Herbert Elliott Hamblen (1849–1908)

Hamblen’s book is a work of fiction presented in the form of an “as told to” biography. It details the trajectory of the life of General Manager M______ . It begins with his leaving home in search of work, his first job as a brakeman and his rise through the ranks of employment on “a great railroad system branching out from Chicago.” Hamblen himself was a railroad engineer from 1880 to 1894 and, like the banker Frank Spearman (Held for Orders), it is obvious he used his personal experiences and impressions of railroad work to frame the content and dialogue of the book. As was noted in the review published in The Nation in 1898 “In most tales in which commonplace argot or speech is employed, the illusion is marred through the interjection of literary words which the speakers would not employ in colloquial intercourse. Mr. Hamblen never offends in this particular.”

The only drawback to the novel, which was noted in the 1898 review, is that Hamblen’s General Manager has an unrealistic overabundance of good fortune. Again, from the review in The Nation, “The crowning achievement, however, is a collision that requires such a nice adjustment of favorable conditions as to border on the miraculous. Two trains travelling on a single track meet immediately beneath a bridge (which the accident destroys) that carries the track of a second railway across that of the first. Into this chasm an opportune train of the second railroad tumbles upon the debris of the other two a few moments after the collision. As may be imagined, this causes serious complications, to no one more than our hero, who is pinioned beneath the wreck with fire sweeping down upon him. Of course he escapes, but with the loss of all that is consumable about his person except the actual flesh. ”

In spite of this, many of the stories ring true and are probably slightly fictionalized accounts of incidents in Hamblen’s career that were either experienced or witnessed (See Common Knowledge for an example of this side of his writing). Indeed, the descriptions of some of the events are such that more than one subsequent author of railroad history has presented sections of Hamblen’s book as historical fact.

I wouldn’t class Hamblen’s book as a must-read but I do think it is worthwhile because, phenomenal luck aside, it is a reasonably well written book and many of the stories do mirror real accounts of railroad life.(Text length - 311 pages, Total length - 311 pages)

Addendum June 2021: Since writing this review back in 2013 it appears that, the 1898 review notwithstanding, recent research by Richard Reinhardt indicates Hamblen's book is essentially an autobiography and should be considered non-fiction. Reinhardt's findings are briefly summarized in Grant Burn's book The Railroad in American Fiction. So, as an update, I've changed the tags to indicate the book's change in status.… (meer)