Reporter Jennifer Maloney Likes Trains

Jennifer Maloney, of the Wall Street Journal

Jennifer Maloney likes trains. No, that's not strong enough. Jennifer Maloney loves trains -- she dotes on them. And why not? It was a train that saved her life and set her on the journalist's exciting and remunerative path.

On a hike across Lake Winnemucca during the dry season in Nevada as a teenager, Maloney was set upon by a herd of feral merino sheep. Just as they closed in on her, their fangs dripping with lanolin, she spotted train tracks, with a locomotive pulling train cars headed her way. As the rabid sheep made for her jugular vein, she leaped into an empty boxcar and was thus saved from a sheepish death. Exhausted with terror, she immediately fell into a deep slumber.

When the train pulled into Primm, a kindly conductor found her still asleep in the boxcar. Rather than turn her in as a vagrant, he took her to his home and fed her beetroot souffle to build up her strength before sending her back home. His parting words to her as he put her on the train back East were:  "Never trust anything you don't read in the local newspaper." 

Ms. Maloney never forgot that sage piece of advice. In a few years she was a star reporter for Newsday, and then came to the Wall Street Journal to report on book publishing, cultural institutions, and trains. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Xhosa and Michif. 

Today she limits her writing to stories about the liquor and tobacco industries (she lost a bar bet.)

She enjoys touring gypsum mines and eating at restaurants that still use flypaper. She is working on a history of cow catchers, which is already out of print.  

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