The Board… and the Gate! As a kid it was the first thing I would study at the station no matter where I was.
It was a big part of the railroad world and you’re imagination. Nothin’ like checking these out and reading every line… wonderment and daydreaming!
Find your train!
That New York Central board in the first shot, wow!
Talk about giving the impression to a passenger he or she was about to experience a great adventure, and also giving the impression the NYC was a mighty collossus and for a brief time YOU were going to be a part of it!
“A time ‘Gone With The Wind’…”
The Southern board could have been from Johnson CIty, Jonesboro, or Greeneville, Tennessee. At one time or another, I rode all of those trains except numbers 1 and 4 (those two were discontinued befoore 1954).
Jonesboro is now Jonesborough. Greeneville was named for General Nathaniel Greene.
New York Central boards in Cleveland? IC/CRI&P must be Memphis.
9:35 AM at Memphis doesn’t sound right for the Panama Limited
Yes Cleveland and Memphis is correct.
http://www.dieselpunks.org/profiles/blogs/terminal-tower-cleveland-ohio
http://condrenrails.com/MRP/MemphisCentralStation/Early-Central-Station.htm
In June of 1916, IC #3 was due into Memphis at 9:10 am, and out at 9:35–and due into New Orleans at 8:45 pm. It also made more stops than it did 50 years later. It left Chicago at 6:35 in the evening.
Good stuff on Cleveland Union Terminal!
Looks like the Van Sweringen brother’s motto must have been “Go big or go home!”
Of course, after the Terminal was built they WERE home, if I remember correctly they had an apartment built for themselves in the office tower.
And Memphis Central Station (as miningman’s link indicates), not Memphis Union Station (where the Tennessean from the east Tennessee board wound up). The board survives in the ‘adaptive restoration’. (All those stub-end terminal tracks east of the mains, though, don’t)
Note the wildly varying station listings for the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley, though. Is it possible that the station-name ‘slugs’ for these boards were put up hurriedly by people who didn’t care what the actual sequence of these stations was?
A visit to Cleveland Union Terminal. [:D]
There are train boards on the left and right in this Harwood photo:
The main steam concourse with mini train boards at each work station:
The ticket concourse:
Stairs down to the platform:
Baggage elevator on the flip side:
The Greenbrier Suite:
CUT in the 90’s:
Wow. Go big or go home indeed!
What took you so long Penny!
A magnificient achievement.
The New York Central was also. Outstanding, now fading from memory.
Memphis Central Station beautiful. So important and meaningful.
All hallmarks of civilization and society.
I’m pretty happy with present day destination displays at stations.
Sydney Central in the old days had both departure and arrival boards, but in my time basically had a huge board with rotating wooden boards to allow for different stopping pattern. This board is now in a museum in its final form.
It was big and complicated and had special clip on panels for certain trains to show particular stopping points or on board features.
Old Display
But the present displays are of course flat screen TVs with the long axis vertical, dozens of them and these are easier to read and can display any service variation easily.
New display
The boards are edge on just right of centre in the photo.
But the new boards are bigger, clearer and brighter.
On one of the city underground stations (Town Hall), small “repeater” displays of the next train are fitted into the structural beams facing away from the platform edge, so you can identify your train without moving out to the edge of the platform to see the main displays. You’d have to know the station to understand what an improvement that is but as a user over many years, that is in the class of a “sliced bread” improvement in peak hours.
Peter
Cleveland Union Terminal:
Cleveland Union Terminal Concourse by Edmund, on Flickr
The actual arrival and departure board is seen in the distant right:
CUT_Dedication1 by Edmund, on Flickr
A page from the New York central employee magazine for July, 1930:
NYCL_mag_0002 by Edmund, on Flickr
The dedication dinner. I understand O.P. and M.J. chose not to attend:
NYCL_mag_0003 by Edmund, on Flickr
The westbound Mercury approaching Linndale:
CUT_Mercury_Linndale by Edmund, on Flickr
— and another view of Linndale:
CUT_Linndale_209-204_crop by Edmund, on Flickr
A GE advertisement:
If there were sections or WWII troop trains run as sections of the train listed on the board, would RRs also display their info on the board?
Not likely. WW2 troop train movements were considered “classified” information and their comings and goings wouldn’t be published, on public timetables or otherwise.
This is not to say there wasn’t some military traffic on the named trains, but those were individuals or very small groups.
It goes without saying railfans back then had to be very careful persuing their hobby. God have mercy on you if you were caught trackside on a mainline with a camera when a troop train came past! Or any military train for that matter.
I believe that ATSF had the practice of running passenger extras as sections of #7 and #8 (the Fast Mail) for operating reasons.
Keep in mind that’s not the “Mercury”, it’s the “Cleveland Mercury” (which is something different from the train we all ‘think of’ as the Mercury, with the streamlined K5b and rebuilt commuter cars, that ran between Chicago and Detroit never getting further east than about Toledo starting in 1936.
It might be noted that a Cleveland Mercury could continue to operate with a ‘dedicated’ special steam locomotive, as the train will always pass through Linndale for its power change.
There was also a Cincinnati Mercury, although whether this did or didn’t operate on a faster schedule than the Riley is something someone like Ed will have to answer…
A close up view of the Arrival Board at CUT:
These are from the Michael Shwartz Library collection at Cleveland State University by the way: https://clevelandmemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/search/searchterm/cleveland%20union%20terminal/page/1
The “Pullman Distributing Room”:
Train Information Room:
Although P1-a electrics did a lot of the passenger hauling, NYC steam did have access to the terminal. The description says “New York Central 3012 with WB #433 leaving Cleveland Union Terminal”, another iconic Harwood CUT photo!
The coach yards under construction:
One of those fantastic P1-a’s:
