My family used to travel by train when I was a little kid. I remember before we got on board on the Santa Fe Super Chief for a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles my grandfather walked with me up to the front of the train to see the locomotives. There was a couple of B units which to me just seemed to be more passenger cars except that they were very noisy and then at the very front was the A unit with the classic red war bonnet paint livery which was really cool.
I also remember our sleeping car and how the top bunk opened up at night to be a bed. It was pretty small but so was I. I think I was three or four.
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As I read these replies, I see a lot of you remember steam. I just missed it, being born in 1958. That couldn’t be helped.
What really bugs me it that my family knew I was nuts about trains. We lived WALKING distance from the big (at the time) SP engine terminal with turntable in Eugene Oregon. And never was I taken over for a for so much as a glimpse. I didn’t realize how close we’d lived to it until a couple years ago. I was robbed! Dan
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Dan, your situation is a prime example of why we build model railroads. We try to capture that which we lost to “progress” or, recreate that we saw and want to preseve in miniature.
Enjoy the hobby.
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I wasn’t much of a train fan until I was an adult. Oh I’d always been interested in them and spent a lot of hours playing with the Lionel. My earliest significant memory of trains was taking the Central from Buffalo Exchange St. to Grand Central. The family with five kids went, and it was an overnight ride in coach. I remember the dark stairs and platform at Buffalo, and for some reason I remember seeing the platform at Utica. On the return trip, I remember seeing the train sweeping around a long curve along the Hudson.
Three occurrances really lit my interest. I remember when they were running steam excursions, sometime in the 60s, and we were driving in Lockport. The train went over the Market St. viaduct, and my dad remarked that there was something you didn’t see every day, a steam engine. The second occurrance was standing at trackside and watching a freight go by fast, and if memory serves it was a pair of Alco RS units. The third was watching a CN freight coming across the bridge at Sault St. Marie on a vacation trip.
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I had forgot to mention in my previous comment on this thread…one stupid gig that both cemeted my love of trains, and almost scared me away, possibly forever!
At age 14 in 1952, my two buddies and I stood on the Cedar Lane bridge in Teaneck overlooking the West Shore/NYC four track main. Below was a long freight seemingly stalled…“Hey guys, lets go down the stairs for a closer look”. We could not see the loco…only a distant glimpse, but it was a steamer. Just off the stairs was an old empty gondola in the consist, so we climbed aboard as the train seemed to be parked for a very long time. The car was filthy and empty except for a few old grease stained boards and remnants of some kind of a tarp.
Then it happened… we were almost knocked from our stances to the tune of clanking couplers and what sound like a distant whistle. Yup, off we went…out of town in a direction none of us wanted to go. We tried to jump off, but one of my friends was a porker and the acceleration was just too fast. There was no way we could signal to either the loco or caboose, so we just hunkered down heading north and hoping the freight would soon stop again or slow to a crawl so we could jump. This did not happen and we actually accelerated even more so. After about two hours the Hudson River came into view, and we eventually tied up in Havestraw, NY. Fortunately this was early spring and the day was fairly warm, and then even more fortunately I knew where we were, and my dad was playng golf nearby that Saturday. Well, we immediately found a ride to the club, found dad, and had a serious mess of explaining to do. Actually he was impressed and we all made it home in time for dinner. For years afterwards, he called me “Little Hobo”, but thankfully the moniker wore off, but the adventure stayed with me.
HZ
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The old steam trains, the smell of coal and stream brings it back just thinking about it, and I remember seeing the flying Scotsman with my dad
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My first train related memory: I can’t remember where… but my parents and I and my brother were travelling along the 4 lane somewhere, and there was a train bridge that crossed the highway diagonally at a sharp angle. Just as we were going under a fast moving steam locomotive passed over us. Don’t recall what it was pulling or if this occurred in Europe or on this side of the pond. Quite possibly a steam excursion train… there were a few of those in the 60s.
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My first train related memories are from the early 80s when I was a little kid. We used to live up the street from part of Conrail’s Mon Line tracks near McKees Rocks, PA. and sometimes at night we’d hear the horn blowing. Since it was the early 80s you could still see patched Penn Central locomotives and some jade green boxcars around. Nowadays it’s near the site of an interchange between the Pittsburgh & Ohio Centrail RailRoad and Norfolk Southern.
