The War Train (1981)

Brown Meggs's novel of 1916 follows Cassie McGill, an eighteen-year-old former spitball pitcher from Lincoln, Nebraska, now a helper-conductor for Pullman's Palace Car Company, who is assigned to conduct a special train carrying a squadron of the 12th U.S. Cavalry and their horses south toward the war zone. The jacket calls it fiction based on fact. (Open Library)

Watches

Hampden watch: Frozen on the platform of a freight run in a March blizzard, Cassie is inventoried down to his trainman's harness: blue serge tunic, starched collar, black silk tie, and across his flat belly a ten-karat gold vest chain from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, to which is tethered a Special Railway Model pocket watch made by the Hampden Watch Company in Canton, Ohio. It was a gift from Pa when Cassie signed on with Pullman's, cost $24.90, was warranted to pass the inspection of any railroad in the United States, and has twenty-one ruby and sapphire jewels, damaskeening in green and copper and fleur-de-lis hands. The text names the maker and the Special Railway Model and gives no movement number.

Source text: Tethered to the chain was a Special Railway Model pocket watch manufactured by the Hampden Watch Company in Canton, Ohio. It had been a gift from Pa when Cassie signed on with Pullman's. (Brown Meggs, The War Train, scan cataloged as Hamish Hamilton, 1981, p. 6, OCR line-break hyphen closed up; the price and jewels follow on the same page and the jacket flap gives his name; Open Library dates the book 1981; Internet Archive scan OCR)