Stories of One Man’s Life on Country’s Railroads Released by WSU Press’s Basalt Books

A longtime railroad enthusiast and professional tells of his experiences along the country’s rail lines in a new book from WSU Press’s trade imprint Basalt Books, Life along the Tracks: Candid Stories from a Career Railroader, coauthored and illustrated by friends and fellow railroad enthusiasts Jim Providenza and Dave Clemens.

As a boy in the early 1950s, Mike McLaughlin was a regular stowaway riding switch engines back and forth in Seattle. By the time he was in high school, he was hand-firing steam engines as an unofficial crew member.

Obsessed with trains and destined for a life along the tracks, McLaughlin started by digging ditches as a gandy and ended as a railroad and transportation consultant, but he never completely relinquished his shovel. His career spanned close to 25 railroads in the United States, including the Great Northern, Denver and Rio Grande Western, and Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific, as well as transportation management for several large industrial firms.

With McLaughlin, even the mundane becomes fascinating, and often humorous. Unlike those of an executive or engineer, his personal accounts focus on what went on behind the scenes—from the finer points of using a shovel to suddenly having to reroute 16,000 tons of talc ore from Montana to a ship in Portland. He describes living and working as part of maintenance and signal gangs, moving days on several lines, supervisory issues, and more.

McLaughlin’s collection of mid-20th-century timetables and other paper ephemera provide minute detail related to railroad activities and communications. Numerous photographs and Clemens’ hand-drawn maps enhance the text, illustrate where stories take place, and promote a deeper understanding of some gritty, intense railroading.

Providenza, also a co-author of A Compendium of Model Railroad Operations from Design to Implementation, writes in the introduction of Life along the Tracks that while several of McLaughlin’s “vignettes,” as he called them, were published over the years in various railroad historical society magazines, McLaughlin always hoped to put them all together in a book. To that end, he gave Providenza and Clemens a draft of his manuscript—more of a collection of photocopies of texts and only three photos—asking for their help to publish it.

McLaughlin didn’t live to see Life along the Tracks finished; he died unexpectedly in 2012. So Providenza and Clemens began a 13-year mission to fulfill their friend’s wish, with encouragement from McLaughlin’s family, especially daughter Christine.

“Christine invited Jim and I to Denver to review what was left of Mike’s materials after Mike’s wife Carol also passed,” Clemens said. “From that day, Christine was our ‘silent partner,’ always there, always in the background, always willing to help. Her inspiration and often ‘trinkets’ of information were invaluable in our effort.”

The pair talked to railfan and modeling friends, contacted museums and archives, reached out to possible sources, and reread books in their personal railroad libraries to find photos and create maps that would illustrate what McLaughlin wrote about.

“Mike was a good friend and, in our estimation, a really gifted writer,” Providenza said. “After his death, we felt that his stories deserved to be made available to a wider audience. The combination of ‘good friend, gifted writer, and lost opportunity’ sustained us over the long haul.”

“I found myself constantly trying to ‘listen back’ to the tales and details Mike shared with us over such an extended period,” Clemens said. “In the end, we worked our way through the morass of details and often wished Mike could ‘whisper the answer’ in our ears. Sometimes it felt like he did. But ultimately, I felt I needed and wanted to do something extraordinary for a truly special friend and colleague in all things railroading.”

Asked for a favorite memory of McLaughlin and the kind of friend he was, Providenza recalled that he and his family, including their 1 ½-year-old daughter, traveled to Colorado and stayed with McLaughlin and Carol for a couple of days. McLaughlin bought a new mattress for their daughter’s old crib so Providenza’s daughter could sleep comfortably.

“Their daughter was already out on her own, but Mike made that special effort for us,” Providenza said. “He was that sort of a guy.”