Queen Of The Rails

The folklore of railroads is full of stories of rail dogs. You'll hear stories from Montana about dogs who waited years for their masters to return. You'll find stories from Connecticut and Pennsylvania about dogs who belonged to baggage masters, and would climb into boxcars and ship themselves all over the country, to the point where the baggage master would put a tag on the dog's collar saying, "Dog belongs to so-and-so at such-and-such a station and I would appreciate it if you'd reroute him back to the station." Sometimes these dogs would be gone for six or eight months. Of course they'd be taken care of from station to station. Many of them became legendary.
Queen of the Rails is a dog that's supposed to live in the Denver Rio Grande and Western make-up yard in Grand Junction, Colorado, or in the make?up yard in Aspen. The story comes from both places. I've been in and out of the D&RG yards in Grand Junction and seen many dogs, all of them mongrels, all of them begging for scraps. Any one of them could be Queen of the Rails; Queen of the Rails could be dead for 20 years; I don't know. I'd like to think that I had run into Queen of the Rails on one of my trips through that part of the country.
The brakemen like to jive young fellows. They'll tell you all sorts of stories. If you'd bum in and say, "I'm looking for Queen of the Rails," he'd point to the first dog he saw and say, "There she is."
This is a dog song, of course, but it's a boomer song too. These old bums do disappear. There's a piece of advice worth listening to, if you're interested in going out on freight trains. Boomer Bill gets killed crossing the coupling joints of a train that blocked the yard, which means that he tried to get from one side of the yard to the other. There's a train sitting in the middle of the yard, all coupled up. To get between the boxcars he had to climb over the coupling joints. Meanwhile, they're switching a car into the head end of that train. That shocks the whole train, knocks you off, and you can lose your life. The advice is: If you want to cross over to the other side of a make-up yard, never cut through the yard; walk out and over the nearest viaduct and back in on the other side.

Boomer bummed the Rio Grande,
The Santa Fe, and never planned
On where held be from day to day, the jungle or the jail.
But when the snow was falling down
Held catch a California bound
With that little dog to keep him warm, old "Queen of the Rails".

One day he went to get a bone
And left his little pal alone,
He crossed the coupling joints of a train that blocked the yard.
They switched a reefer off the main
And humped it into Boomer's train;
He fell and died beneath the iron wheels so cold and hard.

Final Chorus: The black smoke choo-choo's gone away,
Bummin' it's just not the same;
Dreams are few and far between but memories seldom fail.
If there's a place from some old friend
Who waits until the journey's end.
Then Boomer he'll be glad to see old "Queen of the Rails".

Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips

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