PS: Lady Firestorm and I just finished watching “The House on Haunted Hill,” you know, the one from 1958 with Vincent Price and Richard Long?
Can’t believe that silly thing had us terrified as kids! Lady F ran up the stairs and hid in her bedroom over it, while I on the other side of town buried my head in the couch!
But hey, when we were kids that was one of the movies you HAD to see, like “The Crawling Eye” or “Attack of the Crab Monsters!”
What’s this have to do with trains? Not a damn thing.
We run the Pumpkin Express train here at the Cuyahoga Valley RR. - Train ride out to a farm market- Drop the kids off were they pick out a pumpkin and decorate it. We pick them up on the way back.
Just steering the Holoween thread toward trains while I’m waiting for the trick or treaters to show up.
Hardly any trick or treaters here - used to get bunches, but there’s not many kids on my street any more.
We ran our pumpkin trains last weekend. Ride out to the “Punkin Patch” and pick out a pumpkin. I’m usually the patch master, which can be good and can be bad. The kids aren’t bad (and usually neither are the parents), but Mother Nature doesn’t always cooperate. This is just after noon at the patch on Saturday…
I had to cut short a day of train-watching to get home and anticipate the hordes for the designated trick-or-treating hours. That was a bummer–had I stayed at Oak Park an hour longer…and at Elmhurst an hour longer…I would have netted two more manifest trains to discover interesting freight cars on. How do I know? Because I saw both of them while traveling on scoots meeting them on the main line! Talk about “Booooo!”
Anyway, our first trick-or-treater, intentionally or not, was our mail lady–she was wearing a hoodie with a face above her forehead…so we gave her a treat. Other than that, we had a good number of little or not-so-little kids this year–considerably more than the last two or three. The most delightful surprise was our neighbors–they have a nine-year-old son and the parents were taking him around. Dad was in an old(er) man’s mask with a long, flowing white beard. I would not have recognized them were it not for the barking of their two little dogs, which I hear often.
Well, it’s past 9:00 PM, 2100 hours for you vets out there, and here in Henrico the “trick-or-treating’s” over, 43 kids all told and one mom dressed as a surgeon from the time of the “Black Death.” College girl I suppose.
Those punkin trains sounded like fun, would have taken the angst out of pickin’ a punkin. “What?” you say? Sure, picking out the perfect pumpkin’s almost as grueling as picking out the perfect Christmas tree!
We had 7 trick or treaters. Those 7 got a good handful of the candy each, though. Can’t have pumpkins here - idiots would smash them. If they did it after halloween, nobody would care - but they always do it before. Kind of idiotic.
Just doing my part to keep the thread railway-related, on a sidenote I don’t think we drew 10 kids this year, all the families seem to have fled to the suburbs where the candy is fancier and more plentiful. The old neighborhood just ain’t the same without 'em.
We had a lot fewer trick-or-treaters tonight. In years past, several hundred came in from outside the neighborhood, but we think they mostly went to a big festival in town. Hooray!! High temp here set a record for the day, 89 degrees, so definitely no snow to contend with. To keep it train-related, didn’t see a single train today.
I went and watched trains tonight, instead of sitting at home and contending with teenagers, costumed in their school clothes (i.e.: a black hoodie), kicking the door and demanding candy. My house was dark and all I have is a few dents in my lower door panel… but you can’t really tell the ones inflicted tonight from the ones installed the previous few years.
Driving home, I did see a few children dressed in costumes and being escorted by adults and they seemed to be having a good time.
We had 238 kids last night. There were some great costumes, many homemade, but very well done. One young girl was dressed like a lady from the 1940’s, makeup and all. Should have gotten & picture as it was the best of the evening. Some older kids, but all in costume & enjoying themselves, so I don’t mind. They were all polite as well, with thank you & Halloween greetings. I have always enjoyed Halloween because it’s my birthday as well. For a kid, what’s better than all that candy & presents too.
Thanks all for the great responses, I had no idea this discussion would be so successful!
SD70, that photo of the 2850 is fantastic, Lady Firestorm went nuts over it! In fact, she says the “evil eyes” remind her of the “bad guy” cars in the old “Speed Racer” cartoon series.
And TCWright, 238 kids? That’s amazing, like the old days of the “Baby Boom” at it’s height. Is there something in the water out there in Pittsburgh?
By the way, anyone remember the “Milk Shake” candy bars? Man, how I miss those things!
Balt, your memory is perfectly intact, Hollywood Candy made the Zero bar, the Milk Shake bar, and the Pay Day bar. Hershey’s bought the Hollywood Candy Company and kept the Pay Days and Zeros in production, but dropped the Milk Shakes.
Nice lady from the local power company e-mailed me today that an easement they need to move their lines for one of our bridge replacement project crosses land owned by an NS subsidiary (Delaware Lines, LLC, conveyed from ConRail), and so could take up to 6 months to obtain.
I said to her, "Halloween was Monday, it’s not nice to scare me 2 days later . . . "
What will be really terrifying is when I tell the project’s ROW and scheduling people that’s what they’re facing. (Evidently they had no clue, and this could set that part back as much as a year. They want almost complete ownership of that strip, but in Pennsylvania no one can condemn land from a railroad without a PUC order, which can easily take that long and more if the railroad resists. Will be interesting to watch, and maybe some heads really will roll . . . ).
