be the primary form of long-distance transportation.  It seemed reasonable that, as I tried to think about family history and the importance of place, trains would feature prominantly as a way to get to those places that became home.

To a certain degree that's true, and more recently than I had expected - my great-grandfather rode the rails during the Great Depression, and during WWII my grandfather and great-aunt rode trains back to Montana, for instance.

But that's mostly irrelevant.  I had it all wrong.  Trains weren't important because they were methods of transportation.  People got around however they could - mule, horse and wagon, car, truck, bus, hitch-hiking, trains, boats, walking... Trains made certain parts of the country easier to get to, but so did roads and canals.  New forms of transportation didn't really revolutionize the art of getting around.   There was always first class and coach, always some ways that were quicker and some that were slower, some that were cheaper and some that were more expensive, some people who could afford to travel and lots who couldn't.

Trains are important to my family history because trains brought money.  I was thinking about passenger trains; I should have thought freight.

When the railroad came to southwest Georgia, my great-great-grandfather, Bill Regan (the stingy one) convinced the company to build an extension of the tracks that reached onto his property.  He could shear his sheep and load the wool directly onto freight cars.  Having his own railroad tracks brought him lots of money and proved that he was a big-time businessman.  Meanwhile the presence of the main railroad allowed the creation of the sawmills, which turned acres of virgin timber into cash and provided jobs to the local young men.  What had been subsistence farming communities were suddenly swimming in cash.

I don't have any evidence that my great-great-grandmother Ida Huffman (a Montana farmer) ever rode a train.  But she would drive a team of mules, carrying a wagon full of wheat, to the Dooley grain elevators and turn that wheat into money.  As time went on the farm bought tractors and trucks, and four wheels and gasoline became their primary form of transportation.  Trains stopped passing through Dooley and the grain elevators moved to other tracks.  But the grain still went onto trains - and today, the massive farms of that region still make money by transmuting streams of golden wheat into dollar bills by way of a freight car.

I'm headed for California now, the end of the push for western expansion, and the end of the line for that first transcontinental railroad.  And I bet there, too, what mattered about trains wasn't that people had the freedom to carry themselves to California in a matter of days - it was that freight could make it back to the East Coast quick enough for the fruit to stay fresh and cheaply enough for everybody to turn a profit.  It wasn't that it made it easier to get to California, it's that it gave people a reason to go.  Profit whispers more loudly than the call of adventure.

Money, money, money.  Follow the money. Follow the train tracks.