DER IGLER EXPRESS
Mayer, Milton
Der Igler Express By MILTON MAYER Igls, Austria AS LONG AS there are towns named Kankakee, there will certainly be towns named Igls and Ischl and Imst, all of them (with the exception of...
...and they did...
...Now Number One is a big street-car, too big, as it turned out, for a little people like the Austrians to handle...
...The trolley-car proper has operating platforms front and rear...
...What bends the rod...
...Der Igler has begun to corkscrew...
...At Wilt-enplatz you change to Number One, where the conductor punches your transfer...
...Man alone baffles them...
...Der conductor calls out, "Igls—End of the Line...
...Now Der Igler stops at Tantegert...
...The Arlberg-Orient Express was due in five minutes and it looked as if the situation might be fatal, if not serious...
...Now a little lake on the left, the Muhlsee, with a pier, a diving board, and a closed hotel...
...The whistle is bigger than the rest of Der Igler put together...
...Again the wheels spun and the fuse blew...
...Even der conductor of Der Igler—he has been there the memory of man runneth not so far back—is magnificent with mustaches ending in imperial whorls...
...We hove to, but we could not rock the car...
...He says good-night to the passengers, who start off through the snow to the village...
...It should not be necessary to add—but I take no chances—that Der Igler is made of wood and painted red...
...the cars, except for the couplings, are not connected...
...Inside, each trailer-car accommodates twelve persons on two benches running the length of the car...
...If they were not they would not have invented Der Igler Express...
...The conductor has a whistle, too, with a tweet like a bird's...
...disappears...
...The track straightens out—for the first time since it began its thousand-feet climb from Berg Isel—for the last half-mile of the run...
...During the war, when the Germans ran Austria, they tried to introduce German efficiency on the line by running two trains, one leaving Berg Isel at the same time the other left Igls...
...disappears...
...The woods open for a moment, and there's Innsbruck, in miniature, on the left...
...So it's really a train, and up until 1936 (the line was opened in 1900) it was powered by a coal locomotive, and the natives say that when you rode Der Igler in those days the coal was so bad, and the cars so full of cracks, that you got aboard like a bride and got off like a widow...
...This is the plateau, beyond it the wall of the Karwendel Alps, impenetrable even by Der Igler...
...The distance from Innsbruck to Igls is, on Der Igler, 5.375 miles...
...At Aldrans the village church can be seen—a point of bearing again—and now the forest begins to open and the meadows roll down from the mountain...
...But (again like the Arcadian's daughter) it is marvelously deceptive in appearance...
...There have never been any serious accidents on Der Igler, maybe because nothing serious ever happens in Austria...
...Lans is seven minutes walk to the left, Sis-trans 25 to the right, real Tyrolian towns with tapering church-steeples, little shrines in the fields, timbered houses with stucco walls painted with heroic or holy scenes, and cafes with names like Zum Wilden Mann—"At the Sign of the Wild Man," the towns of mountain people, who, alone with the Swiss among Europeans, never knew serfdom...
...it makes up lost time (sometimes more than it intends to, when the rails are icy) on the way down from Igls...
...Otherwise there is nothing...
...A ski trail crosses the track at Tantegert...
...You blink again, and Innsbruck is gone, the peaks all around you are Special Student Rates for Classroom Use The Progressive is available to students and teachers at the low rate of only 50c per student per semester when 10 or more copies are sent in a single bundle to one address...
...At Berg Isel you change to Der Igler, holding on to your transfer and your hat...
...Evening magic, and the mute forest, and the trolley-car curling around in the world of snow—and you see that it isn't Der Igler that's turning at all, but the world revolving around it...
...What bends us all...
...And why not...
...On your left, falling fast below you, are the roofs and spires of Innsbruck...
...The motor-man applied the brakes and the conductor mounted to the roof by way of the platform...
...the contours of the snow are those of the earth beneath...
...All hands went over on to the floor, picked themselves up, and waited...
...The wind never touches the floor of the forest...
...He tweets it to notify the motorman to start at the intermediary stations...
