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HAROLD H. CARSTENS (1925-2009)


PRESIDENT AND PUBLISHER HENRY R. CARSTENS


VICE PRESIDENT JOHN A. EARLEY EDITOR


E. STEVEN BARRY


ASSOCIATE EDITORS WALTER C. LANKENAU OTTO M. VONDRAK


CONTRIBUTING EDITOR JAMES D. PORTERFIELD


COLUMNISTS AN EXCURSION TRAIN PASSES “NOWHERE, KANSAS” ON THE MIDLAND RAILWAY, AUGUST 31, 2013. PHOTO BY EVAN ACKER What’s in a name?


SOMETIMES, THOSE OF US WHO ARE railway enthusiasts get lost in esoterica, in maze- like subareas of what is already a kind of subculture. If you doubt this, try talking to a member of the general public about the dif- ference between the electrical cabinets of an SD40 and an SD40-2, the various shades of Conrail blue, or the difference between track warrant control, direct train control, and timetable-and-train-order. The blank stares and slow nods you will receive are a mark of how deeply arcane our interests can be. Yet in North America, the railway was once a major force of social, economic, and geographic change. Every day, we live in a world that was radically shaped by rail transportation. One of the more powerful ways this occurred can be seen today on every map and atlas: place names. There is a great power in bestowing


names upon the landscape. In centuries past, this power was restricted to kings and nobles, and held an almost magical power to call into being the character of a place. By the 19th century, however, the rapid expan- sion of transportation brought by the Indus- trial Revolution made the pace of place nam- ing explode.


The railways were the vanguard of this explosion of naming geography, far ahead of efforts by the U.S. Postal Service or even the creation of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names in 1890. Railways, with the need to manage thousands of miles of new lines, needed to create new station names merely to carry out their basic function. The ways that railways chose names var-


ied and was sometimes capricious. It was not unusual for railway barons to use sta- tion names to honor allies and lieutenants. As one example, in 1872 Ben Holladay named an Oregon & California station point Creswell, after former senator and sitting U.S. Postmaster General John A. Creswell, a case of political flattery to support Holla- day’s efforts at securing a major payout from the federal government. (Holladay’s effort was for naught.)


4 DECEMBER 2013 • RAILFAN.COM


Other companies took different tactics, choosing names for romantic beauty, in the hopes of luring people to buy railway-owned town lots in speculative settlements. Many of these names were chosen from native words, but along poetic lines, so that Chero- kee names might end up west of the Rockies, or Athabaskan names along the Gulf Coast. Sometimes the railway itself became the namesake of a new place. A town in New York that sprang up along the tracks was named Delanson in 1890 after the Delaware & Hudson railway that gave it life. Railway station names formed one of the foundations of official naming conventions. When the United States created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890, and Canada created its Geographic Board of Canada sev- en years later, railway timetables were one of the most powerful sources of place names. Station names were, as a fellow historian said to me recently, “the first exotic points” on a map. Relating station points on the Southern Pacific’s crossing of the Cascade Range like Wicopee, Frazier, Cruzatte or Abernethy, he added that the names “were mythic, almost sacred places, their power in- creasing with distance and elevation.” Who can imagine the map without names like Owenyo, Belen, and Portage, or Clifton Forge, Reading, and Altoona? And for every one of these famous station points, there are hundreds if not thousands of mundane names belonging to communities large and small located along existing or now gone rail lines. The majority of rural America was set- tled along, and named by, the pen of an em- ployee of a railway’s operations or real es- tate


department. For many of us, the


hometowns of our childhood were named by the railways.


Alexander B. Craghead is a writer, photog- rapher,


watercolorist, and self-described “transportation geek” from Portland, Ore. You can reach out to Alex on our web site at www.railfan.com/departures.


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RAILFAN & RAILROAD (ISSN 0163-7266) is published monthly by Carstens Publications, Inc., 108 Phil Hardin Road, Newton, New Jersey 07860. Phone 973/383-3355. Henry R. Carstens, Publisher; Phyllis M. Carstens, Secretary-Treasurer. Periodical Postage paid at Newton, NJ 07860 and additional mailing offices.


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