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THE LOST TRAINS

That’s my Middle West,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald, “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth.” Tn the 1990s, an elderly novelist looking back nostalgically to his boyhood will be recalling airports—Orly, Kennedy, O’Hare —with their scattered bustle, their flashing signals and their announcements of imminent departure to the uttermost boundaries of a now-narrowed world. The passenger train is rapidly becoming obsolete. The railroad companies are mainly concerned with freight. The commuter trains are crowded, but every year the schedules of the transcontinental expresses become shorter. Last fall the Twentieth Century was taken off. Is the Chief still running? And it is not only the big trains that are going. The small branch services are being discontinued. All over the United States and Europe you will come across abandoned stations.

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Alec Waugh

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THE LOST TRAINS

That’s my Middle West,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald, “not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth.” Tn the 1990s, an elderly novelist looking back nostalgically to his boyhood will be recalling airports—Orly, Kennedy, O’Hare —with their scattered bustle, their flashing signals and their announcements of imminent departure to the uttermost boundaries of a now-narrowed world. The passenger train is rapidly becoming obsolete. The railroad companies are mainly concerned with freight. The commuter trains are crowded, but every year the schedules of the transcontinental expresses become shorter. Last fall the Twentieth Century was taken off. Is the Chief still running? And it is not only the big trains that are going. The small branch services are being discontinued. All over the United States and Europe you will come across abandoned stations.