...but all this is nature, and nature is pie for the Austrians of the Tyrol...
...From Berg Isel Der Igler climbs for a short time along a cut on the side of the mountain...
...He doesn't have to notify the motorman to stop, because Der Igler has to stop at every station so that the conductor can get oE one car and get on the next to collect the fares...
...The motorman took the throttle off the power post and went to the rear of the car, attached the throttle on the rear platform, opened it gently, and we went all the way up to Igls with the front platform empty—a ghost escaped from a graveyard of trolley-cars, its whistle a moan in the night...
...We do not...
...Number Six is its real name...
...Der Igler Express By MILTON MAYER Igls, Austria AS LONG AS there are towns named Kankakee, there will certainly be towns named Igls and Ischl and Imst, all of them (with the exception of Kankakee) in Austria...
...The time to ride Der Igler to Igls is any old time, summer or winter, but the time of times is the evening of a winter's day...
...Do we rail at the Russians for calling their cities Omsk and Tomsk, and, if we do not, is it, perhaps, because we are afraid of the Russians and not of the Austrians...
...You would never guess that it goes, still less that it goes like Bucephalus...
...Every twig, every needle is turbaned with snow...
...All the stations on Der Igler are a mile or so above or below the villages they serve...
...It all depends, like everything else in the Tyrol, on the weather...
...And what right have we, in any case, to raise our voices in Kennebunkport, Tucumcari, and Poc-atello against the Austrian nomenclature...
...Or for loving short, Der Igler...
...But an American army truck came along, and the truck pushed the street-car off the dead-point, and away we went, thanking God for the Americans...
...The motorman switched on the emergency fuse and threw the throttle again...
...But the sun was down, the day's temperature falling fast, and a very light drizzle, hardly more than a mist, was freezing...
...Nobody was killed, but the Germans were disgusted with the Austrians, who are not really Aryans but a hodge-podge of races with lots of charm and no character...
...But one way or another Der Igler has to average out the run in 30 minutes, for it leaves Berg Isel at a quarter before the hour and Igls at a quarter after...
...Der Igler starts from the end of the line in Innsbruck...
...reappears on the left...
...An occasional figure on skis, far away and below, and then back into the woods, and Der Igler twists and turns, its clatter muffled in white...
...Prior to its electrification Der Igler's running time, from Innsbruck up to Igls, was set at 25 minutes...
...You don't know it, but you are about to take the loveliest street-car ride in all the world, all the lovelier because, like the Arcadian's daughter, Der Igler is unself-conscious of its loveliness...
...Ah, but they are...
...The car would not start...
...Only the natives call it Der Igler Express...
...To get to the end of the line you take Number Three in Maria-Theresia-Strasse, the main street of Innsbruck...
...Now the stop marked "Lans-Sistrans...
...The motorman sounds the whistle at every curve, which means, since the Line consists of nothing but curves, that Der Igler, in addition to screeching and squealing, rattling and rolling and rocking and lurching and howling and whining, whistles continuously...
...On my first ride we had three accidents...
...So there is no point in talking about the eagles, except to say that Der Igler screeches too...
...Now the little Lanser-see, really a pond, on the right, with its little summer hotel and its big, incongruous sign in English: Welcome...
...You shut your eyes and open them, and Innsbruck is on your right...
...Number One runs to the end of the line, at the foot of a little mountain called Berg Isel...
...Why, then, should the Austrians be different...
...The wheels spun on the icy rails, and a fuse blew...
...After the Lansersee—the last stop before Igls—the meadows are cultivated...
...I asked...
...Now the white mountain meadows are spreading, criss-crossed by the snow-covered streams whose frozen courses are marked by the footprint, of animals come down to the banks in the night...
...The conductor asked the passengers to disembark and the males among them—ah, Austria!—to heave to and rock the car past the dead-point...
...Accidents on Der Igler are, like the Austrians themselves, always frivolous and charming...
...it was straddling the track of the electrified Austrian railroad, and the trolley-rod was touching a dead-point where the wires of the two lines crossed...
