Nostalgia & History > No Streamliner Saturday (vol 27)

Bill Gibson’s slide notes called this IC train a "School Kid Special". Good enough for me… :^)

1. IC 9311 in Springfield, IL on May 8, 1967.
Original Kodachrome slide by William A. Gibson Sr, now in the James T. Wilson collection.

Thanks for looking back!
Lance Garrels (santafe199)
Jim Wilson (jtwlunch)
Remembering the late Bill Gibson, aka ‘WAG Sr’

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Thanks for posting this great and interesting slide. It is nostalgic for me too. We ran trains similar to this on the SOU. We even had some chocolate and orange coaches too, left over from the joint IC-Central of Georgia trains.

SOU had two types of school kid trains. The big ones were the spring time "Schoolboy Patrol Trains" that carried big groups of GA and AL school crossing guards for long weekends of touring in Washington DC. These trains could run upwards of 20 cars, including a diner and a sleeper for the dining car crew and the chaperones. Usually these trains were pulled by our version of "executive E8's', which was a four engine set of E8's freshly repainted early in the year for special moves like the Kentucky Derby Special and Board of Directors office car trains.

The other school kid trains were called "Diesel Instruction Trains". SOU had an ample amount of spare passenger engines and cars, and they had a very active passenger sales department, right til the end in 1979. They ran the "Diesel Instruction Trains" with spare equipment, sometimes it might be equipment for a second section of the Southern Crescent being repositioned for it's next run. They made these co-ordinated daylight runs to acquaint school kids and their parents with our railroad and our passenger service. At each of the co-ordinated stops, one school group would get off and another school group would get on. There were a lot of SOU "Junior Railroader" and "Junior Engineer" buttons given out.

Posted from Android

Notch7 Wrote: > ... SOU had two types of school kid trains ...

Off the top of my head, the only other "school kids" train I can remember posting is this one by Bill Gibson:
( https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,5949451,5949451#5949451  ).
There is some interesting dialogue in this thread...

Lance

santafe199 Wrote:
--------------------https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11
> ,5949451,5949451#5949451  ).
> There is some interesting dialogue in this
> thread...
>
> Lance

It is an interesting older thread. SAL and SOU also did school kid trips on regular trains in the Carolinas. I hauled some student groups on the SOU Piedmont in 1976.

Posted from Android

In Ohio W&LE inconjuction with Operation Life Saver took school kids on short trips to emphasize safety around railroads.  Such train began about 1980 until 2005.  

In 1955, when I was 11, my class rode the IC from Chicago to Springfield IL. The heavyweight car we occupied was dropped from the 'Night Diamond' (?) and we spent the day touring the many sights. 

Thanks for reviving old memories.

Tom

As a kid we always got stuck in school buses. Bah!
But we had plenty of commuter and long distance trains and even trolleys. 
Gonut

In 1963, as a Freshman in high school, our band, along with many other Chicago area high school bands rode a special IC train to Champaign for the University of Illinois band day.

I remember riding a Boy Scouts special on the Erie, Cleveland to where they had large shops (Kent?). We toured the shops and came home.