Nostalgia & History > Do you remember you first trip on a passenger train??

I (kind of) do. The year was 1967. I was 8. My dad put my mom and I on a Texas & Pacific passenger train from Dallas to Ft. Worth just so I could experience it. I do remember that we left Dallas in the late morning or early afternoon but I don't have a clue what train this was...maybe the West Texas Eagle?? It was a fun little trip and I remember being sad at having to get off the train at Ft. Worth, but my mom was glad the short little jaunt was over. Very few passengers in the car we were in...maybe 3 or 4 at most.

Thus, this is the reason I have a soft spot in my heart for the 'ol T&P...


Allen



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/14 16:04 by bradleymckay.

Yes I do. About 1960 or 61. Morning ride from Davis CA to Sacramento CA. Was on SP train probably the Senator. Was 4 or 5 years old at the time. Rode in car back to Davis.

Rutland Railroad "Green Mountain Flyer" (or whatever it was called), from North Bennington, VT to Grand Central in New York in 1943. Rutland RR to Troy, NY and NYC to Grand Central. This was the first of many trips on the Rutland to or from GCT in the following 7 years or so.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/14 15:58 by Super_C.

I wish I did remember, but was in my mom's belly for my first train ride, and had I don't know how many thousand rail miles (at least one transcontinental trip in 1945) before the first ride I can recall....pieces of our first rail vacation after my Dad returned home to us, and the SP, in 1946, after the war. I do envy those who remember well their first train trip, but there is a kind of satisfaction in the knowledge that I had so many miles under my belt by the time I was aware of the joys of train travel. For the record, that first train I recall was in the winter of 1947, heading east on the Gold Coast, from Oakland Pier. AA

Stanford White
Carmel Valley, CA

Mid-1952 riding the Overland to visit relatives in Salt Lake City. I remember a GS on the point.

About 1967 in the winter wonderland of Germany. My dad was in the military and we were headed to Bad Tolz (in Bavaria). Mom took us kids on the trip. Two memories stand out: Rounding a curve in the snow somewhere deep in West Germany and seeing the steam locomotive up ahead churning out smoke from the stack and its side rods pumping up and down. There was at least one tunnel too.

I think we must have made a connection at Munich. We were in a big train shed and hungry. I could smell the aroma of cooked sausage. But when my mom saw the vendor handle the sausage with his bare hands, we had to do without! I also remember the skiers with their skies boarding or disembarking from trains in Munich. We traveled in a compartment with other passengers. Another smell was what appeared to be someone's sweaty socks in our compartment. I was told that Germans don't bathe as often as we Americans. (Nowadays they do more often.)

September, 1958 - Rode the Imperial ( SP train 39) from Mesa to Phoenix, to see the Thunderbird Model Railroad Club upstairs in Union Station. After their operating session, rode SP #4, the Golden State, back to Mesa. No. 4 did not always stop at Mesa, so I had to ask the conductor if they would stop for me. "Sure," he said, and by golly he did! At 15 I was rewally impressed!


TIOGA PASS

Norman Orfall
Helendale, CA
TIOGA PASS, a private railcar

It was mid 1959 and I was 5 when my mother took me between Waverly, NY (it is really South Waverly, PA) to Buffalo aboard Lackawanna #15 The Owl. Reason for the trip was to ride pass our house before the DL&W-Erie track consolidation on Aug 31, 1959 which would remove the tracks. I can remember passing the house. Later on the return trip on #10 The New York Mail just before getting back to Elmira where we detrained the Conductor gave me some seat checks. Rest of the memory has passed. One night I was hoisted up into the cab of Train #10 in Elmira, NY as the Engineer John Mundy from Scranton would come to our house during his layover. The unit would have been an E8 or F3.

Mid 60's. Union Pacific eastbound from Abilene to Manhattan, KS. About lunch time? I was 6 or 7 and my older cousin (by 6 years) escorted me while Mom & my Aunt Nellie drove over. I'm thinking it was the eastbound Portland Rose, but I'm not sure when #18 ran in those days. All I remember was constantly cramming my nose up against the window trying to see the engines on curves. I had railfan instincts even in early grade school...

