I was very amused to see this story today, about a train in India that stopped on a short unpowered section of track and the passengers had to get out and push to get it started again. It reminded me of my mother’s stories of the AJO&P Railroad of her youth.

The acronym stood for Alton, Jerseyville, and two other towns (the names of which I can never recall, I’ll have to ask her what they were again — looking at a map, it might have been Otterville and Piasa) in southern Illinois, the major destinations of the small local railroad company. The way she tells it, due to an unfortunate combination of too-steeply graded tracks and too-weak engines, there were a couple areas where the passengers were routinely expected to get out and either walk alongside the train or actively help it along. Thus the nickname, the All-Jump-Off-&-Push Railroad. I believe the topic originally came up when we were playing a family game of Monopoly, with the B&O Railroad, which we had renamed (in true childhood fashion) the Body Odor Railroad.

No particular reason for this entry, other than the random association with an amusing topic.

UPDATE: My mother says that this is completely new to her, so either one of us is hallucinating, I’ve dropped into an alternate reality, or I’m misremembering the source… maybe it was my Aunt Sharron? Mom agrees that the P would have been Piasa, and that the O was probably Otterville, though.