Don’t know whether this belongs on TRAINS Transit forum or here. Any one who enjoyed the Erie Boosters article some time ago might enjoy this posting. Here goes.
As a teenager, I was not very athletic and someone underweight and scrawny. So my highschool football coach made me first assistant manager and then manager the next two years. CGS regularly used Campus Coach Lines, still in business as NYCity charter bus operation, for almost all special transportation. But I was always a railfan. CGS played two games with both Morristown Academy in Morristown, New Jersey, and with Woodmere Academy on Long Island. Of course I had to check whether the school would save money by group rates on the commuter trains, and of course the saving was substantial. Morristown Academy meant boarding the AA local at 96th and Central Park West, getting off at Hudson Terminal (later to be WTC), and walking about 1/3-mile to the Barkley Street ferry of the DL&W and riding one of the classic Dover-bound mu electrics to Morristown, with the football field less than 1/4-mile away. The school furnished me a pack of nickles for the subway ride going, and on the return the students would pay the subway fare, since it was a replacement for their normal transit ride home. Thge ferry was free with the group railroad ticket, indeed, my memory is that in one direction or the other, freeloaders could ride since no one checked tickets in one or the other directions. I knew enough to direct the other students to the appropriate subway station on the way home to get them to their homes as quickly as possible, and some were commuters from Brooklyn, including my classmate and cousin David Lewis.
Going to Woodmere was also easy. But at that time, service to Woodmere was given mostly by trains running a loop service, going out via Jamaica and Valley Stream and returning by the pr