Lance

My first train ride was in June, 1959,for my 5th birthday.
My aunt treated me to ride the FW&D RY #4, the Sam Houston Zephyr, from Corsicana , TX to Dallas Union Terminal. With only one E-8 on the FW&D Ry roster, the train regularly was pulled by an E-5 . We ate a light meal in the cafe portion of the parlor obervation car.Starched white linen tableclothes and napkins and real silverware, it was a first class experience. It left me in love with postwar passenger train equipment and Burlington E-5 locomotives. I remember it fondly and gratefully. --Kelly

In the summer of 1940 my mother and I went by train from Los Angeles to Ferndale, WA and back - mostly on the SP. I was only 2 years old so I don't have any memory of the trip. The trip was repeated in 1942, 1944 and 1946. I have good memories of the last two. The 1944 trip included a round trip from Ferndale to Libby MT on the GN.

Jim Lancaster

My first, I was only 3 months old. I was on "The Super Chief" from Chicago to Pasadena.

The first I can remember was about 1955 with my father. It was on the 20th Century from New York to Chicago. We stayed a day or two in the windy city and continued on the "City of San Francisco". We rode on the ferry from the Oakland Mole to the Ferry Building in the City. My mother was waiting for me and she was pissed. My Dad had lost track of time, I guess, and we were about a week late.

Rode a lot since then and wound up being the Fireman or Engineer on a lot of them for the SP.


Nudge

My first ride on a passenger train came later in life as a new hire brakeman on the Rock Island in commuter service from Joliet to Chicago. Then more passenger trips off the extra board in between freight trips. I held the brakeman's job on the Peoria Rocket for two weeks before getting bumped.

Bob Krieger
Cheyenne, WY

Spring '63 or '64, from Santa Ana to San Diego & return. A trip to the zoo. Mom, dad, sister, stroller, diapers - a real production number - to include the bus from the depot to the zoo!

John Gezelius
Tustin, CA

Yes and well no. I was a baby in 1939 when I made my first train trip from Louisville to Knoxville, then later on when I could know I was 5. My grandmother worked for the L & N and got a Pullman for us. I got the top bunk and laid awake most of the night watching the train go through town after town. My real memory, however, was when we moved from Louisville, KY to Albuquerque in June 1947. Dad would come later when mom found him a job. We went through Memphis, TX, and got off at Belen, NM. From what my mom kept telling me was that I sure was dirty. We rode much of the way with the windows down. Mom brought a cake for us and we gave a piece to a man who had befriended me. He and I would stand in the foyer with the window open using his telescope. My next major train trip was not until I was 16 in 1956, when I left ABQ for Chi and then down to Louisville. My last trip is tonight, when we leave our visit in Spokane for Seattle, then to Vancouver, and Friday night we leave on the Canadian for Toronto. Yep, as Amtrak used to say, trains are the only way to fly.

1964 on the NYC Empire State Express but I was too you to remember it. In 1966 my parents took me from Grand Central in NYC to Boston and back on the New Haven. Looking at the timetables we took the Bay State to Boston and the Merchants Limited back. We rode in a parlor car both ways. I distinctly remember eating in the dining car, especially the neat little crock of Boston baked beans. I remember waiting for our return train at Back Bay station with an FL9 leading the train.

