Top 100 Quotes About The Railroad
#1. The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.
John Moody
#2. I started composting in 1970 by taking my food scraps out behind where I lived and burying them in a hole next to the railroad tracks - and green things started to grow there!
Ed Begley Jr.
#3. The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!
Mark Twain
#4. For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.
Harold Evans
#5. Some hours later they were down
at the railroad tracks
standing close together by the switch lights. The huge night moved overhead
scattering drops of itself.
Anne Carson
#6. It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.
Cory Doctorow
#7. The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#8. The campus is an oasis, settled in an otherwise nondescript town in rural America. A place where the grain elevator and the railroad grew together.
Fritz Nordengren
#9. I'm a secret interior decorator. There's a mural on my dining room wall of the railroad tracks at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I love having my hometown with me out here in California.
Jill Scott
#11. RAILROAD, n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off. For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition.
Ambrose Bierce
#12. Reagan was looking at Nick like she was already tying him to the railroad tracks. Wren
Rainbow Rowell
#13. Do I understand, sir, that you mean the Cause for which our heroes have died is not sacred?'
If you were run over by a railroad train your death wouldn't sanctify the railroad company, would it?' asked Rhett and his voice sounded as if he were humbly seeking information.
Margaret Mitchell
#14. Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I've heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.
Gary Krist
#15. If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say.
Brown Dog
Jim Harrison
#16. Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#17. I came from a poor family. My father was from Glasgow, Scotland; my mother's brothers were brakemen on the railroad. We didn't have anything but mush for breakfast.
Mickey Rooney
#18. What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don't normally sneak up on people. Unless they've derailed, you pretty much know where to find them.
David Sedaris
#19. The most villainous move any person can make is tying a woman to the railroad tracks.
Chuck Klosterman
#20. I lay my head on the railroad track, waitin' on the Double E. But the train don't run by here no more, poor, poor, pitiful me.
Warren Zevon
#21. During that year by the railroad embankment, at the time of my father's complete disaster, distance meant for us not only some faraway lyrical splendor but also the exceedingly utilitarian idea of running away, the deliverance from fear and hunger.
Danilo Kis
#22. Benefit of clergy: Half-rate on the railroad.
Mark Twain
#23. This time he had seen it coming, like a monster in a slow-motion nightmare. This time he had seen it coming, like standing rooted on the railroad tracks, unable to jump aside.
Michael Grant
#24. I did as much as I could: raising chickens, pushing an ice-cream cart, bagging walnuts, driving a tractor on a beet farm, working on the railroad. I think this eclectic career helped me a lot in life.
Charles R. Schwab
#25. COBB: You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can't know for sure. Yet it doesn't matter...
Mal looks at his across the railroad tracks. Replies-
MAL: Because you'll always be together.
Christopher J. Nolan
#26. Given a little wine, you will find folks are the same no matter what side of the railroad tracks they came from.
Nancy B. Brewer
#27. I mean, the power of water to lift cars is amazing. A creek backed up near a railroad track. And an entire train was lifted off of the railroad track and dumped over. People just need to make sure they do not drive into water. It floats the cars, and then we have deaths because of it.
Jay Nixon
#28. On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.
James Stockdale
#29. Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.
Jerry Spinelli
#30. You cannot tie your fiance to the railroad track of self-reflection and personal improvement.
Amy Dickinson
#31. The Chinamen built the railroad, the Indians saved the Pilgrim,
And in return, the Pilgrim killed 'em.
They call it it Thanksgiving, I call your holiday 'hell-day.'
Nas
#32. Yes," she said. "'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.
Lorrie Moore
#33. Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist - whatever.
Les Paul
#34. A player's ability to rebound is inversely proportional to the distance between where he was born and the nearest railroad tracks. The greater distance you live from the poor side of the railroad tracks, the less likely that you will be a good rebounder.
Pete Carril
#35. I enjoy being busy, I really do. Remember, I'm the stub end of the railroad. I have no family, so I'm not taking busy time away from people that I should be spending it with. So I'm just relaxing and enjoying it.
Betty White
#36. John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company's profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.
Alex Berenson
#37. The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game.
Knute Rockne
#38. The railroad originally was as completely dissociated from steam propulsion as was the ship.
