Pelican Road (2008)

Howard Bahr's novel, copyrighted in 2008, takes its title from the railroad men's name for the two hundred and seven miles of Southern Railway main line between Meridian, Mississippi, and New Orleans. Its crews, among them the engineer A. P. Dunn and the conductor Artemus Kane, work the line through the days before Christmas, and the young telegrapher Donny Luttrell keeps the lonely station at Talowah. (Open Library)

Watches

Waltham watch: Sent to the boxcar station at Talowah, Donny, called College Boy by the lumbermen, learns the trainmen's signals and rules and takes a beating to earn a place at their noon table. By autumn he has a telegrapher's "fist" and no longer asks for repeats, and he goes up to Meridian and charges a gold Waltham watch and chain to his father's account, then talks the stores department into a cap with a brass plate. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He went up to Meridian one day and charged a gold Waltham watch and chain to his father’s account. (Howard Bahr, Pelican Road, scan cataloged as MacAdam/Cage, 2012, p. 122; he is introduced as the Talowah operator on p. 110; Internet Archive scan OCR)