Spent my formative years in the 50s living literally a stone’s throw from the S.P. mainline, but can’t recall my first railroad memory. The childhood railroad experience I remember best and never recovered from was a holiday season visit to the East Bay Model Engineers Society’s layout on Halleck St. in Emeryville, Ca.
Regards, Peter
Reading the above replies, makes me feel that I’m not the only dinosaur among us.
I was lucky as a child of the late 30’s, and growing up on the Erie main line through Allendale, NJ. Then came the West Shore/ NYC in Teaneck, NJ and an endless number of K3q’s every day passing through town.I was even more lucky to have had two uncles who ran steam; Uncle Ike on the Erie, and Uncle Ed on the Pennsy/Reading Seashore Lines. I rode with Ike often in his K1, and once with Ed in a K4 doing over 80 knots and scaring the hell of both my dad and myself…but we both became hooked for life from these days. Then just after the big war, Dad became a serous model rail eventually having a Hi-rail layout of immense proportions. My serious epipthany was after reading the John Allen articles in the early 60’s.
HZ
My Dad took us when I was 10 to Florida by train. It was 1970 a year before Amtrak was formed. We rode the then new Penn Central Metroliner from NYC to DC where after an overnight stay we boarded the Seaboard Coast Line to Florida. I remember fighting with my br all night and that the train split in two separate runs in Jacksonville (I think).
I was lucky enough to have two sets of childhood train memories. My grandparents owned a bungalow colony in Highview NY. One rainy April morning in 1957 I rode with them to the Highview station so my Grandpa could drop off a package before the train departed westbound through the tunnel. I marvelled at the big grumbling F unit in those unique O&W colors. I was witnessing a historical moment–a few months later the line closed down and all the track pulled up for scrap.
Every summer us kids would trek down to the tunnel mouth to cool off from the summer heat. The temperature would drop 30 degrees or more a few steps inside the portal. But nobody dared to walk much further, spooked by tales of falling rock and ghosts (an O&W worker did hang himself near the station after hearing the bad news about his employer) Far as the falling rocks, the tunnel was a mile long bore through unstable slate bedrock, and the older kids came back reporting slabs of fallen rock that had collapsed from the roof, some refrigerator-sized.
Finally one summer our entire day camp with counsellors took an expedition through the tunnel armed with a load of flashlights. We climbed over several of those massive rockfalls, oblivious to the fact that another one could occur right over our heads at any time. Halfway through, since the tunnel curved, we lost sight of daylight ebbing into the portal behind us, and a counsellor ordered us to switch all our flashlights off. Screams and hollers ended that frightening moment. The girls and the younger kids turned back, and the rest of us soldiered on to the other end, earning our guts and glory awards.
I grew up in the Bronx, NY like Paul and was a subway riding fanatic as a kid. I could ride from one end of the city and back for fifteen cents, shunning a much shorter bus ride just to run down to Manhattan and back up to the Bronx on a different line. I stood up against the glass of the front door of the lead car so I could see all the underground lines and where they
My dad took me from Baltimore to NYC on the PRR in 1962. I still have the passenger time table. Tickets were $15.90 roundtrip.
Before that I saw the Ma and Pa once crossing York Rd in my hometown of Towson. That had to be between 1954 and 58. I never saw it crossing again. I also saw a double headed steam PRR somewhere in PA on the way to my grandmothers. I was old enough to count the cars but too young to appreciate I was seeing the last steam engine I would see in routine service.
I must have been about 4, when my dad took my mother, brother, and sister to Scandinavia (Wisconsin) to catch the train to Stevens Point (20 some miles, don’t recall if it was GB&W or Soo). He then drove to Point to pick us up. Someplace I have 8mm movie of the arrival, the only steam powered ride I’ve ever had.
Later, around 1957 my friend Jimmy and I were riding our bikes near the tracks in Iola, and ended up talking with the engine crew of a GPsomething; we were offered a cab ride (about 1 block long) and jumped at the chance. We found out that this was their last run to town, as the 4 mile Iola Northern trackage to Scandinavia was being shut down.
Gary
I should have been more clear, as I grew up in Manhattan (215th St, above Broadway) and could look east from the apartment window (past the 215th street elevated subway in Manhattan) and see the NYC trains running along the Bronx side of the river.
I just wanted to make the clarification, lest someone infer that I am a Yankees fan! Better to root for either team that left, than the Yankees, IMHO.
[#oops][bow][pi][B]
Translation: Dear Paul, my apologies. will you accept a Bronx pizza and a cold beer?
I have never, and shall never, turn down a free, cold beer. The pizza is ok also, but do they deliver to TX?
What a great thread!
Thanks everyone, for sharing these memories. They make a very enjoyable read. Don’t stop!
Sadly, Robert Kennedy’s funeral train, as it went through my home town in New Jersey. I was little, my mom took me up to tracks to watch the train go by. I remember all the people there to pay respects, some standing dangerously on a railroad bridge.
Another memory I have was riding the the number 7 Flushing Line from Queens to Manhattan about once a week or so and passing over the Sunnyside yards with all those colorful boxcars.
