Conductor Mason walked to the door of the dining car, bent to the small brass plate beside the frame, and read it aloud in the sudden stillness, over the clatter of the wheels. “This car is named the Arthur Pennington, in honor of Engineer Arthur Pennington, who on the night of June ninth, nineteen seventy one, stopped the westbound Zephyr one hundred feet short of a washed out trestle near Galva, Illinois, and saved the lives of two hundred and twelve passengers.” He did not turn around for a long time. I am Arthur Pennington, seventy nine years old, and I sat at the booth with my apple pie and my fork in my hand.
I was twenty four that night. I drove the locomotive on a stretch of Illinois track in a storm so heavy that I could not see the signals. At some point, I do not know why, I felt the road go soft beneath the engine, and I threw the brake on an instinct I could never explain, and held it. The train stopped. The headlight showed the rail hanging in the dark like a dropped ribbon, and under it a brown flood. In the morning the railroad gave me a silver pocket watch. In 1979, they named a dining car for me. I sold shoes for twenty six years after, because I could not bear to drive again.
The old steward, Lou, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway holding a coffee pot, set it down on the counter with a shaking hand. “Arthur,” he said. “Arthur Pennington. I rode that train. I was a waiter in the third car. I was twenty two.” He came across the car with tears running down his lined face. The couple in the next booth had stopped eating, and the man in the cowboy hat took it off and held it over his heart. Outside the window, the plains of Iowa slid by in the gold light of late afternoon.
A brass plate by a dining car door gave one retired engineer the length of a coffee to bring a young conductor back to the rails in Illinois.
I gave my terms to the conductor when he came back from the door with the stiff walk of a man trying to stay upright. “Young man, I am not going to take offense. You were doing a job, and you have been told that coach passengers eat in the café car. What I would like is for you to sit down at this table, here, and have a cup of coffee with an old engineer. And I would like you to tell your passengers tomorrow morning, over the speaker, the name of this car. They have a right to know who it is for.”
Mason sat down heavily across from me, and his eyes filled. “Mr. Pennington, I have worked this train for six years,” he said. “I walk through this car forty times a trip. I never read the plate. My grandfather was a brakeman on the Burlington.” He pressed his knuckles to his mouth. “I called your watch a stolen thing from a museum. It is the watch from the museum in Galesburg, is it not? It was a loan.” I nodded. “I gave it to them in 1984,” I said. “They lend it back to me when I travel.”
But Mason, for all his remorse, could not stand to be seen weeping by a car full of strangers. He reached out suddenly, snatched the silver watch from the chain across my vest, and rose and strode out of the dining car into the vestibule, perhaps to compare the serial number to the registry, perhaps to throw himself on the mercy of the engineer. He had gone through two doors, the connecting walkway thundering under his feet, when the way ahead was filled by the steward Lou, who had run through the next car on his old legs.
Lou stood in the narrow corridor with his arms spread to either side. Behind Mason, the couple from the booth and the man in the cowboy hat had followed, and they stood in a line in the swaying passage. The train rocked on a curve. Mason looked down at the watch in his palm, the polished case, the engraved number, and it was as if all the weight of the wheel and the rail went through him. He turned, walked back through the cars, and laid it in my open hand with a bowed head.
The consequences were gentle. That evening, over the speaker, Mason told the whole train the story of the Arthur Pennington, in a steady voice. The passengers lined up in the aisle to shake my hand. The railroad moved me to a sleeper compartment for the remainder of the trip, with my pie and my coffee, and a note from the superintendent. Mason asked to ride the rest of the way in the dining car, standing behind my chair like a boy, listening to my stories of the road.
In the name of my wife Grace, who passed in 2016, I started the Grace Pennington Fund. It pays for the care of railroad museums and for scholarships for young people entering the railroad trades, in Knox, Warren and Henry counties. In the first year we restored a signal tower and a caboose, and sent twenty four students to the rail technical college. One was a young woman from Galesburg whose great grandfather had been a brakeman, and who is now training to be an engineer.
Denver came up in the morning, with the Rockies pink at the window. Mason met me at the door of the dining car with my small suitcase, and walked me to the platform. My daughter was waiting, waving a hat. As the train eased out again, I looked back and saw the young conductor standing in the open door of the dining car, one hand on the brass plate, and he touched two fingers to his cap. I raised my silver watch in answer, and the train went west.
