Train (clothing)

“ As soon as the train has got well out she will, being wise, take off her coat, hang it up, remove her hat and put it in the rack, take off her gloves, put them in her coat pocket, and then settle herself comfortably to enjoy the passing panorama, or the book which she has brought with her. ”

“ Every European resident of India who is accustomed to traveling by train has an outfit always ready similar to the kit of a soldier or a naval officer. It is as necessary as a trunk or a bag, an overcoat or umbrella, and consists of a roll of bedding, with sheets, blankets and pillows, protected by a canvas cover securely strapped and arranged so that when he wants to retire he need only unbuckle the straps and unroll the blankets on the bunk in the railway carriage. ”

“ The young girls are radiant with colour — white, red, pink, and blue — and the children come dressed in brand-new garments — all stiff from the warehouse — and equipped with spade and bucket and bags full of thin paper, cut the size of pennies, to throw out of the carriage windows as the train flies along. ”

“ When trains are in fashion, all older women should wear them. Fashion or no fashion, no woman who has passed forty looks really well in a cut-off evening dress. An effect of train, however, can very adequately be produced with any arrangement or trimming that extends upon the floor.
The informal dinner dress is worn to the theater, the restaurant (of high class) , the concert and the opera. ”

“ I have begun to take delight in travelling by the Subway. People there don’t pose. They are in too great a hurry to put on masks. Extraordinary how impressive breeding is when it is united with good clothes. The [58] train can be so full that there is often a double row extending from one end of the car to the other, hanging on to the round leather rings with coarse, toil-worn, or delicate kid-gloved hands. Some one always makes room for me, but I also take my time to form the desired expression on my face. To-day a poor woman sat next to me with two or three little wreaths on her lap. ”

“ There were quite a number of people there besides the Porter,—two or three ladies in smart dresses, and quite a crowd of gentlemen in high hats and frock coats—besides everybody who belonged to the station. They recognized several people who had been in the train on the red-flannel-petticoat day. Best of all their own old gentleman was there, and his coat and hat and collar seemed more than ever different from any one else's. ”

“ The fashion for the present, and for some time past, requires the skirt to be fitted with as much care as any other part of the dress. All fullness must be so arranged as to fall into the back breadths of the train. The sloping of the bottom must be proportionate, so as to give a straight even effect across the front and sides and allow the train to suddenly spring out at the lower part of the back widths. ”

“ But there are others who know of nothing more thoroughly pleasant than lounging back easily in the cushioned seat of a railway-carriage, with the one close beside, with one hand in reach at any moment, the one face ready to reply in smiles to the look of pleasure given, and the one head ready to repose upon the shoulder when night comes on or the continued motion of the train brings on drowsiness. ”

“ The train rattles on, but despite these assurances some of the passengers are ill at ease.
The females bestow compassionate glances at Peace, whose costume causes him to be a marked man; it is in every respect so different to that worn by the other occupants of the carriage. ”

“ If every holiday recollection of my youth, every escape from town to country, be associated with the railway, I must feel towards it otherwise than did my father, upon whose middle age it came as a monstrous iron innovation. The locomotive is one of the wonders of modern childhood. Children crowd upon a bridge to see the train pass beneath. Little boys strut along the streets puffing and whistling in imitation of the engine. All that romance, silly as it looks, becomes sacred in afterlife. Besides, when it is not underground in a foul London tunnel, a train is a beautiful thing. ”

“ Here, as one whirls by in the train after nightfall, he may catch hurried glimpses of swarthy men, stripped to the waist, stirring the molten iron with their long levers or standing amid showers of sparks as the brilliant metal slips to and fro among the rollers that mould it into the forms of commerce. ”

“ The people in the train are, of course, a little interesting, but far more saddening. Where the train with its Western atmosphere has penetrated, the beautiful and dignified robes, the silken skirts and kimonos of both men and women, though principally of the men, are giving place to a hybrid mixture of all the vulgar and hideous garments of “civilisation.” Only a few of the most cultured Japanese know how to dress in good taste in our things, the others are unspeakable. ”

“ A lady’s dinner dress may be elegant as her fancy dictates. But if she is hostess she should never try to eclipse her guests. Trained418 gowns are eminently suitable, and may be worn by maids or matrons alike. Full length trains are not necessary, and even demi-trains need not be worn by very young women. But the soft sweep of a train lends an added grace to a woman’s gown, and this is one of the few places where it can be appropriately worn. ”

“ The different methods used in the transportation of merchandise are no less peculiar; for while on the eastern side of the city, may be seen approaching long caravans of camels laden with the rich products of the East, on the western side may be heard the shriek of the locomotive, announcing the arrival of a train, bringing passengers, merchandise and latest intelligence from western nations. ”

“ The dress for traveling should be plain and simple, suited to the need rather than elaborate. The effect of crumpled finery is so very unpleasant that no person of taste will make a display of it in a public conveyance.
If you wish to leave your seat in a train, a coat or bag placed upon it is sufficient to reserve it for you. The removal of a coat or bag so placed is a very great rudeness.
A gentleman will give up his seat to two ladies, or to a gentleman and lady traveling together, as he can be more readily accommodated in the single seats than can they. ”

“ You begin to understand things, and to see that the locomotive is trailing civilization along after it wherever it goes.
Again on the train: A man enters the car who toes straight out the way he is going. He has a red sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his waist. The glitter of a silver-mounted revolver at his left side, a shady sombrero upon his head, an uncivilized nugget of gold for a breastpin, a small log-chain of the same material a-swing upon his breast, buttons up and down the side seams of his pantaloons, square-shouldered, broader at the breast than equatorially. ”