John Moody
#39. Once asked what action he would recommend if a person were to feel a nervous breakdown coming on: Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, and find someone in need and do something for him.
Karl A. Menninger
#40. You're the new squadron commander,' Colonel Cathcart had shouted rudely across the railroad ditch to him. 'But don't think it means anything, because it doesn't. All it means is that you're the new squadron commander.
Joseph Heller
#41. ... We also have friends among the railroad men, and they tell us that so far the Germans of the garrison haven't dared touch the pumpkins. They've blocked the line and have brought in a team of mine detectors from Cracow. They're more worried about the pumpkins than about the car you stole.
Primo Levi
#42. There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through the wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the great white North.
James Oliver Curwood
#44. Many of the railroad evils were inherent in the situation; they were explained by the fact that both managers and public were dealing with a new agency whose laws they did not completely understand.
John Moody
#45. For decades, people have known the chemical-propulsion approach to space travel is really not going to get us that far. Chemical propulsion is essentially like the horse-and-cart approach to the exploration of the American West, instead of the steamboat or the railroad.
Franklin Chang Diaz
#46. Lay my head on the railroad line,
Train come along, pacify my mind.
Toni Morrison
#47. My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.
Chuck Palahniuk
#49. Way over on the railroad, Tomorrow all the tipping trucks will unload together, Every scrapbook stuck with glue, And I'll stand beside you, Beside you, child.
Van Morrison
#50. Now, people have said that somebody told them that they saw somebody on the railroad bank or saw somebody going over the bank, but no one has ever been able to show any cartridges, any rifle, any pistol, no one has ever found anything other than the evidence about Oswald.
John Sherman Cooper
#51. Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.
Little Richard
#52. Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.
Rebecca Solnit
#53. It's the same things your whole life. 'Clean up your room!', 'Stand up straight!', 'Pick up your feet!', 'Take it like a man!', 'Be nice to your sister!', 'Don't mix beer and wine, ever!'. Oh yeah, 'Don't drive on the railroad track!'
Philip Connors
#54. That hatred of the railroad was Winder's only original notion, and when he got mad that always came in some way. Everything else was what he'd heard somebody, or most everybody, say, only he always got angry enough to make it sound like a conviction.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#55. The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard.
Nicholson Baker
#56. Oh Lord, we thank Thee for this thy gift of lobster Newburg. And grant us also, if it be Thy will, control of the Hudson Ohio Railroad.'
'But we ain't wanting control of the Hudson Ohio, Sean softly objected.
'True,' said Gabriel Love, 'but the Almighty doesn't need to know that yet.
Edward Rutherfurd
#57. When I want an opinion, I'll get it from my peers - from men of vision, like our great railroad builders ... Stanford, Huntington, Dinsmore ... fellows with imaginations broad enough to span the continent.
Jonathan Raban
#58. I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
Amy Lowell
#59. A "seducer" who boasts of initiating women into the mystery of love is like a stranger who arrives at a railroad station and offers to show the sights to a tourist guide.
Karl Kraus
#60. My dad was a telegraph operator for the Cotton Belt Railroad. He worked seven nights a week from 4 until midnight, no vacation.
Johnny Gimble
#61. I try to jog in every city I visit, and I particularly enjoy harbour-front paths that let me ogle big ships, railroad bridges and the ruins of factories and warehouses.
Steven Pinker
#62. An iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road of the common construction. Here lay in a few words the idea from which our railway system has sprung.
Andrew Carnegie
#63. I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.
Harriet Tubman
#64. She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.
James Baldwin
#65. In the United States 'First' and 'Second' class can't be painted on railroad cars, for all passengers, being Americans, are equal and it would be 'unAmerican.' But paint 'Pullman' on a car and everyone is satisfied.
Owen Wister
#66. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet.
Henry David Thoreau
#67. Separation of the Church and State is like a railroad track. It cannot be close to one another, neither can it be distant, because there will be derailment. We (Church) should cooperate with the government and the government should cooperate with us because we're serving the same people.
Jaime Sin
#68. Engagement pictures made me want to vomit - especially when they were taken on railroad tracks. I always pictured Thomas the Train rolling over them, his smiley blue face beaded with their blood.
Tarryn Fisher
#69. Dear Artie: "The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could. "Roy
John Pearce
#70. I realized that I was really tired of people popping on and off of my property like it was a train station on the supernatural railroad.
