Your earliest RR memory...real trains

My dad was an engineer for the PRR in NYC.  My first exposure to real trains was one day when he took me with him to work.  I got to sit on his lap in a GG1.  I guess I was 5 or 6 but I will always remember how I broke out into tears when we took off.  The noise was something but what really got me going was it seemed like we were sitting 100' off the ground and I thought the engine was going to fall over because it was rocking back and forth a bit at low speed.  It was dark when we finally left and the sights of all the lights and such going over the bridge was amazing.  I often wonder if today's engineers manage to slip their kids in once in a while when they goto work.

 My dad and uncle  always built a new layout at Christmas in the basement of my uncle's printing shop.  It was always amazing ( at least me and my brothers thought so at the time).  Turns out he was really a closet lionel guy.  We would always get the 1or 2 pieces of rolling stock we wished for at christmas.  But we would also usually get 1 or 2 other lionel pieces as well.  It was only long after my dad passed that I happened to learn that those other lionel things we got were really the things he wanted.  Being the old school guy he was there was no way he was giving himself trains for christmas so he got them for "us".

Ed

I can remember making several trips on the Southern RR between Memphis and Knoxville in 1947.

Dad was a volunteer at the Ohio Railway Museum during the glory days of the 1960's and weekends were spent there.  They built a classic station, had N&W 578 running, and tons of traction.  

Two early outside museum memories include a wreck of the National Limited west of Columbus, and being taken out of school to see NKP 759 run light north over the N&W through Ashville, Oh, I believe about 1970.

Bob

That's an easy one.  I grew up in the shadow of the **** Gate bridge in Astoria, NY in the 50's and would look with wonder at the various trains crossing over the east river each day.

George

I guess it was going with my Dad to a place in Rochester, NY watching trains on NYC's Chicago Line. It was in the waning days of steam and I do remember those Pacemaker box cars we are so fond of.

Jim McClenin

Probably at age 4. Taking the PRR Liberty Limited from Washington, DC to Chicago. I remember hearing the PA announcement in Union Station, and exclaiming "That's our train!"

I remember seeing the GG1 roll past in Baltimore after it cut off to be replaced by a diesel. I remember that we seemed to be going slow after leaving Baltimore and my father telling me it was because we were going into the mountains.

I dimly remember the firery glow of the  Pittsburgh steel mills, and I think my parents woke me up to see them.

Lastly, I remember another train with a red observation on the adjacent platform when we arrived in Chicago Union Station. I know now it must have been the South Wind.

Age 4 or 5, my grandfather worked for the B&O, and we would watch freight yard operations from the RT1 bridge in SW Baltimore. Later, he took me from Camden Station Baltimore to Union Station in DC, then by PCC streetcar througfh the suburbs of DC to Glen Echo Amusement Park. Loved the trees smacking the side of the street car!

Train trip to San Diego on the ATSF San Diegan from LAUPT. Back then, they didn't do push-pull operation; they turned the train on a reverse loop that ran South and East of the San Diego Depot.

For me it would have to be 1965 and the Raritan River RR.

The tracks ran in back of my Grandmothers house in South River and my great Grandfather would take me up to the end of the street to get a good view of the train when it went by twice a day. Sometimes they would have to set off a car at Claytons lumber yard and the crew would chat with my great grandfather in his native Polish...they knew him well from his time that he worked at Squibb's in New Brunswick. Squibb's was a large pharmaceutical factory on the New Brunswick end of the line.

I bought this engine 28 years ago from a long gone train store in Perth Amboy...the owner custom made 6 of them to represent the 6 engines that the RRRR actually had.

The RRRR also had yellow cabooses until the late 60s then they were red.

I was born in Charlottesville, VA, where the Southern crosses the C&O.  Recall my mother stopping at the grade crossing rather than going a few blocks away to the overpass. I was about 3 years old and she had discovered trains had a soothing effect on me, and the delay was worth it. 

I might have been able to count to ten and I counted over and over as the trains passed.  C&O for Progress.  Southern Serves the South. 

The earliest thing I remember was my dad taking me down to the small Soo Line depot at Dresser, Wisconsin, about four miles from where we lived. They used to have a coaling tower just across the tracks, and I remember looking at a steam engine that was stopped there. Afterwards, we got back in the car and headed down a road that ran adjacent to the tracks, and followed the steam engine as it headed out of town.

