Tonight after dinner, I took my boys into town to watch the evening CSX train that works the interchange at Apex, NC. As I heard the air horn in the distance, it reminded me of my own childhood, and that timeless sound of a distant train.
I grew up in Greenlawn, NY, on the Port Jefferson branch of the Long Island Rail Road. We had roughly 20-24 trains come through town each day. I lived two blocks from the tracks.
When I was very young, maybe 5 years old or so, I was scared of thunderstorms. On Long Island, it seemed most of the worst thunderstorms came at night (these came from squall lines that developed over Pennsylvania in the afternoon, coming across New Jersey in the evening, and hitting Long Island after dark). I would close my eyes as tight as I could and duck under the covers to keep from seeing the lightning, and would cram my fingers in my ears to drown out the thunder. This never worked, of course.
But, because of the frequency of trains, there was almost always a train due toward the end of the storm. I remember clearly that sound of an Alco C420 or EMD GP38-2 air horn piercing the darkness and the fading rumble of the retreating storm. As the pounding rain would fade, I would hear the running water from the downspouts and the whine of the downshifting diesel engnes coming to a stop at Greenlawn’s station. There was something very comforting about the sounds of “business as usual” that would lull me out from under the sheets and into a deep sleep.
Of course, my fear of thunderstorms didn’t last much past age 6 or so, and now I’m a meteorologist (and have even been known to chase a few storms!). But trains were an interesting (and surprising) part of my fascination with the weather.
Here’s me at 5, Uncle had a HO layout the he would suspend from the rafters in the garage. Sunday after church we would stop over and he would crank down the layout and run trains. Thats as close as I was allowed to get. Then not long after this photo was taken we went over to visit and I said, Where’s the trains? He said, I gave them away. [:(!] thats kind of the look I gave him and if I knew what a swear word was I would have told him what I thought of him. I think becuase we lived so close to the beach and with all the dust in the garage he had a hard time keeping the track clean and he was just frustrated with it. But it was fun while it lasted.
Dave, couldn’t agree with you more. My parents’ house was about 1/2 mile or so south of the old PRR/PC/CR main thru town here. When I 1st got into trains at the age of 11/12, I learned the differences in the horn sounds. Since I was a “B&O/Chessie” person, I strained to hear those horns, but they were further in town & less frequent (also the old NKP/NW branch run, which was similar).
On a family vacation to Tennessee in 1979, we spent the night in a motel in Ashland Ky, along US 60 & the Chessie main. I sat out till past dark watching trains until my Mom called me in-& all night those wonderful whistles kept waking me up!
Funny though-now that NS has taken over CR here, those same whistles I strained to hear are now commonplace, & hope to hear an old CR unit on a NS train now just for a memory trigger & change of pace. (I’m a mile or so further south now, but still can hear them well)
One more that sat me straight up in bed about 20 yrs ago, & that was the whistle of NKP #765 going east on a fan trip on the CR main-I could make out the smoke on the horizon & smacked myself for forgetting about it! (It made my dad’s day tho-1st time he heard a steam whistle come through town since the 50’s!)
So you’re a meteorologist? you have my upmost respect-something I’ve been interested in heavily also since a kid (but on a very amateur level) actually as I type this, my weather station says 45.7F, 55% humidity, mostly sunny tomorrow, & my rain gauge says .02" of rain since midnight last [:D]
In the late 40’s around 1948, I was about 4 and we lived in Valley Center, Kansas, across the street from the ATSF Mainline. I remember being terrified of the trains coming through town at full speed. Of course they were steam and made a tremendous amount of noise, even inside of our little frame house. The whistles roared as they went past our house, headed for main street, just a block or so a way. We were all of 300 feet from the tracks or less.
Eventually the fear turned to love as we watched those big monsters roar by. Mom sent me 8 or so miles to Grandma’s house on the Doodlebug so I’d get use to the trains. After that ride, me and trains were more than good friends.
Spent most of my childhood through high school near the ATSF mainline in Norman, OK. Memories of the Texas Chief and countless war bonnets roared by. The blue whisker freights were always struggling to pull the endless cars.
Almost never, did I remember seeing a banjo wig-wag, except the one near where my Dad once worked in Wichita. Vivid memory.