...by municipal bus, also painted red, it is only 3.125 miles, but the bus fare is 20 cents, so nobody takes the bus, only foreigners...
...The conductor tweeted his whistle...
...it rattles and rolls and rocks and lurches and howls and whines all the way up to Igls...
...he said, and added, "Old age...
...The mountain drops sheer from the track, now on one side, now on the other...
...The first was on Number One, between Wilten-platz and Berg Isel...
...Then he uncouples the trolley-car so that it can go into the slot and come around in front of the two little trailer cars to pull them—restrain them, rather—on the way down to Innsbruck...
...It still is...
...It still is...
...Do we anathematize the Italians for telling us to turn off at Poggibonsi for San Gimignano...
...In the winter, trees borne down by the weight of the snow crash on the track, in spring the thawing and freezing spread the rails and the flash floods wash them away...
...At Berg Isel the survivors piled out, as usual, and transferred to Der Igler...
...The two trailer-cars also have platforms, open to the Tyrolean weather, with space, of course, for skis, and two corner seats, for one person each, on each platform...
...You say "Igls" to the conductor and hand him two Austrian schillings, or eight cents, and he gives you a transfer...
...The pink peak of Patscherkofel shows on the right side of Der Igler through a break in the forest's plume...
...Rails and ties lie alongside the station which, like all of the stations on Der Igler, is only a three-sided shanty...
...And once you have ridden the wind with it, you can only say, as the French say of such trolley-cars and such daughters, formidable...
...Der Igler made the usual stop at the Aldrans station, which is really a mile or so above Aldrans...
...Der Igler consists, actually, of a little trolley-car pulling two still littler cars on, of course, a narrow-gauge track...
...Der Igler, squealing and squirming, pushes its prow through the stillness and splits it, and the stillness closes up again behind it...
...This fall all classroom subscriptions will start with the September issue, including The New Soviet Challenge, at no increase in price...
...We were rolling along when an automobile cut in front of the car and the motorman put the brakes on...
...There's Innsbruck, min-iscule now, on the left again, on the right again...
...We turn off...
...Der Igler romps down the home stretch like a puppy that's been chasing a tin-can tied to its tail and finally got rid of it...
...Then there's a little tunnel and the woods open up on the left, and away down below is Schloss Ambras, one of the Hapsburg palaces that is now a museum...
...it reminds me of myself and of my father's observation, "Boy, you have a champagne appetite on a beer income...
...Prior to its electrification its actual running time was from 30 to 35 minutes...
...Above Tantegert the grade is steeper—four-point-five per cent—and the woods change to forests...
...School Department The Progressive Madison, Wisconsin gone, everything's gone but the woods, birch and pine at first, and then spruce and fir, and the single serpentine track of Der Igler winds around through the evergreen Titans up to their knees in snow...
...The gates at the end of each car hook and unhook, and the passengers unhook and hook them themselves...
...We were not long out of Berg Isel when Der Igler stopped and began to roll backward down the mountain toward Innsbruck...
...Der Igler screeches and squeals...
...again, and there's Innsbruck, in still smaller miniature, on the right...
...In addition, it whistles...
...Unadvertised and uncelebrated among the great funicular railways that go up the mountains everywhere, Der Igler, seen sitting on the level at Berg Isel, looks like one of those primordial Toonervilles maintained in museums for the edification of the young in the fogeyness of their forebears...
...As the eagles fly, Igls is only two miles from Innsbruck, but high as the eagles fly in Bombay, they would have to fly still higher in the Tyrol, on account of the Alps...
...The trolley-rod was bent and had lost contact with the trolley-wire, and this, it was explained by the passenger next to me on the bench, was not uncommon on Der Igler...
...They told the Austrians what to do when the two trains met and the Austrians said they would (as they always do) and then collided head-on...
...Der Igler Express is the trolley-car from Innsbruck to Igls...
...Der whistle blew, Der Igler shuddered and shook, and we were off again...
...The motorman threw the throttle...
...Tantegert is not even a wide—just a flat—place in the road with signs of timbering far up above...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