Tim

I was born in Austin, Texas in 1959. As soon as I was out of diapers, my father started taking me with him on his regular quarterly weekend trips to his home to the Texas Panhandle, where he owned the local newspaper (the Friona Star, Parma County) and owned farmland and an interest in a cattle feedlot along with the rest of the family. He was at that time working in Austin as a lawyer for the Attorney General, assigned to the Texas General Land Office. After he got off work Friday we would drive 60 miles north to Temple and catch the Santa Fe's westbound "California Special" at about 10:00 at night. My first memory is that I had a hard time lifting my fat chubby legs over the height of the railroad tracks when we had to leave the brick platform (apparently, that first memory now in hindsight, the train misaligned, or was too long). I must have been only two or three years old, I lost that baby fat in a hurry. We always went coach, not sleeper, northwest to Muleshoe, getting off there the next morning where my grandmother would meet the train and drive us the last 30 miles north to Friona. To this day, his bedroom in my grandparents' house, now owned by an aunt, is preserved as he left it in 1951. He met my mother on a blind double date at UT, lucky for me. One of his Fiji fraternity brothers came running in to the fraternity house on Halloween, 1953, saying he needed a guy to come out and get in the car right away or else his whole weekend was ruined, because some other guy had backed out of a double date. My father stuck his head out in to the hall to see what the commotion was all about. That was (would be) my mother, in the back seat of that car. It does not take 8+ years of a TV show "How I met your Mother" to tell that story....

On the train I remember a black (always) porter would bring us pillows after we settled in to our seats, and tuck me in with a blanket he would also bring. We got to eat breakfast in the dining car before getting off in Muleshoe. I remember being sleepy at night, at Temple, waiting for the train, and being allowed to lie down on the brick platform and stare at the stars, and thinking the bricks were so warm, heated by the Texas sun all day and still radiating that warmth back many hours after dark. And falling asleep on those bricks.

Fast forward, I now have moved to Austin and restored two Santa Fe depots (the San Saba freight depot, which was near my Mother's family ranch, and the Dumas passenger depot, which the railroad called me about just before demolition, because I now handle oil and gas legal work for them in Texas), two Santa Fe boxcars, one Santa Fe bar lounge car (1371 "Nambe", leased to the Austin Steam Train Assoc. for their excursion runs, see their website for pictures of it), and have in progress restoration of three CBQ Denver Zephyr cars, later Texas Zephyr, moved from Hill CIty, South Dakota a few months ago; all of these passenger cars acquired and moved with assistance from another more frequent poster to this forum, "Topfuel". Also at the Austin building site I have two Texaco warehouses, from McCamey and Spur, Texas, and an oilfield supply warehouse from Snyder, Texas, some other small ATSF buildings saved from demolition, and am about to move there another oilfield supply warehouse from a ghost town, Midkiff Texas. If you will go to Google Earth and look at 9300 block of Highway 290 West, Austin, you will see the building compound, all leased to commercial tenants.

And there has been great pain taken to secure enough original ATSF depot platform bricks to recreate those brick platforms at the Highway 290 restoration location. I have a website at www.texassantafehistory.com which sprang from this as well. It is is not a slick website, because one of my sons did it for an 8th grade project years ago. But I had both sons lie down on the exact same Temple Tx brick platform with me when they were young, to recreate the history for them.

I will close with the thought that what you do with your kids, in some seemingly minor (to you) way, may shape them or their interests for their entire lives, as it did between me and my father, who is now 82 years old and has lived to see all that he set in motion with those train trips long ago, although he could never at the time have foreseen it...

Thankfully, I have a very patient wife, who tolerates this obsession...

- William Osborn, now an oil & gas attorney in Austin, Texas

only a vague memory ... i was 3 or 4 around '58/59 my pop had me up on the engine ... a scheduled ride i guess i was about 5 or 6 on s train to the jersey shore in Cape May from Haddonfield,NJ

Not counting DL&W and E-L MU's, my first journey on a real passenger train was a round trip from Dover, NJ to Scranton, PA on the Phoebe Snow. I was 13 or 14 and accompanied by early railfan mentor, Rick Pennisi, who was 2 years older.

Tom Y

I was 8 or 9 and we rode from Newton Ks. to Albuqurque nm. over Christmas brake my dad was a Santa Fe Conductor out of Newton and he told me it was 703 miles. My grandma sent a lunch and she sent me a turkey leg wraped in waxed paper and stuck it in one of my dads house slippers in the suit case I chewed on that leg half the trip and never batted an eye it was nose to the glass all the way what a fun trip 1950 I think.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/14 18:17 by highmiles.