Have you read any good railroad novels lately? Me neither. Or at least I hadn’t until May, when Fred W. Frailey emailed me a nearly final draft of his first novel.
Frailey needs no introduction. For more than four decades Trains Magazine readers have enjoyed his masterful reporting and writing on the railroad industry. Now in retirement Fred has traded fact for fiction in “Seldom Willing,” a novel that draws heavily on his lifetime of observing railroads.
“Seldom Willing,” now available on Amazon, is set in the 1970s and tells the tale of the fictional South West Kansas Railroad.
From villainous executives and corporate intrigue to operational hijinks and the dedicated people who keep trains moving 24/7/365, “Seldom Willing” captures the essence of a fascinating industry. Toss in a whodunit caper and the quirky characters that are part of the fabric of railroading, and you’ve got a page-turner.
Frailey is no stranger to writing books: He has authored or co-authored a half-dozen non-fiction works about railroads. Fred has been a stickler for facts since beginning his journalism career at age 16 at the newspaper his family owned in Sulphur Springs, Texas. “I never wanted to do fiction. Ever,” he says.
But then inspiration struck on a January 2013 trip through Kansas. Frailey was following Union Pacific’s Kansas Division along Interstate 70 and took note of the small, prosperous towns beside the tracks, each with its own skyscraper grain elevator. “And I thought, my God, the wealth that’s created in this state that everyone thinks is boring. It’s not boring,” he recalls. “I started thinking, is there a story to be told here? And if there is, what is it?”
The idea popped into his head around Hays, Kan. By the time he reached Topeka three hours later, his imagination had run wild and he had the makings of a novel. At a motel that night, Fred jotted down a rudimentary plot and a cast of characters. When he arrived home in Virginia, he opened a spreadsheet and created a list of station names and mileposts – half real places, half imaginary – that would dot the South West Kansas Railroad’s mythical map.
“Then I proceeded to forget about this whole thing for eight years,” Frailey says.
But writers write, and not long after hanging up his Trains pen in 2020 at the age of 77, Frailey yearned to be active again. And his thoughts returned to the long-forgotten novel he had sketched out.
Writing “Seldom Willing” took two years. “I’ve never had more fun,” Frailey says. “Once you get your head into writing it just takes you away. You’re picked up and swept into the heavens. And this was 58,000 words of being swept up into the heavens.”
Readers will get swept up in the book. “Seldom Willing” begins with a bang – quite literally – and then delves into the fragile state of the Central Pacific Railroad and its Kansas Division. The Kansas Division was built in the 1870s as the South West Kansas Railroad, which earned the moniker Seldom Willing before going bust and becoming part of the CP.
Frailey’s Central Pacific is headed by a CEO named Buzz “Chainsaw” Whitaker, who thinks only of the short term. To cut costs, Whitaker decides to abandon the redundant Kansas Division, only to have a smart and well-connected local grain magnate scoop up the Kansas City-Denver route. The upstart and underdog railroad is renamed South West Kansas. And the plot thickens from there.
“I was bound and determined this would not be a thinly veiled story about Union Pacific,” Frailey says. “UP is not a failure. The fictional CP is a failure in the making. The CP runs south of the real UP, although both railroads – real and imaginary – go through Hugo, Colo.”
The events in the book do lean on Frailey’s decades of experience covering railroads. “I borrowed everything I possibly could,” he says. Several real railroaders – former BNSF CEO Rob Krebs, former Conrail CEO Jim Hagen, and former Kansas City Southern CEO Mike Haverty – even make cameo appearances.
With “Seldom Willing” his first crack at fiction, Frailey wasn’t sure if the book was any good. He shared it with his wife and asked her to do two things: Read it quickly and then let him know where the book was boring or confusing so he could fix it.
She’s his toughest critic. “Cathie hates trains because railroads have taken her husband away too many times,” Fred says. But when she returned the draft two days later, she said she liked it and that it was neither boring nor confusing. Frailey then shared the draft with his predecessor and successor at Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine, where he once was editor. They came back with hundreds of edits each, and then several railroad friends read it and made more suggestions.
The easiest decision about the book, Frailey says, was self-publishing on Amazon. Last year Fred had read a first-time novelist’s book, which noted that agents and publishers rejected the manuscript more than 200 times before a major publisher finally picked it up. “I thought, OK, now you’re 79. You don’t have time to be rejected,” Frailey says with a laugh.
Frailey has been bitten by the fiction bug and is hard at work on his second novel: A mystery that revolves around a dozen passengers who are riding Santa Fe’s westbound Super Chief during its heyday. “The fact is, there’s not much railroad fiction,” Frailey says. “I think there are a lot of stories to be told.”
You can reach Bill Stephens at bybillstephens@gmail.com and follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter @bybillstephens
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