• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 807 0

no tea trolley. You had to bring your own sandwiches. My dad would urge us to be quiet and not fidget while he read the paper and we’d look out of the window, getting cinders in our eyes from the smoke of the engine. Every year it was the same: ‘Argh, there’s something in my eye!’ But I couldn’t resist looking out, getting a face full of smoke and steam while watching it flying across the fields of corn like a ghost, disappearing as if it were being sucked in by the crops. It was one of the loveliest things. The smoke had a funny charcoal, sulphurous smell, but to me it was eau de Cologne. I thought it was absolutely fabulous.

At Wemyss Bay, we disembarked on to paddle steamers. The first one I was ever on was the Marchioness of Brid Albion, which I thought was a kind of posh name. There was also a Queen Mary II, the Caledonia, the St Columbus and the Waverley (which is still operating – the last ocean-going paddle steamer in the world). Linked by a quayside bridge to the train, there was always a magical engine-room mixture of diesel and coal smoke and steam and fumes as we boarded the boat. It was fantastic.

So when – in Williams, Arizona – Mike asked me if I liked steam engines, I thought: Do birds sing in the morning?

From 1901, steam trains had carried passengers and supplies from Williams to the south rim of the Grand Canyon, which had become a tourist destination in the 1880s. Although hugely popular, by the 1960s most of the traffic had switched to the roads and the last train, which ran on 30 June 1968, carried only three people. That should have been the end of the Grand Canyon Railroad, but the train refused to die. Enthusiasts clubbed together and started to renovate the sixty-five miles of track, the stations and the depots, and the old locomotives and carriages. In 1989 the powerful pull of the steam engine returned to the track, exactly eighty-eight years to the day since the first train had run. Since then, they’ve carried more than two and a half million people to the Grand Canyon.

Unlike the steam trains of my childhood, the big locomotive I met in Williams was powered by vegetable oil – like a gigantic fish supper – which was towed in a stainless-steel tanker behind it. Donated by all the restaurants and fast-food joints in Williams, the smell of the oil was something else. One moment there might be a whiff of fish, then it was kind of meaty, then veggie. But it was always a million times better than diesel.

Looking just like Casey Jones, the train’s engineer was a big man with a striped hat, overalls and gloves sticking out of his back pocket. His assistant, a thin man with glasses and a bowler hat, welcomed us on to the boiler plate of the engine and we all clambered aboard – the camera man, the sound man, Mike and me. Squashed beside the assistant, I winced as we reversed out of the station. Something seemed to be missing. Then I realised what it was: the shovelling. No whist, whist as the coal was shovelled and no kerchang as the little door to the furnace was clanked shut. Instead, there was just a wee hole with a shining flame behind it. That’s progress, I suppose.

After chuff, chuff, chuffing out of the station, we linked up with a diesel that was hooked on to the other end of the train. Maybe a steam engine powered by vegetable oil couldn’t pull such a big train on its own? I transferred to a very fancy carriage at the rear of the train, the kind of thing I’d expect the Queen to roll around in – all plush blue furniture, cinnamon rolls, cups of tea, and an open bar. Chuffing along, it took nearly two hours to reach the Grand Canyon. All the way, I couldn’t help thinking about Jesse James riding through that rolling countryside. The James Gang were the first criminals ever to rob a train, so I pictured them in their dust coats with their guns out, ready to jump aboard. This was perfect terrain for an ambush – prime baddie country.

I’d never visited the Grand Canyon before, so I used the journey to try to get my head round some of the statistics. Two hundred and seventy-seven miles long (I