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A Window in Thrums
For those wondering, Thrums is a station on CPR’s Boundary Subdivision, located along the Kootenay River between Nelson and Castlegar, British Columbia. CP named their sleeping cars after stations on their lines, and Thrums was a member of the “T” class. Freight trains still pass through Thrums but, alas, the last scheduled passenger train to do so was about 50 years ago.
The sleeping car Tring ended its days as part of a restaurant near the airport at Bangor, Maine. I thought the name was strange, but attractive. It sent me to maps of Canada to find where Tring Junction was. I have no idea how Tring got to Bangor. I last saw Tring in the early 1980s when I was flying out of Bangor as a National Guard helicopter pilot. On a trip through Bangor in 2004 I found no trace of the railcar.
My dream as a teenager was to travel on both the 20th Century Limited, with its red-carpet departure from Grand Central Terminal, and also the Broadway Limjted, with the engine change at Harrisburg. Unlike you, my acoustical consulting career at Bolt Beranek Newman in Cambridge, MA, did allow me to realize this dream. Sure, the Dryfuss J3as and the K4s and T1s had been replaced with diesels. The GG1s remained. And obs cars still ran. And one still could have his pants pressed (I did) and shoes shined (I did) on the Century. And the food was just as great as ever. It was 1959, the worst of the passenger cutbacks had yet to arrive since the Post Office still used rail extensively,and I had a portion of the consulting work on McCormick Place with Skidmore Owens and Merrill.``So, I wisely planned a trip to the BBN’s NY office, where I handled local sound system design, a visit to SOM’s New York office, with a roomette on the Owl, and then the grand moment walking the red carpet at GCT to a roomette on the Century. And I used the IC Suburban electric to the job site. With its classic 1928 rattan-seat mu-cars. The excuse for returning on the Broadway, instead of going direct to Boston on the New England States, was work on the Princeton University McCosh 10 Lecture Hall. I enjoyed a seat at the rear of Mountain View (much later in life I was a small shareholder in Pullman Classics Lmt, which owned and operated the car, still often wear my official cap here in Jerusalem) as we left Chicago and raced the Century at Englewood, required an early wake-up to view the Harrisburg engine-change, and first-call for breakfast before leaving my wonderful Broadway Limited trip at Philadelphia, for a short parlor-car seat ride on a Clocker to Trenton, then a growling MP-54 to Princeton Jc., the Dinky MP-54 back and forth, and another MP-54 ride into New York, a short visit with friends, and the Owl back to Boston.
I did ride the Broadway quite frequently afterward. But it had been downgraded, without t