Top 100 Railroad Quotes
#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. 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
#4. 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
#5. Driving in Olathe was likewise an exercise in patience. Going anywhere often involved waiting at railroad crossings as a long freight train passed. David
Marek Fuchs
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
Daniel Suarez
#9. 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
#10. It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.
Henry James
#11. 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
#12. The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!
Mark Twain
#13. For 50 years my father worked for the railroad.
Harold Evans
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.
Mark Twain
#21. 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
#22. Wherever I go, I'm watching. Even on vacation, when I'm in an airport or a railroad station, I look around, snap pictures, and find out how people do things.
Richard Scarry
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet.
Henry David Thoreau
#27. As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.
Paul Johnson
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. I bought a railroad during this period of time.
Bill Janklow
#33. A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Reagan was looking at Nick like she was already tying him to the railroad tracks. Wren
Rainbow Rowell
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I still want my right to defend myself. A railroad operation, and you know it, from Nixon on down. they got you running around violating my constitutional rights.
Bobby Seale
#42. 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
#43. If you live on the railroad tracks the train's going to hit you, Grandpa used to say.
Brown Dog
Jim Harrison
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
Ada Louise Huxtable
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Give me snuff, whiskey, and Swedes, and I will build a railroad to hell.
James J. Hill
#52. 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
#53. Tsukuru visited railroad stations like other people enjoy attending concerts, watching movies, dancing in clubs, watching sports, and window shopping. When he was at loose ends, with nothing to do, he headed to a station.
Haruki Murakami
#54. I was one man and I tackled a big railroad. I did the best I could.
O. Winston Link
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. My favorite bands were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Jethro Tull, Uriah Heep, Grand Funk Railroad. If you listen to some of my early music, you can hear it.
John Tesh
#59. The most villainous move any person can make is tying a woman to the railroad tracks.
Chuck Klosterman
#60. Most games follow a real railroad plot, no matter what you want, you're following their storyline to its unavoidable conclusion. I'd like to write a game where your character can follow any number of possible story arcs and sub-plots.
Patrick Rothfuss
#61. Wall Street billionaires are predicting that Roosevelt-style railroad rate regulation will sooner or later bring about financial catastrophe. [ca. 1906]
Edmund Morris
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. A man's wife can hold him devilish uneasy, if she begins to scold and fret, and perplex him, at a time when he has a full load for a railroad car on his mind already.
David Crockett
#65. Once I built a railroad, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Yip Harburg
#66. 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
#67. When I did big things, some large corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad Company were behind me and responsible party.
Andrew Carnegie
#68. I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Mary Harris Jones
#69. These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line - all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#70. Benefit of clergy: Half-rate on the railroad.
Mark Twain
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. We seem to be committing ourselves to an eye wateringly expensive railroad for the few. High speed rail plan is madness.
Mike Rutherford
#76. 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
#77. Night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.
Carl Sandburg
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad.
David R. Brower
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I know Mother named me after a railroad man, but it's too late now, I'm afraid. Much, much too late.
Hoagy Carmichael
#89. Some people write string quartets, some grow lettuce and tomatoes. There have to be a few who build railroad stations,
Haruki Murakami
#90. Give me a moment I am preparing to drawback to scream
Louder than a train overhead below a railroad bridge
John E. Wordslinger
#91. You cannot tie your fiance to the railroad track of self-reflection and personal improvement.
Amy Dickinson
#92. 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
#93. When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.
Pam Houston
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. I don't care a damn for their guns, or you either, sir! What I want is the Southside Railroad!
Philip Sheridan
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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