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My childhood memory is around Tucson yard on special occasions. I would see Dash 8 SSW and 4 axle geeps with a few SP units.
I travel on Amtrak twice in Minnesota between two stations. I don’t remember the names since it was nice two hour trip.
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[<:o)]
Florence is on the way and I,m ready to move to the basement tomorrow and play with trains all day. I run mainly Southern, but I have many other vintage roads from the South that I love to run
My favorite memory was taking the Southern from Union Station in Washington, D.C., and riding the rails all the way to Grand Junction in West Tennessee. Just a small wooden station but that is where the Southern stopped, then you had to have a relative pick you up drive you Jackson, Tn., our destination.
What a ride, it was a thrill for me, my sister didn’t care much about it but for me it was the only way to travel. I loved the coaches, walking through the vestibules and the diaphgrams from car to car. The dining car was fabulous and the food, WOW!
The porters and conductor would tease me and tell my mother that I didn’t ride the train on the trip, I walked the whole way. All I did was go from front to back then back again. Once in a while one of the guys would open the dutch doors in the vestibule so I cold look out of the train and feel the breeze.
All of that is pretty much gone, and I think America is missing out on a great way to transport people. Wouldn’t it be nice to once again to be able to go the the local train station, buy a ticket and travel anywhere in the U.S. by rail.
Those were the days.
Robert Sylvester
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I grew up in Brookville, PA and my Grandfather was an engineer on the Pittsburg & Shawmut RR. I lived within a couple hundred yards of where the Brookville viaduct crossed over the Pennsy / Conrail low grade. I remember the old crusty PC units hauling coal on the low grade in the early 70’s. I remember the old yellow and red P&S paint scheme on the locomotives and when the first locomotive and caboose rolled out in the Bicentennial paint scheme. I think my earliest steam train memory was from 1973 when Reading T-1 2102 headed a steam excursion train over the Pittsburg & Shawmut line. However, another early steam memory comes from sometime in the 70’s also. I used to go camping with my Grandparents alot and this one particular time we went to the Rustic Acres Campground near Shippenville, PA. I heard the whistle from a long way off and told my Grandpa. He took me up by the railroad tracks and a steam excursion train came through on the old B&O Northern Subdivision.
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My earliest railroad memory is my dad taking me to the Ronkonkoma Long Island Rail Road station in the mid-1980s. The line to Ronkonkoma had just been electrified. He’d drive me there in his Fiero (the V6 version) and we’d watch men in business suits boarding shiny M1 and M3 MU cars bound for a far-off place called “the city.”
A few years later, I think for my 6th birthday, my parents decided to make it a train day. First, we went to lunch at a restaurant called The Dining Car in East Setauket, NY. This place had an old observation car and two old cabooses that served as dining rooms. The cars are still there, but now it’s an Indian place called The Curry Club.
After lunch, my dad and I rode the train from Stony Brook to Port Jefferson, while my mother and brother followed in the car. The conductor punched my ticket and even wished me a happy birthday!
Later that year, we were in a Toys R Us store and my dad, on a whim, bought a Bachmann HO starter set. And that was it, I was hooked on the hobby.
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Late 1950s, a park with an ice skating pond right next to the B&O yards in Lorain, Ohio. EM-1s used to pull strings of coal from West Virginia to the docks for loading on ore boats for Detroit Edison, and leave with strings of Taconite for plants south of us. Winters, when the skating shack opened, we older kids would go out to the tracks, fill our pockets with spilled lumps of coal, and take them back for the old pot-bellied stove. Then, from the Henderson Drive Bridge, sometimes we’d be lucky enough to watch slag cars on the Lake Terminal railroad being dumped. Toni Morrison mentioned it in one of her books! Spectacular! There was the elevating ore dumper at the lake front. A cable system would pull loaded hoppers up a ramp, bump the car on the rotary down the switchback, and be locked onto the system. Them, watching the assorted counterweights moving down, sets stopping at intervals, then all moving to tip the car and its contents into the chute and into the hold of a lake boat. Watching one February morning as a Yellowstone kept slippong both engines trying to start a load out on the .45% grade, watching a SECOND unit coupling on doublehead, and FOUR engines spinning, throwing sparks, and finnaly moving with an L-1 0-8-0 at the point, and possibly a PAIR of the switchers pushing. And finally, one night, going to watch the action, and instead of the 2-8-8-4, this strange pair of somethings painted kind of a dark blue, no tender showing (Baldwin RF-16). During that transition, I got to see Q-1s, S-1s, T-3s, and even a U 0-10-0. And on the crossing Nickle Plate, passenger trains were being pulled by E series diesels, and frieght by 2-8-4a. Can’t just pin it down to ONE single early vision!
