[This message has been edited by First Assistant (edited August 13, 2006).]
The next paragraph tells us a bit about David but it's all past stuff. Is going up a hill really important to the story? Cause if it's not I'd suggest starting at the turning point--when David meets the story you're going to tell.
“Slowly lumbered” is a redundancy. The verb lumbered means: to move in a slow, heavy and awkward way (Oxford). That gives you permission to murder that adverb
About the fragment as a whole, I think pixydust addressed the most important problem already: unless David climbing a hill in a train is a vital part of the story, you’re starting it in the wrong place.
If you want to keep the train lumbering up the hill, it wouldn’t hurt to let us know why David goes to live with Grandpa Joe or some other detail that illustrates what the story might be about.
Mentioning David’s greatest climb up to that point helps to get an idea of character but it just expands on the same subject (the train climbing). It makes me think: yes, the angle was steep, the Choo-Choo struggled, give me something new. The fact that the train moves doesn’t mean the story moves with it, because essentially, you have two paragraphs describing the same action.
Hope this helps 
Oh and I liked the title.
Nicole
Start there, I think, with that conflict. David's riding in a train; not interesting to me.
Now, maybe it's going to be derailed, or aliens are going to scoop everybody up, and you want a little life interrupted first. OK. I see a coupla possibilities:
* David has a conflict in his life already -- it's not *just* about the derailment. OK. Start with that conflict
or
* David has no conflict until the disaster strikes. You could start with, "The day the aliens kidnapped David ..."
Your stroy is about David, not about the train. It's fine to open with a line or so about the train--it can serve as a nice metaphor, and you're well on your way to having that metaphor down--but don't linger on that metaphor too long.
Also, as your story is about David, give us information that would be relevant to him, that he could have access too. Like pixydust said, how does he know what's going on with the conductor? Don't give us the whole world, we don't need it. Give us David's world.
Anyway, that's my $0.02
Hope it helps
The biggest problem for me was POV. Others have gotten at this by mentioning how David does not know the conductor, but I see POV as a much larger problem. The very first sentence introduces me to a character. Then he is completely absent from the next three sentences - so much so, that I almost got the feeling he hadn't been there in the first place. Then David again. But then another short sentence entirely NOT about David. Then, FINALLY, the camera settles on David. If you were to cut out the non-David stuff, it would read like this:
quote:I am not by any means presuming to tell you how to write your story, but this conveys the same information (train struggling up a mountain, new experience to David but not to the others, etc.). Anyway, something to consider.
The locomotive carrying David to his new home slowly lumbered up the great incline. The climb, as terrible as it was to David, seemed to have no affect on the other passengers. His Grandfather Joe, sitting next to him, seemed quite content. It was all new to David. He was from the valley. His greatest climb, until now, was last week when he climbed up the hill behind the school to roll down through the meadow grasses and land in a sprawl, laughing, among his class mates. That climb was with his own legs. This climb was not, although it...
On an unrelated note, I would have liked to know the genre and what this is intended as (short story, novelette, 5-volume epic, etc.).
Good luck!
[This message has been edited by sojoyful (edited September 09, 2006).]
still, a fairly interesting beginning: it did make me wonder why you chose to start with an apparently ordinary train, and what the train was about. as you've said the train is important, bravo.