Fantasy, Wishes and Imagination time- you personally get 3 hours and 3 hours only, back in time, at any time of your choosing and only for railfanning. Anywhere you want…you are whisked to the place, you can walk around, see, hear, take in the air, sights, sounds and smells, everything is real but you are incapable of interacting…for all purposes you are a phantom to all around you. You only get one choice, one location, 3 hours …and just for the heck of it you can either go alone, with a pal, or a maximum of 2 buddies. Has to be railroad…anything…a roundhouse, a station, in a caboose, trackside busy mainline, a boardroom even.
Where will you go? What day/month/year? Take anyone or by yourself? What do you want to see or even find out about? Why?
For one time and place, and one only, It would have to be Terminal Tower in the Erie’s Jersey City terminal, circa 1950, at evening rush from 4:00 to 7:00.
It’s the last hurrah for Erie steam, non-stop action starring the K1 through K5 Pacifics. A spectaular steam show courtesy of all those homeward bound commuters. And my best friend Shotgun Charlie would have to be there with me, he loves steam as much as I do.
I do have a second choice if anyone’s interested, but as the man said I’m limited to one.
I’m a phantom to all around me? Reminds me of “A Christmas Carol…”
Scrooge: Spirit, are these people real, or are they shadows?
Ghost of Christmas Present: They are real, WE are the shadows.
Erie steam would be a heckuva Christmas present, at any rate!
Wow …That sounds terrific Firelock…long live the Erie in memory and lore at least.
Can’t have anyone interacting becuase then you get into altering the past and all those conundrums so you are correct…“They are real” “We are the shadows”.
Never did warm up to Erie Lackawanna. The Erie was it’s own thing to Chicago. The Lackawanna had those tenders with the spelling of it taking up the length of the tender and conjured up Buffalo destinations in it’s day. Both were magic.
Wanswheel, I don’t know where you are, but in Peekskill,NY every Feb the town recreates Lincoln’s visit to the town. A crowd gathers and a Lincoln re-enactor gives the speech that Lincoln gave when his train stopped at Peekskill on his way to Washington, DC for his inauguration in 1861. The best part? The New York Central freight house where Lincoln’s train stopped still stands (now the Lincoln Station Museum) and “Mr. Lincoln” delivers the speech from the same spot where Lincoln actually did. http://lincolndepotmuseum.org/. Firelock, I agree that being trackside in Erie days would be great. I personally would go back to the early 1970’s to the EL in Radburn. I would actually spend 3 hours there each afternoon, watching EL E-8s on the Port Jervis trains, the new U34CHs on new push-pull commuter trains and an EL GP-7 handling the local peddler rushing back to Suffern Yard to get out of the way of the evening commuter rush. My 3 hours would end when the 6:15 from Hoboken would pull in, my father would get off the train and we would all be together as a family once again. Firelock, one more thing: Want to see what an Erie engine crew was paid in 1937? Go here: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/177315-life-in-1937
Myself, a lawn chair, an ice chest super cooling some glass bottled Coke, its summer in 1956. I position myself trackside between Alto and Slope tower along the busy PRR mainline in Altoona Pennsylvania. Here the grade steepens, a steam struggles to start its ascent over the Allegheny Mountain. Pushers, maybe steam maybe a first generation diesel, probably and EMD F unit. Brake dust from downgrade trains requires a quick quench from the cooler.
Passenger and freight trains, cabin cars, maybe catch an REA express freight with a tuscan FP9 in the lead, no doubt the westbound Aerotrain will be by. Seeing aging steam, an assortment of diesel power with their different and distinct sounds, one can only guess its maker, unassigned power passing by. My seat on the fifty yard line.
On the blue ridge around 1957 watching the coal traffic on the N&W. Y’s on the point, pushers behind. Light engines dropping down. A’s on the hotshots and maybe even some passenger consists. What a show!
My second choice, welllllllll since you forced it out of me…
Ashland, Virginia, 1943, anytime during the year. On the two track main line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad. RF&P is the only ball game in town connecting Richmond and Washington, a 100 mile racetrack where the freight and passenger trains HAVE to move, no ifs, ands or buts. We’re in the middle of World War Two and the trains, all steam-powered, are coming through one every fifteen minutes, both northbound and southbound, 24 hours a day, although three hours out of that 24 would be more than enough.
The downside, because there is one you know, is phantom that I am I’m looking at the troop trains and I know a lot of those kids won’t be coming home. Most will of course, but still there will be mothers and fathers somewhere left with a heartache only the grave will erase. It would spoil the fun a bit.
Sorry if I bummed everyone out here. Would you like a third choice?
And Miningman, “Erie-Lackawanna” may not get everyone excited, but at least it sounds like a real railroad, not like it’s erstwhile replacement, “New Jersey Transit.”
I am going to choose early November 1943 at the N&W’s East End Shops in Roanoke, Va. There I can see the world’s finest locomotives being built, including the unstreamlined J1. And, watch my father as he goes about his duties as a “Tinner”.
From there it is a very short walk over to the busy passenger station. Here every train through Roanoke funnels down through the station tracks. You can watch them from ground level or up above on the station concourse. With wartime traffic, both freight & passenger, up so high there shouldn’t be a dull moment.
I am in Silver Banquit having Rocky Moutntain Trout for lunch while passing the Book Cliffs and Castle Gate on the Rio Grande Zephyr. Leonard Bernstein himself or Tom Long is sitting across from me, and my former girlfriend, Pat Cruise is alongside me.
For myself I drew up a list of 20 places in no time at all without much thinking. Painfully crossing out destinations to get down to one I am left with: Pennsylvania Station in the Big Apple, because I never saw it, and I’m picking sometime at the height of the roaring twenties and the golden age of railroading.
I know it does not beat Rocky Mountain trout in the diner with Leonard Bernstein whilst passing through Castle Gate, or trackside wartime but I just have be outside and inside Penn Station and see the trains below.
Choosing the roaring twenties because it’s a time that the station was still fairly new and was used in a way it was exactly built for, not tainted by depression or war or decline.
I’ll ask Dave Klepper to come along because he knows his way around and Wanswheel because he will be well prepared with information.
Allentown,Spring, 1949. Preferably I would have rode in from Philadelphia on the LVT Transit Liberty Bell Route and placed myself at the LV Station early in the morning so that I could see LVT cars cross over the LV, The morning rush such as it was of LV service mostly eastbound to New York would be the main attraction and in the distance i could see some arrivals and departures at the CNJ station. My three hours would end with a streetcar ride to Bethlehem to catch a Reading train to Philadelphia.
Make it ayear earlier, 1948, so that your trip to Bethlahem can be on one of the ex-Dayton and Troy Cincinnati-curve-side interuruban cars, perhaps riding through to Easton, PA, before returning to Bethlahem.
Probably mean nothing to anyone but me. I would go back 60 years to the porch of the B&O YMCA/hospital in Brunswick, MD, right across the track from the roundhouse and engine facility between the two yards. As a kid I spent days there watching trains. Busy B&O main line along the Potomac, plus the local engine service and yard action traffic. I’d like to see if it really looked like I remember now decades later. Specifically the day a hostler, who saw me there every day, called me down and had me drive his GP7 onto the turntable, then rotate it and off to another track. I remember clicking the throttle into 3 and feeling the power of the engine respond.
Hmmm, that is very tought to answer. I would have to say on the Milwaukee Road between Milwaukee and New Lisbon, Wisconsin on May 15, 1937. There I would be able to see Milwaukee Road #2 break 112.5 mph. I would also go to see one of the greatest locomotive classes to have never been preserved.