I don't know why we made the short trip to see this, but it may have been that dad knew steam was about ready to depart the Soo, and he wanted to see a steam engine operating once more before they were gone. Although this memory is faint, it's a great one for me.

My Grandfather taking me with him to the Soo locks to see a steamer coming in to the US from Canada, during the late 60's. Then we went to St Ignace, Mi. to see it loaded on the SS Chief Wawatam ferry, so it could make its way into the lower peninsula. I don't remember the exact kind of locomotive, but it was longer than the Soo GPs, and nothing else went across the Straights of Mackinaw with it. Not even the tender.

My earliest recollection was sometime in the 1940's.  My dad and I were leaving a lumber yard in Gladstone, NJ, when the local "P&D Drill" arrived, pulled by what looked like a boxcab electric loco!  Normal power for that job was a 2-8-0.  Even at that age I knew the freight sidings on the Gladstone branch weren't electrified, so for many years I thought it was just something I dreamed.

A few years ago, I learned about the experimental tri-power (Diesel, Electric, Battery) locos the Lackawanna had.  Could it be they have made a test run on the Gladstone Branch?  Back then, when everybody heated with anthracite coal, the drill was a heavy worker.  At times it had to leave part of the train at West Summit and "double" the branch!  It certainly would have been a good test of the hybrid's abilities.

On a few occasions, they tried an SW-something, the Drill remained regularly steam powered up until 1953, when it was replaced by a GP-7.

When I was very small (around 1950, when I was two), my father was going to school on the GI Bill.  We didn't have much money in those days, so on the nights when Dad wasn't working, we would sometimes pile into the 1938 Plymouth and drive down along the Susquehanna River, not far from Danville, PA.

We'd park in a small cutoff area next to the road, near the PRR bridge across the river.  There, we'd watch the trains rumbling by in the dark.  It was an inspiring sight that I've never forgotten, especially the passenger trains.

I remember being most impressed by the "streamliners," (F-units) at the head of their strings of heavyweight passenger cars.  If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have been counting the steam locomotives instead.

A couple of years later, after graduation, Dad got a job in a small town in central PA, on the PRR 4-track main line.  I spent many hours down at the station, watching the constant flow of long, long mixed freights roaring through, along with the occasional passenger trains that stopped to pick up or discharge passengers.

1943 or 1944: In a NYC caboose with the rest of my Kindergarten class. We road back and forth a couple of times pulled by a 0-6-0 switch engine in Middleport, NY. Our teacher had connections with the railroad.

Dick

My "serious" train watching started around 1949 (I was 7) when we drove from our home in Ridgewood, Queens, NY to visit my Grandparents in Hollis, LI. The Hollis station was a short walk, and I would spend hours on the platform watching a steady stream of LIRR trains (electric locals on the near tracks, steam passenger express trains and steam freight on the center tracks). The tracks could be seen a long distance in both directions, and there was usually always a train on the horizon. The steam engineers or firemen always waved to me, but not so often when diesels started showing up.

Later on we moved to NJ, and I took a DL&W commuter electric to high school between Peapack and Bernardsville each day.

Today I enjoy seeing steam trains in nearby Strasburg,PA...but nothing compares to seeing steam pulling a express train at 70+ mph.

Sometime in the early 1960s took a Southern Railway passenger train from Sheffield, AL to Memphis.  Then we flew back home on a Southern Airways DC-3.  Also in the early 1970s rode Amtrak's Floridian from Decatur, AL  to Valdosta, GA once and then another trip from Decatur, AL  to Jacksonville, FL on the Floridian.  Wish I had pictures of those trips.  

Neal Jeter

My Uncle was an Operator at Newton Falls, OH for the B&O.  I am not sure of the year but I was only 4 or 5 years old and it was either 1969 or early 1970 when one late night my Father took me to the Newton Falls Depot/Tower where my Uncle was working the "late trick" overnight shift.   My memory is of a B&O streamliner rolling past the tower as viewed from upstairs in the tower at night.  It had a dome car in the consist, a fact I clearly recall.   Although I would spend many afternoons in the 1970's visiting my Uncle at Newton Falls watching Chessie freights and the steam special once, that last glimpse of pre Amtrak B&O passenger service in its last months of service remains a brief but spectacular memory for me.