The Troop Train

Between December 1941 and the end of the war the railroads carried more than 40 million American servicemen, nearly all of them in trains like this one: coaches and converted Pullmans with a kitchen car in the middle, running on schedules nobody outside the Army knew.

Most of the sixteen million who served left home from a station like the one in the painting — a water tower, a grain elevator, a platform with the whole town on it. For many of the men, the train was the first time they had been more than a hundred miles from where they were born.

The families on the platform did not know where the train was going, and neither, usually, did the men on it. They waved until it was out of sight. Then they went home and waited for letters.

The train runs away from the viewer along the left of the picture, every window full of faces, arms out of the frames. On the platform the families are seen from behind — a mother lifting a small child, a man in overalls with his arm high, girls in print dresses — and the eye moves down the line of them toward the water tower and the grain elevator on the horizon. Evening light comes low from the left. Every shadow points home.