An especially nice view of the main railway station in Providence, showing its relation to the trolley (tram) interchange and park. The design of the cars date it to Lovecraft’s time, perhaps the mid 1930s. In style and mood it evokes Lovecraft’s eventual and joyous return to his home city from his 1920s sojourn in New York, but in its perspective view and sweep it also evokes something of his boyish love of his own home-made miniature railways. And of surveying their layouts and terrains, from just this sort of vantage point.
“The trains fascinated me [as a small boy], & to this day I have a love for everything pertaining to railways.”
He appears to have read vast numbers of early Munsey proto-pulp story magazines that dealt with railroads, including the entire run of Railroad man’s Magazine. This mixed rip-roaring adventure, ‘tall tales of the rails’ from old-timers, true-life accounts and short non-fiction.
One of his own early ‘household and friends’ publications was The Railroad Review. In middle-childhood he made his own systems, seemingly (though not mentioned by him below) in the large coach-house / stable which had previously housed the family carriage and horse…
[Alongside my early love of the 18th century … ] “my parallel fascination with railways & street-cars led me to construct large numbers of contemporary landscapes with intricate systems of tin trackage. I had a magnificent repertoire of cars & railway accessories — signals, tunnels, stations, &c — though this system was admittedly too large in scale for my villages. My mode of play was to construct some scene as fancy — incited by some story or picture — dictated, & then to act out its life for long periods — sometimes a fortnight—making up events of a highly melodramatic cast as I went. These events would sometimes cover only a brief span — a war or plague or merely a spirited pageant of travel & commerce & incident leading nowhere — but would sometimes involve long aeons, with visible changes in the landscape & buildings. Cities would fall & be forgotten, & new cities would spring up. Forests would fall or be cut down, & rivers (I had some fine bridges) would change their beds. […] Horror-plots were frequent, though (oddly enough) I never attempted to construct fantastic or extra-terrestrial scenes. […] There was a kind of intoxication in being lord of a visible world (albeit a miniature one) & determining the flow of its events.”
Such activities are common to many intelligent and craft-minded boys in middle-childhood, but the difference here is the sustained storytelling and development of such over several weeks per miniature layout.
A railroad track in decay famously features in his later work, as the line out of Innsmouth. In this he might be seen as nodding to other writers who had earlier used a ‘follow the railway lines’ plot point in post-apocalyptic settings, but it was more likely just the obvious route of escape required by the story.
Underground tram-ways also feature elsewhere in his work, in either real-world form (“Nyarlathotep”, in which only the subway entrances appear) or in disguised horror-fantasy forms (“The Festival”, in which the descent echoes the manner of going down into a subway in company with a shuffling crowd, whereupon the celebrants then mount a line of indeterminate ‘creature-vehicles’ which arrive, and are carried away into the darkness — much like entering and being carried away by subway cars).
