OK, I’ll join in on two conditions:
We confine ourself to trains — not other forms of transport.
We document our quotations — not rely on invention or hearsay.
And I’ll state what I see as the problem with trains. As a form of transport one’s attachment for them is different from that of a ship (historically) in which you trusted your life or made your living. Likewise, a car (@Greybeard) which you might own, use frequently, keep in good order and regard as a sort of extension of yourself. A train is a functional mode of transport which, even for long-distance travel, most people have brief contact with and regard in a utilitarian manner. There is hardly anything romantic about the London Underground or the New York Subway, such that one would consider personifying the grubby assembly of carriages.
So there is not a lot of adult poetry or literature about trains.
As a Brit addressing a predominantly North American list membership (some of whom may never have been on a ‘real’ train) all I could think of was that beautiful Rootabaga Story — The two skyscrapers who decided to have a child, by Carl Sandberg. A story for children… and adults. The child of this union was a train, the Golden Spike Limited, so it is interesting to see how Sandberg personified this.
In discussing the future child he personifies it as female:
“It must be a free child,” they said to each other. “It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she must be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child.”
But thereafter, as a train, he only uses the neuter, it:
So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the
Golden Spike Limited…
…so when people spoke of the Golden Spike Limited, they spoke of it as
a strong, lovely child.
So if the Golden Spike Limited was female it was perhaps because she was a child, not because she was a train.
One swallow…
I shall try to find some more examples as I have been criticized for generalizing (I didn’t) from one.
T.S.Eliot, an expatriate American with whom some of you may be familiar, wrote about a British railway train in his poem “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat”. In fact this train also went under the name of the “Night Mail” but the focus was on the cat and the passengers travelling the 400 miles from London to Glasgow’s Gallowgate (alas, no longer a railway station). If you read the poem you will see that not once is the train personified. It appears as variously “the Night Mail”, “the Northern Mail”, “the Sleeping Car Express” and “the Railway Train”.
Perhaps the problem was that it was probably ”The Flying Scotsman”.
And then there was Noël Coward. His play, Blythe Spirit (no it isn’t on Netflix), illustrates the romantic attitude of users to the train in its hay-day:
Myra: Well, Judith, I do think you might have told
me someone was motoring down. A nice car would have
been so much more comfortable than that beastly train.
I suppose there is some personification, or at least anthropomorphism, there. But it would be beastly to say he meant it as a ‘she’.
But…
If one considers traditional American folksongs (hundreds of which are listed on this Wikipedia page, although finding the lyrics is another matter entirely) there are a few counter-examples.
There’s my childhood favourite, The Runaway Train:
The runaway train came down the track and she blew,
and the Wabash Cannonball:
Now listen to the jingle, and the rumble, and the roar,
As she dashes thro’ the woodland, and speeds along the shore,
But, for the most part, the relationship to the railroad of the protagonists of these traditional songs was unromantic. They either worked as convicts in its shadow (Midnight Special), killed themselves competing against automation in building it (John Henry), or came to an untimely end riding it (Casey Jones).