“ Beyond the peculiar character of their clothes there were to be recognised those whom the trains from Calais, Brussels, Vienna, and Berlin had brought together at Paris or Basle to make up the great cosmopolitan Engadine train: the Englishman with white shoes, check overcoat, turned-up trousers, cloth cap ”

“ The front piece is longer than in the Hadhramout, coming down to within a foot of the ground, but the train is also very much longer, and must lie more than a yard and a half on the ground. These ladies get good neither from the length nor the breadth of their dresses, for as the train evidently incommodes them, they twist the dress so tightly round their bodies that the left side seam comes straight or rather lop-sidedly behind and one corner of the train is thrown over the left shoulder all in a wisp. ”

“ A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as well as the traits common to all railway travel; and our friends decided that this was not a very well-dressed company, and would contrast with the people on an express-train between Boston and New York to no better advantage than these would show beside the average passengers between London and Paris. And it seems true that on a westering' line, the blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into increasing informality of costume. ”

“ He returned in two days with mules, saddles, saddle-bags, boots, leather leggings, knickerbockers, woolen ponchos, and scores of other articles which he assured us were absolutely necessary for any degree of comfort. By the time we were ready to start we had a good-sized pack-train on our hands. ”

“ October 22.—As this train only stops about every fifty miles or so, and we have to pay extra for its being an express, there are relatively few passengers, and none of them at all amusing except one old man, whom I take to be a Chinaman. He is tall and dressed in widest garments, the trousers being of such flowing description that he hitches them up behind when he walks, as a lady does her skirts. He has an amber-coloured silk jacket, slashed up the front, and into this and the front of his lower garments he has stuffed so many things that he looks very rotund, which he isn’t by nature. ”

“ The arrival and departure of trains once or twice a day is a thing as personal as the letter which comes into the hand of the butcher, the banker, the druggist, from that same adventuring train that kicks the level dust of the Prairie miles behind it, with the ease of a thoroughbred, and climbs the gorges, the canyons and the steeps of the passes, and enters the black mysteries of the long tunnels as nonchalantly as a cowboy, hand on hip, sits astride his pony. ”

“ The traveller in a scurrying railroad train becomes familiar with few more thought-suggesting sights than the farm woman in the cottage door. She comes forward with her hands in her apron, if not with a baby on her arm. Sometimes she waves her hand to the unanswering train. Sometimes she leans against the door-post and looks, one might fancy wistfully, at the clattering cars, at the people who are going somewhere. ”

“ Curtains are drawn in front of your bed, so that you are hidden from the view of the other passengers. If you choose an upper berth, you climb into it by means of a small step-ladder, and then begins that very difficult task of taking your trousers off while lying on your back. It takes a good deal of practice to perform this feat successfully when the train is running along at full speed, and I have known many a traveller give it up in despair, choosing rather to sleep in his pants than attempt the operation. ”

“ On shot the locomotive, like an arrow from the bow, the men throwing over the ties until the train was well nigh unloaded, when just as they were close to the curve by which the train arrives at the station, they saw the dreaded cars strike a tie, or something equally of service, and with a desperate plunge rush down the embankment, some fifteen feet, to the little valley, and creek below. ”

“ The children brought forget-me-nots and anemones to sell at the wayside stations; but on this line the towns and hamlets are fewer than on the one we had just left. Though the land seemed so uninhabited the train always seemed full, and the passengers made themselves thoroughly at home. The second-class travellers, who were going any distance, put on fresh clothes, the ladies dressed in négligé costumes like tea-gowns. One amazingly stout lady put on a muslin gown over a pink slip, and looked just like an animated pin-cushion. These people seem to wear all their jewels too, when travelling. ”

“ Whatever tricks you think of, in the long run you’re bound to smash or scatter something, and at the station and in the train you have to stand with your arms apart, holding up some parcel or other under your chin, with parcels, cardboard boxes, and such-like rubbish all over you. The train starts, the passengers begin to throw your luggage about on all sides: you’ve got your things on somebody else’s seat. ”

“ It is thus used of the portion of a skirt, robe or cloak which is lengthened behind so that when allowed to fall it trails along the ground. In ceremonial processions and other state functions the duty of keeping raised the train of the sovereign's robes, or of the robes of great officials and dignitaries, is assigned to pages or to official train-bearers. The length of the train which ladies must wear at royal courts, drawing-rooms or other state functions is fixed by regulations from the lord chamberlain's office. ”

“ Bells are ringing; porters are hurrying to and fro with luggage on trucks, to the risk of passengers’ shins and toes; men, women, and children, young and old, high and low, rich and poor, are mixed in confusion on the platform, some insanely attempting to force their way into a train that is moving off, under the impression that it is their train, and they are too late “after all!” Others are wildly searching for lost luggage. ”

“ We are forced to pick out our clothes from among all the others, with the steam blinding us; we choke, cough, entreat the women to give us time; they persist, "Quick, quick, or you'll miss the train!" Oh, so we really won't be murdered! They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous germs. Thank God!
Assured by the word "train" we manage to dress ourselves after a fashion, and the man comes again to inspect us. ”

“ Consequently the experienced lady traveller will not undress entirely, but merely removing a few of her outer garments, and keeping her shoes within easy reach, she will don a comfortable dressing-gown, and compose herself [Pg 297] for sleep. Some people prefer to have the berth made up feet first, but it is always better to have the head toward the engine, as experience has proved that the slight motion of the train assists the circulation, which should run toward the feet if sleep is to be enjoyed during the night. ”