From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

To most people, railroads mean passenger trains; they, after all, carry people. But most of the stock rattling and rumbling along U.S. tracks these days is hauling freight and is doing so, as TIME contributing editor Hugh Sidey reports in this issue, with surprising vigor. "A couple of years ago," says Sidey, "I began noticing brief newspaper items about various freight routes and companies. And they didn't mention government subsidies. Freight was making money."

Sensing an untold story, Sidey hit the rails to interview people at all levels of the freight industry. He rode a Conrail train up the west side of the Hudson River Valley, getting an engineer's-eye view of spectacular scenery; half a continent away, he observed the switchings, couplings and uncouplings at a vast freight yard in North Platte, Nebraska. These experiences called up memories of his Iowa childhood and his long romance with railroads: "I remember as a four-year-old hearing the train whistle on a winter morning and pressing my nose against an icy windowpane to catch a glimpse of a steam engine chugging past our house."

The assignment also brought some unexpected drama when, near the end of Sidey's reporting tour, floods overwhelmed the upper Mississippi valley. Flying over the inundated areas, Sidey looked down on the Midwest of his youth utterly changed. Taking a break from freight, he gave us vivid reporting from the centers of devastation.

Sidey is not surprised that following a story into the U.S. heartland was so rewarding. Although he has spent 35 years reporting and writing for TIME in Washington -- experience he put to good use in this week's Essay on the pressures and perils of working there -- he has never lost his fascination for what he calls "the machines and methods of America: mining, cattle ranching, plows, the things that make this country work." As a journalist new to the Capitol, he was once approached in a Senate hallway by Lyndon B. Johnson, then the majority leader: "He stared at me down that long nose of his and said, 'I've never known a reporter without a character flaw. What's yours?' " Sidey did not confess then, but he is willing to come clean now: "I've always been more interested in interior America than in events overseas. If I were given a choice between assignments in Omaha and Paris, I'd choose Omaha." Omaha, not to mention Sidey's readers and colleagues, may be inclined to view this lapse leniently.