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A decades old, popular tale, The Baby Train is based on the same premise as the claim that a baby boom occurred after the 1965 New York City blackout: when the usual patterns of home life are disrupted, adults will spontaneously turn to sex as a form of entertainment or solace, without regard for family planning or birth control. Or, as J. Richard Udry wrote, [i]t is evidently pleasing to many people to fantasy that when people are trapped by some immobilizing event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation: Example: [Scott, 1985] Baby Train illustration © Michael Jantze Mention of The Baby Train popped up in the 1939 Christopher Morley novel, Kitty Foyle: The first thing you hear mornings in Manitou is the early Q train to Chicago. It's too early to get up and too late to go to sleep again. They have a legend out there that the morning yells of that rattler do a good deal to keep up the birth-rate. The legend also appears in a 1944 collection of jokes and anecdotes. A visitor to a small town near Charleston is struck by the number of children in that village and thinks to ask the waiter at his hotel about it. The obliging server takes the traveler to see the train tracks at the east end of town where the expresses to Miami come barreling through. It's this way, he explained. That damned train rushes by here every morning at seven o'clock. It's too early to get out of bed, and too late to go back to sleep. A trainless version of the legend appeared in a 1967 Reader's Digest: The Big Book of Urban Legends. New York: Paradox Press, 1994. ISBN 1-56389-165-4 (p. 126).
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