The Cookie Express

Until they got to know the trainmen, the two widows could scarcely have been more isolated. Their three-room cottage sits up in the sere San Bernardino Mountains, on the desert's run northeast of Los Angeles. They have no car or telephone; their mailbox is a mile and a half down a dusty track filled with gulleys and rattlesnakes. But every day a Southern Pacific freight snakes uphill just 25 yds. from their door. For the past five years, Ronnie McGillick, 67, and Loretta Tumulty, 74, have been giving cookies to the train crews. So far, they have passed out more than 50,000.

When a train comes through a pass two miles down the track, a crewman toots. That gives the women time to get out to the track with two bags of cookies -- one for the men on the engine, the other for the two in the caboose. In return, the crews drop off newspapers, magazines and books. They have given the widows a transistor radio and a television set, and often bring their families up to visit on their days off. Last Christ mas, the 42 crewmen who had passed through during the year collected $110 to supplement the widows' combined pension of $50 a week. "Since I was a lit tle girl, I've always waved at trains," ex plains Mrs. McGillick. "That's how it started here -- just waving."

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