Railvt

Railvt

Railvt is the screen name of Carl Fowler, who resides in Williston, VT. My mother was a Pullman Reservationist at Pennsylvania Station in New York from 1939 until I was born in 1947 and my father was also briefly employed by the Pennsy Passenger Reservations Bureau, before becoming a travel agent. Mother always regretted having to leave the PRR, but in those days if a female employee had a child she was “out” until the child was grown-up. By then the family had moved to Florida and this option was closed.

Although I worked full-time in the sale of rail travel from 1982 to 2010 (and continue to do so part-time in “semi-retirement”) I was only once directly employed by the railroads. In high-school I was a regular train-spotter visitor to the Winter Park, Florida depot of the then Atlantic Coast Line/Seaboard Coast Line RR. After years of watching me watch the West Coast Champion, (and after the FEC strike in 1963) the City of Miami, the South Wind and the Silver Star, the Winter Park agent, W.A. “Bill” Lapinski decided to get some work out of the kid, and put me on the Railway Express payroll for the winter of 1964/65 as a part-time REA Express clerk. The fun part was being allowed to call the arrivals of the great streamliners on the PA and serve as an informal “red cap”. The hard-part was loading crates of oranges as LCL/REA Express, being shipped back home by winter visitors to central Florida.

My father retired and moved the family to Florida in 1958. In 1963/64 I went to school back in New York and got to ride from Winter Park to New York five times a year and tried to use a different set of trains/routes virtually every time. With the generous “Diverse Routings” offered by the railroads in those days you could go from Winter Park to New York not only directly on the West Coast Champion, but also via Atlanta, or on the SAL north of Jacksonville and for very little more even via Cincinnati or Chattanooga.Once I had a "strip tic