As I remember so many decades ago…my grandfather and father got this hobby started. The PRR Panhandle Division ran through Carnegie PA, trains approaching the station eastbound would whistle at Walkers Mill and westbound trains either on the main or coming onto the main from the Scully Yard cutoffs would whistle at Wagner tower. Once we heard the whistle, my grandfather and I ran to the red brick platform crossing the PRR Carnegie yard tracks in the process. Remember those F units,coal drags, gons and flats loaded with steel, and an occasional hotbox. The platform in this sweeping curve was maybe 20 feet wide and what a rush to get caught between two freights running at track speed. Also got my first cab ride in a new PRR GP-9 from Carnegie yard to Scully Yard and back. He owned a shoe store at the time and sold work shoes to many of the PRR crews. As for my dad…he made sure Lionel trains where part of every Christmas starting at the tender age of one. The PRR Congressional set and Wabash F unit’s still ply the rails on my current O gauge layout. Also have my grandfather’s standard gauge freight train,track,switches and transformer packed in a bin. This dates back to 1914 and is operational. Those Lionel trains invoke such wonderful memories of Christmas past and the family members who got this lifetime hobby started. Fast forward a few decades…I had the pleasure of knowing Cecil H. He was a lifelong PRR employee along with his father. He wrote a book on the PRR Panhandle Division. If memory serves me correctly…his father opened Wagner Tower @1953. I visited Cecil on a fall afternoon @1988 I think??. Photos taken inside and out. His shift ended at 3:30, we walked out and padlocked the tower for the last time. What an ending to a peice of PRR history. Nearly every vestige of the PRR is gone from Carnegie but the memories will accompany me as I board the train for that final ride home.
The “Southern Crescent” leaning into the curve at Fairfax Station, silver behind the covered wagons…4501 at speed in the same place, bursting into sight minutes after the sounds heralded her coming…Southern Geeps and SDs running long hood forward…a Geep in the turntable pit at Brunswick, with a steaming crane and more employees than I ever saw there, before or since, struggling to rerail it…Fs on the Brunswick Line, a 2-10-4 and a Royal Hudson…the American Freedom Train at Alexandria…E-8s and Heritage cars when my friend’s family took me along to pick his grandma up from the “Silver Star.” Pot Yard, almost empty, save for a switcher by the hump, and PC jade green cars on the Long Bridge, trimmed with rust.
I can’t remember that specific!
Not because it was all that long ago or because the memory is shot. There’s just too much in there to sort out. I grew up in Butler, PA. Pullman was already closed by then, although Trinity would use the bones for a few more years. But, even by that late of a date, Butler still sported no less than three railroads. There was just so much going on that a first? No idea.
I do recall seeing a high nose GP something in Conrail colors moving through the miniscule speck of Cabot PA on the ex-PRR Butler Branch sometime around 1988. Couldn’t have been much later than that, because the tracks were gone not long after that. I also have memories of seeing B&LE F7s, and those were gone by 1989.
A Conrail hotshot rolling by with 4 standard cab EMD units, while on a bike ride with my dad. (I was 3-4 at the time.)
Between that, and seeing a different CR standard cab GE up close, while around 4 years old, my choice in hobby was made.
I grew up in Phoenixville, PA, not far from the steel company. I have memories of the small switcher pulling cars filled with slag - and having to wait at the crossing until the train went by and they swept the street. Also remember counting cars whenever we were at a crossing. Then, of course, were the models, Lionel and Marx that we put up at Christmas (and my Uncle, who put up American Flyer trains).
I grew up across the street from a railroad, so trains going by was normal for me since I came home from the hospital. When I was little I would wave at the trains from our fenced-in yard, and when it got dark in the winter I would flash our porch light at them and they’d wave or blow the whistle. Just after I turned five, and just before Christmas, the train stopped in front of the house and the crew gave me a railroad flashlight (silver cylinder with a long red plastic attachment) so I could use that to wave to them at night.
My first (and when you are over 70, dimmest) train related memories occured in the very early 1950s, when Boston MA, had railroad YARDS. On Sunday morning Dad, (who was a closet railfan) and I would get up early and head over to the Boston and Albany’s Beacon Park yard in Alston MA. Sometimes we would find a big, hulking black monster of a steam locomotive under the coal chute getting its tender filled. The most impressive part of this memory was the rumble of the cascading coal.
After Beacon Park, it was across the Charles River, through Cambridge and Boston’s West End to the Prison Point bridge which spanned the Boston and Maine tracks, between the Boston engine terminal and North Station. The engine terminal was our focus with a lot of steam but the diesel had a toe-hold that would only strengthen in the coming months.
Back across Boston to the south side, we went into South Station to buy the Sunday papers and see if anything was stirring. Usually, it was as quiet as a library, with maybe one each, New Haven and, B&A Alco switchers idling at the bumper posts. On the way home, a stop at the Southampton Street roundhouse was in order. There were cold New Haven steamers on the tracks around the house that dad knew would never run again but, my young mind did not grasp. Once the steamers were gone our visits on Sunday morning began to be further and further apart, and not last as long. When my brother and sister came along, those Sunday mornings for just me, dad, and our railroad yards came to a close.
The steam is long gone along with all the diesels that replaced it. Dad went to his final rest in 1994. North and South Stations are strange, alien places. And all of Boston’s railroad yards followed everything else, into oblivion. Will I be going back to Boston? N
In the early 50’s my dad took me to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin from our home in Muscoda to see the dieselized Milwaukee Road Zephyr. It was about a 100 mile round trip on two-lane roads back then.
We make it to the station with a few minutes to spare. Since Prairie du Chien was a passenger stop then, the arrival was kind of anti-climatic compared to the previous streamlined steam locos and steam switchers I was used to seeing in our home town lumber yard/pallet mill and at the Kraft cheese factory/warehouse.
Still a good memory though.