Charlaine Harris
#71. A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley
#72. It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.
Tim O'Reilly
#73. During winter 2013, the Disneyland Railroad station and it's "Population" sign was swathed in a huge tent for refurbishment; when the tent was removed, the updated population sign read 650 million.
Leslie Le Mon
#74. Now, therefore, the Directors of the company are hereby ordered to see that precautions are taken to make travel on said railroad perfectly safe by using a screw with at least twenty-four inches diameter.
Joshua A. Norton
#75. If a railroad is bent, the train shall turn over; if a man's character is bent, he shall turn over just like that train.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#76. The Reading Terminal Market on 12th and Arch was created in 1892 when the Reading Railroad opened markets below the elevated tracks of the new train shed. It had consistently housed an undetermined amount of aromas since then by creating a gastronomic bazaar conveniently located at street level.
Craig Johnson
#77. Her younger son, twenty, was assigned to a factory that made railroad equipment, but since it provided no salary he was actually paying his workplace three dollars per month so he could stay home to help his mother with the pigs and moonshine.
Barbara Demick
#78. Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history.
John Moody
#79. The close relationship between railroad expansion and the genera development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads.
John Moody
#80. A TEN-YEAR-OLD lad in Indianapolis who was arrested for picking up coal along the side of railroad tracks is now in jail. If the boy had known enough to steal the whole railroad he would be heralded as a Napoleon of finance.
Mother Jones
#81. I was one man and I tackled a big railroad. I did the best I could.
O. Winston Link
#82. The Atman alone is eternal. Hospitals will tumble down. Railroad givers will all die. This earth will be blown to pieces, suns wiped out. The Atman endures for ever.
Swami Vivekananda
#83. A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt
#84. The shuttle tomorrow is truly like laying the last spike on the transcontinental railroad, only much more so. And whether or not we're going to see in in the next 10 or 20 years, there are people alive today who will see manufacturing in space from moon materials or from asteroids.
Jerry Brown
#85. When I did big things, some large corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were behind me and responsible party.
Andrew Carnegie
#86. I once drove a pair of horses from New York to Vicksburg, and to this day I can almost map out that country as I saw it then, with its hills and valleys, villages and rivers. Yes, I naturally attribute something of my success in railroad building to the interest I take in such things.
Collis Potter Huntington
#87. Every new development, highway, railroad, steamship line, building operation, whether it be a drainage project in old Greece or a new water system in Peru, means an added use of the automobile.
Walter Chrysler
#88. We seem to be committing ourselves to an eye wateringly expensive railroad for the few. High speed rail plan is madness.
Mike Rutherford
#89. I grew up, really, in the country.When I was a kid there were three country stores, a railroad depot, and a post office.
Jeff Sessions
#90. I have always loved to sit in ferry and railroad stations and watch the people, to walk on crowded streets, just walk along among the people, and see their faces, to be among people on street cars and trains and boats.
Ella R. Bloor
#91. It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.
David R. Brower
#92. I went West and took part in the strike of the machinists - the Southern Pacific Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail, that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its workers.
Mary Harris Jones
#93. The Indiana Jones films have a built in Disney connection, as director Steven Spielberg sent his sound designers down to Disneyland to record Big Thunder Mountain Railroad to provide a soundtrack for the second film's mine chase scene!
The Imagineers
#94. In reality, government subsidized railroad construction, maintained high protective tariffs and a tight money supply, used its power to crush strikes, and in other ways supported the nation's most powerful economic interests. But the laissez-faire myth still framed political debate. The
Steven J. Diner
#95. Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#96. I don't care a damn for their guns, or you either, sir! What I want is the Southside Railroad!
Philip Sheridan
#97. A rival editor in Philadelphia said that the spreading railroad network carried "New York everywhere" in terms of the city's predominant influence.
Harold Holzer
#98. Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
Margaret Atwood
#99. When the scheme for the construction of a railroad from Baltimore to the waters of the Ohio River first began to take form, the United States had barely emerged from the Revolutionary period.
John Moody
#100. The Oberlin/Cleveland area is where the underground railroad came out, so it's an interesting historical place. I love Ohio and really loved Oberlin.
Isabel Gillies
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