They say smell triggers the strongest memories. When ever I smell a smoke unit on a model train, it reminds me of my first Marx steamer around the Christmas tree when I was 5.[:)]
Then THAT leads to the memory of my mom yelling about the grease stains the train left on the carpet after we took the tree and train down…[:-^]
When I was a kid, we lived a couple of miles north of a flat switch yard. On summer nights, in the heat, it was hard to get to sleep, and with the windows open I could hear steam locomotives pull out a cut of cars… and slip the drivers sometimes… a very distinctive sound as the cadence would accelerate slowly and then suddenly jump to a very rapid beat before the engineer could close the throttle, and then the slow beat would start again as the drivers slowed to match the speed of the train and regained traction.
Then, I could hear a short acceleration (maybe 2 or 3 rapid, loud chuffs followed by 1 or 2 quiet ones) and in a few seconds I’d hear a car bang into others; I knew they had uncoupled a car in that short acceleration and the car had rolled into another cut of cars on some section of track… I don’t know how I knew what they were doing, but I did. Sometimes the bang was VERY loud and I wondered if the car was still in tact! I imagined that the loudest ones were empty tank cars! Sometimes they would echo many times, too.
I now wonder what people who lived closer thought of all the noise late at night!
Sometimes the sound was better described as a “BOOOOOOM”.
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Just a few nights ago I awoke laying on my side with my hand up under the pillow. My hand had “gone to sleep” and was tingling and my index finger was twitching against the pillow. The sound in my ear through the pillow was exactly the same as the chuffing of the locomotives 55 years ago as they pulled the cut of cars out! Lousy tingle in my hand, but the sound was quite pleasant!
i remember mine from the mid 60s in proctor, tx on the santa fe’s dublin subdivision. we lived close to the tracks and i loved trains(still do) so i kept a close eye on the railroad as a kid. there is a passing siding here so there were lots of meets back in the good ole days…i learned to watch the signals and i knew when a green light replaced the red, a train would show up eventually. i would wait patienly, sometimes 2-3 hours or more. blue f7s were the norm, then mixed with gp7s. i remember a gp7 one time with a very hot wheel on its way west, and a ghostly looking hobo in a gondola going to ft worth. i was on hand when they came thru and welded the rails, close enough to talk with some of the guys on the job. a few years later, we had a few cousins visiting along with some local friends and we were walking around all over this small town, like kids did back then, and a train came thru and for some reason, took the passing track instead of the main, with no meet involved. i can still see that f7 swinging off the main onto the passing track. i think they called it a slow order. a short time later, heres comes the sherrif and some local railroad people wanting to have a little talk with us and our parents. that train spotted some spikes placed on the main line and called in. we were all over the railroad in town, but not that far east where the spikes were. one santa fe guy was really mad. the local cops were much calmer…im sure we got the blame, but it definately was not us!!!
My congrats to Dave V. for starting an interesting topic. Congrats, also, to those who posted some interesting memories.
By the time our family moved to Illinois in the late 40’s, I had already resided in Texas, Tennessee, and Missouri. I can barely recall train travel before moving to a home that was really close to The Burlington triple track main line west of Chicago. I grew up there, and I could see the trains from my bedroom window if it was wintertime because there were no leaves in the trees to block the view.
At first there were steam engines including some that vibrated my bedroom door on its hinges. I do remember the early diesels including shovel noses and E5’s. Soon the steam engines were scarce and many more first generation diesels were performing the work. A train ride at Christmas time to see Santa Claus in Marshall Fields resulted in my seeing the Lionel layout in the toy department. At Union Station, I also saw many Pennsy passenger trains in the transition era, also. My first train was a Lionel.
Our family traveled quite a bit by train. Trips included (but were in no way limited to) Pennsy Broadway Linited, Santa Fe Super Chief, SP Daylights, Burlington Zephyrs, B&O Capital Limited, and IC City of Miami. There were many others. I also rode electric interurbans around Chicago. My dad was a model railroader. I followed (you guessed it) by becoming a model railroader also.
I left home at 18. By then turbo charged SD-24’s and GP-20’s were introducing the second generation of diesels on the Burlington.
…and now the CB&Q has been a fallen flag for …oh my… oh my… many years…
I was born in Staten Island, New York. The Staten Island Rapid Transit (S.I.R.T.) had 3 lines, the North Shore, South Shore, and straight down the middle from one end of the island to the other. During the 1940’s we took the train everywhere, to the amusement park, shopping stores, the movies and to the ferry terminal where we could take a ferry to Manhattan.
