Old School Ties

By Michael Demarest

ALL ABOARD WITH E.M. FRIMBO by ROGERS E.M. WHITAKER & ANTHONY HISS 235 pages. Grossman. $8.95.

The estimable Ernest M. Frimbo is the Baron Munchausen of railroads, with a puff of Lucius Beebe and a chuff of Cervantes thrown in. Frimbo--the "world's greatest railroad buff'--is the brain child of Rogers E.M. Whitaker, who has himself bumpety-thumped across 2,334,000 miles of rails from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Ill. By inventing Frimbo--lexicographer, gourmet, jazz fan, connoisseur of contessas and, of course, compulsive investigator of trains--Whitaker has transmuted what might have been a soda-water sermon on the glory and decline of the trains into a Jules Vernean adventure that takes him from the Casbah to the Caspian Sea, Buffalo to Kyoto.

Reporting on his travels, Voyageur Frimbo rails--so to speak--against what he calls "infernal combustion."

What, he asks, is a car? "A car is a rolling sneeze, a slice of selfishness." Train travel, by contrast, can be "the most nearly perfect way of moving from one place to another." In many nations, notably France, Italy, Germany and Japan, there are commodious sleepers, cooked-aboard meals, and the kindly service that has been supplanted in the U.S. by the do-it-yourselfism of Howard Johnson motels and Amtrak sandwich bars. Even the U.S. expense-account ethos has done little to encourage elegance or comfort on the rails.

Whitaker-Frimbo and Co-Author Anthony Hiss have compiled a tingling compendium of great train rides, past and present. Some that Frimbo describes, like a Washington-Mexico City-San Diego odyssey aboard the privately owned Pennsylvania, are for the chosen few. Other trains that he recalls, now "annulled forever, the tracks torn up." include the old Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn, India's His Highness the Nizam's Guaranteed State Railway, and that sans pareil the London-Edinburgh Flying Scotsman, now privately owned by a wealthy English railroad fan.

But there are exotic trains still in ser vice. The Trans-Siberia Express is running, though there is a strong possibility of having a lady commissar as your sleepermate. Angola's Benguela line, whose locomotives are the world's most fragrant (they burn eucalyptus logs), huffs up and down mountainsides, as does Chile's Antofagasta & Bolivia. The great Sud Express from Paris to Madrid -- with a stop at the Spanish border for a change from standard-to broad-gauge (more than half a foot wider) undercar riage -- still hauls magnificent Pullmans with inlaid-wood furniture and three-star menus. There are other royal rides for those who like to look an English cowslip in the eye or find out for them selves that Mussolini did indeed make Italy's trains run on time. "For God's sake," adjures Frimbo, "get on a train!"

Frimbo, at his polemic best, reasons that for a fraction of the money the U.S.

lavishes on concretizing the countryside for unsafe, gas-voracious automobiles, the nation could rebuild its rail road beds and develop the nonpolluting trains that successfully operate in other coun tries. As it is, this Super-Chief of a book points out with some justice, "the U.S.

is rapidly becoming an undeveloped country." A country, moreover, whose pristine beauties and excitements are now largely invisible to those who tra verse it.

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