One of my favorite books, when I was a child, was Watty Piper’s “The Little Engine that Could,” the story of the little blue engine that pulled a train filled with “wonderful things” for “good little boys and girls on the other side of the mountain.”

The little engine was not sure that she could pull the train all the way up the mountain, but she kept saying, “I think I can. I think I can, I think I can.” She persevered, accomplished the task, and then said, “I thought I could. I thought I could, I thought I could.”

As a child, I was unaware that the book was teaching its readers about the importance of taking on difficult challenges and sticking to those tasks.

Today, when I read Piper’s book, first published in 1930, what strikes me is that it embodies a longtime American core value, the work ethic. If you work hard, you will surmount difficulties. Another guideline to living is also contained within the book. If, like the little engine, you see that you will make people happy by helping, you offer to help.

Various children’s books about trains, from other eras, conveyed different messages about how to live one’s life. Gertrude Crampton’s “Tootle,” in the Little Golden Book series, tells the story of Tootle, the little engine that loved to go off the tracks and play in the meadow with the buttercups, the butterflies, the green frog, and the strong black horse.

One evening, the chief oiler finds grass between Tootle’s wheels. The next day, a smiling Tootle makes a daisy chain, and the first assistant oiler finds a daisy in Tootle’s bell. By the end of the book, Tootle has learned “the most important” lesson taught in the Lower Trainswitch School for Locomotives: “… most of all Stay on the Rails No Matter What.” He is now famous, and he teaches that lesson to the young locomotives.

First published in 1945, Tootle teaches a lesson that fits in well with America’s conformist society of the 1950s. People should all look, talk, dress and think alike. They should stay on the tracks, no matter what. They are to be punished for going off to play in the meadow.

In 1971, another train book told a different story. Bill Peet’s “The Caboose Who Got Loose” traces the history of Katy Caboose, who does not want to be at the end of the long freight train. She would like to get loose. She says, “If you wish hard enough then your wish might come true.” She wishes “that she someday could be / Something quiet and simple like a lovely elm tree, Or a … barn … alone on a hill” or a house in a small village, where she could relax, or a cabin in a pine forest, “[t]o live there in the trees where it’s peaceful and quiet.”

By the end of the book, she comes loose from the train, and lands between two tall pine trees. A train crew searches for her, cannot find her, and she lives happily ever after high up in the trees with her neighbors, the squirrels and the birds. Peet writes, “At last she was free, just as free as the breeze /And how Katy did love it up there in the trees.”

Katy, the free and loose caboose, seems to embody some of the values of the 1960s and 1970s. For one thing, every individual should do his or her own thing. One can be free of society. For another, a woman does not have to stay at the end of the train, being silently pulled along the track. She can become independent. (Note, though, that she does not lead the train, nor does she want to, although by the early 1970s, the woman’s movement might have preferred that Katy ask to become chief engine.)

In what, at first glance, might seem like a return to “The Little Engine that Could,” in Rob and Amy Spence’s 1999 “Clickety Clack,” we see a train filled with what would appeal to children. This time, instead of toys and good things to eat, the train carries quacking ducks, stomping elephants, talking yaks and tumbling acrobats. The lesson imparted is by Driver Zach, who yells, “Keep it down,” and is happy only when “the only sound you can hear, in fact, is the sound of the wheels on the red track.”

What about other children’s books about trains? Not surprisingly, a few of them reflect the emphasis of our era upon the importance of information. Tony Mitton’s and Ant Parker’s 1998 “Terrific Trains” gives its readers factual information about rails, freight cars, and switches. Anastasia Suen’s 1998 “Window Music” describes the things one sees out the window during a train journey from the country to the city.

Shirley Neitzel’s 1999 “I’m Taking a Trip on My Train” talks about what boxcars, gondolas, tankers and locomotives are. A mother tells her child, “Before going to bed, pick up this freight yard.” Anne Rock Well’s 1988 “Trains” presents facts about monorails, diesel and steam engines, subways and elevated trains.

Chris Van Allsburg’s “The Polar Express” teaches a very different lesson, a lesson of faith and miracle. An old man recalls a long-ago Christmas Eve, when he was a young boy. A friend had told him that there is no Santa Claus. He remembers the train that stopped in front of his house that Christmas Eve and took him and other children to the North Pole. He remembers the silver sleigh bell that Santa gave him. Its music was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. He remembers that only he and his sister, but not his parents, could hear the bell’s magical music.

We read, “At one time, most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them …” The book ends with these words, “Though I’ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for all who truly believe.”

This book about trains sends a strong message. Have faith in a world of wonder. If you don’t believe, you won’t hear the beautiful music of the silver sleigh bell.

What can we conclude from our short journey through train books? We learn that our children are being trained — to work hard, help others, stay on the tracks, hang loose, be quiet, and learn facts — as they read a treasured bedtime story. In the case of “The Polar Express,” they are taught that no matter what anyone tells them about sticking to the matter-of-fact world of the rational, there also exists the unseen realm of imagination.

These lessons, the down-to-earth and practical, and the whimsical ones that nurture our children’s imagination, are all part of that special joy of taking trips through the pages of books about trains, and through the pages of books well beyond the world of railroad tracks.

Former Lewiston resident Ellen Chances, of New York City, is a professor of Russian literature at Princeton. She was inspired to write this column after seeing the Sun Journal’s coverage of the Great Falls Model Railroad Club’s holiday celebration on Jan. 1.

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