When I about 6 years old a neighbor gave me a set of Lionel trains. That did it I was hooked on trains ever since.
Sometimes I would take the S.I.R.T. train to the dentist and my mother would give me a note for school excusing me for half a day. The dentist would be finished in a half hour then I would spend hours looking at the switching operations in the freight yard, which was close by. I think my mother knew what I was doing but it was the only way to get me to the dentist.
Another great experience was when I had my first job in a Gypsum plant. The local freight was moving cars on the plant siding. I talked to the engineer who was standing by the track watching the fireman move the cars. He let me climb up into the engine and after a quick lesson drive the locomotive.
I am retired now and my wife and I travel each year to a different state and ride the railroads. The longest trip was to Colorado from New Jersey on Amtrak in our own compartment, which had a TV, kitchenette, and a shower in the bathroom. I trying to complete an HO model railroad following the Pennsylvania Railroad. I hope God gives me enough time to finish it.
I grew up on the south shore of Long Island, outside New York City. Unlike Dave, I seldom got to see diesels. That line is almost exclusively commuter trains, and they’re all electrified. I could hear them if the air was still and quiet from my home, but most of the time they just faded into the standard background noise of the burbs.
One year for my birthday, my Dad took me into the city to ride the subways. We took the LIRR in, and then paid our 15 cents, which was good for the whole day, as long as we stayed inside the system. It’s the only birthday that I really remember. We rode all over the place, in the front car, in the middle, and I discovered the fun of riding in the back of the train, watching the tracks behind and getting the sudden surprise of bright light as we entered a station. Maybe that day is why I model subways now.
Being raised in Kansas and Oklahoma, one cannot imagine the magnificence of what you experienced unless one has been there and done that. I’ve ridden the LIRR once out about 10 or 15 miles, cannot remember the station, seems like it was someplace in the Carribean as I recall. Seeing the city shrink and grow and seeing the ‘stuff’ along the way is way cool.
And, having ridden your Acela 4 times, WoW, the only way to travel. Better than 1st class in any airplane! Going from Manhatten to BWI in less time than it takes to get through security and get on the plane! I love staying in the hotel above Grand Central Station. The food court below is the most econmical place to eat in the city from what I can tell. My boss thought I was nuts when I only put $10 for supper. Two hot dogs and a pretzel was enough for me to feast on!
My neice took her family to NYC and complained bitterly to her dad that it was going to bankrupt them to just eat in the city. I told them, go to Penn or GCS and feed the family like the locals do!
But then, all of those are old man’s memories, not those of an innocent child!
Mid '50s childhood Summers.
Way, way back in the mists and fog of my memory there are a couple of summers that still jump out at me whenever I hear certain sounds or encounter certain smells. The hiss and '‘chuff’ of a Steamer, the smell of creosote in the summer sun, the smell of burning coal. I used to go “up north” to the UP of Michigan and spend time at my cousins house (ok, technically my Aunts home).
He lived directly across the street from tracks in Manistique. We would sit on his front porch and watch the steamers roll up and down past his house. If we were playing down the street we would run like mad back to his house when we would hear the whistle blow at the grade crossing. Down the tracks was a trestle crossing a creek and we would go and sit underneath on the support timbers and fish. No one seemed concerned about two boys sitting under the tracks fishing. The train crew would wave if they saw us and we would of course return the greeting. The warm August sun and the smell of the creosote on the timbers was so comforting that we didn’t care much if we caught anything or not. We could look up underneath the trains as they would roll over the creek, trestle vibrating under the power of the train, cinders and dust drifting down on us. Life was good.
I bought a ‘bundle’ of old RR Ties from our local ACE Hardware to line the drive and yard and now on hot August days I get to smell the creosote aroma drifting through my yard and for a few moments, return to the days of my carefree youthful summers.
sigh I miss those days. If ever a time machine (preferably a DMC model) is invented, I want to go back to those summers.
In New Britain Ct, in the mid-50’s, my father and I used to run down the end of the street to the tracks when hearing those horns at a crossing. No easy feat for my farther, lost a leg when he was a kid and walked on crutches, but man he could still move out on those things, especially when we were trying to glimpse a train. His brother was a New Haven engineer and we were always trying to catch at the helm of freight coming out Waterbury or Hartford. Tracks are still there, but the street and the New Haven are gone.