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My earliest memories were formed in San Francisco and Fresno in the early '60’s. I rode the San Francisco Chief out to Oklahoma and back when I was 2, but probably don’t have a specific memory of that. But I have memories of silver passenger trains with red warbonnets going through town, stopping us at crossings, etc. My next ride on the SF Chief was when I was 4 - by then I knew that there were Santa Fe trains and “other” trains, that the passenger engines were red and silver and streamlined and freight engines were blue and yellow and not streamlined, plus there were these other black engines that could have been either ATSF or SP. I have lots of memories of that train ride at 4 years old. One was seeing what I thought should have been a passenger engine in blue and yellow freight colors - my first freight F unit, I guess. What’s interesting to me now is knowing that I must have seen as much SP as Santa Fe in those early years, and yet it made no impression on me. There was Santa Fe, and then everyone else.
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My first railroad memory actually is an inspiration for my current project.
I grew up in Detroit near the yard of the Detroit Terminal Railroad which was located at Mound and Davison in the east side of the city.
One spring day, I think it was 1968, the nun gave us an assignment to write a report on anything we were interested in. I rode my bike to the office of the DTRR and knocked on the door and explained to the man that i would like some pamphlets or something taht described the railroad. This was a Friday afternoon and he invited me to return the next day for a tour.
I returned the next morning and was invited in to see the offices and to meet some of the yard workers. Next I was shown around the old roundhouse which was literally falling down by that time. Then it was a walk through the yard so I could see the different buildings, signals and everything else. Finally the tour was over so I was invited into the cab of DTRR #105, an EMD NW-2 engine. My tour concluded with a ride through the entire yard and into some of the industrial spurs.
As the ride was about over I was asked if I wanted to take the controls and bring the engine home. What a thrill that was!
Now I am retired and after building a module for our club layout and moving into my present home I have begun my own layout. It is based on the east side of Detroit in 1949. It is a proto freelanced layout as it has some industries and trackage not found on the original DTRR, but it will capture the times and the feel of industrial switching in post-war Detroit.
Some industries actually existed on the east side but I have chosed to change their location to suit my track plan. Other industries are what would have logically been found in Detroit supporting the auto industry as it rebuild in the post was years.
The only regret I have is that those photos from my youth have long ago been lost. Wish I could have had them to display in my crew lounge.
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Good Morning, Crew! I’d like to add to this thread as a way to introduce myself. I was raised in northern NJ with the Erie main line just a stone’s throw away from our backyard and the small, long-gone Erie station right down the street, hence my user name. The other station is still in the center of town, the NYS&W station, that’s been preserved. This was the time that steam had been mostly replaced by the earlier diesels and I watched many RS2/3s or PAs pulling Stillwell coach commuter trains, E8s speeding down the track with through trains from Chicago heading for the Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, NJ, as well as Geeps and FAs dragging long freights. I have fond memories of my father taking me for train rides into New York City and crossing the Hudson River on the Lackawanna Railroad’s ferry boats. It was also a time when we could arrange for a cab ride or to look around at the inside of a caboose, which we did. Today I’m replacing an Sn3 shelf layout with an HO layout based on a hypothetical freight transfer/switching yard between the DL&W and the Erie set in Paterson, NJ in the early '50s era. But that’s for another post. [swg]
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My great-great grandfather was a Superintendent on the Milwaukee and Prairie du Chien Railway. I have his gold retirement watch (1867).
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DocLBRock, that’s pretty neat that your family has that watch that’s been handed down over the generations. Thanks for posting! Welcome to the forum.
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Can you lift the dome and show us the movement?
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