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All Aboard!

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This is the anniversary of the start of the first passenger-carrying railway, the Swansea-Mumbles Railway in Wales in 1807. The tracks were laid to move limestone and other minerals to the docks at Swansea for shipping. The idea to retrofit a horse-drawn rail car to accommodate people was revolutionary. People apparently enjoyed the trip – the line continued for just over 150 years and in addition to equine locomotion, passengers through the decades enjoyed traveling under power provided by steam, sails, and electricity.

The line was dismantled in 1960 when the railway was purchased by a company that wanted to run busses instead. That’s a familiar story for fans of the old Twin Cities Streetcar line.

Amtrak

I’m an unabashed fan of train travel. My rail journeys have been much more memorable than any trip taken in a car (which is exhausting) or by air (which can be frustrating and ultimately demeaning). The relaxed pace, interesting scenery, friendly people and the freedom to move around a bit while underway are factors that make train trips civilized. At least until the engine breaks down or the toilet backs up.

And more rails are on the way. Not only is the Central Corridor Light Rail line just about a year out from starting, plans continue for the Southwest Light Rail Line (the Green Line extension), and light rail in the Bottineau Corridor.

That’s not all. The city of Minneapolis is having a serious discussion about streetcars, including a proposed route that would connect the city from north to south by going straight down Central Avenue, through downtown, and down Nicollet Avenue.

Then there’s lame duck Mayor RT Rybak’s latest pitch – beefed up airports in outstate Minnesota, linked to the Twin Cities with high speed rail. Why would Twin Cities bound air travelers choose to land at St. Cloud? Aside from the wonderful Stearns County hospitality, they’d get to take a cool train ride, of course.

When and where have you traveled by rail?

87 thoughts on “All Aboard!”

  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    In 1964 my aunt decided to give us a train ride before the passenger line in NW Iowa disappeared. So she rounded up her 5,4 and 2 year old and me and my 2 siblings, ages 11, 8 and 5, for a trip from LeMars Iowa to Chicago. There we would meet my scholarly and adventurous uncle who was studying in Chicago for 6 weeks. (My aunt and uncle regularly travelled with all 6 of us, bless them). This is a train trip I have never forgotten. However, it may not be for the usual reasons. My 5 year old brother discovered the men’s room where, when you flushed the toilet, you could watch the rails go by below–the implications of what this meant about flushing human waste and where it landed post-flush passed me by at the time. Never-you-mind that though. This meant that I spent most of the overnight train trip hauling my brother out of the men’s room so the very few other passengers on board could use it without benefit of a curious 5 year old in the tiny room.

    Unforgettable indeed!

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    1. I used to teach “City of New Orleans” in my freshman composition classes, Jacque. My freshmen would gasp in astonishment when I explained the line: “The conductor sings his songs again, the passengers will please refrain . . .”

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  3. i was thining that when the comment about toilets backing up was mentioned. in my experience the toilets ask that you not use them in the station. this eliminates the concentrated attraction of flys in the summer and allows the countryside to receive fertilize free of charge. most of my train riding these days is in far away and exotic feeling places but i love traveling on trains in europe and china. the high speed rails go a zillion miles an hour and the old trip from frankfurt to cologne has been whittled down to an hour from the three hours of winding through the river valley of the rhine mast castles vinyards castles and wonder. the new route sees castles but the route in the fields above the valley instead of the main streets down below is progress of a sort but a loss in the overall soulful experience. my daughter graduated from foreign studies in florence a couple years ago and wanted to travel by train after her graduation and i agreed. i thought italy she thought europe. we did europe and it was a delight. mountains and metropolis little rattle traps and bullet trains sleepers and locals it was a wonderful trip. no temptation to rent a car. when i go to europe i like to fly into amsterdam and take the train to the final destination. amsterdam is a little like the state fair with museums ladies of the night and coffee houses instead of chocolate chip cookies. anne frank vincent van gogh and canals are a wonderful substatute for the german army checking your bags at the terminal in frankfurt cologne or dusseldorf. hong kongs new airport is 45 minutes outside the city but the train gets you there quicker than the cabs used to from the old airport in the middle of downtown hong kong. the train form hong kong to shenzhen is the only way to go. there is a plane but why would you? my first trip via train was with my dad at age 5 or so to visit his family in fargo. i threw up all the way form minneapolis to fargo. i have not let that detur me from subsequent enjoyment. my car sickness has passed and my enjoyment of the rails has grown.

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  4. Good morning. I can remember a little about at least one train trip I took when I was in grade school with my mother and my brother. One of the things I remember is the station where you got on the train which was a typical one for those days and looked like some of the abandon ones that you can still see in some towns. They were usually one story brick or wooden building with a wide awning to stand under while waiting for the train. I think they were still using steam powered locomotives to pull the trains and their were porters on the trains dressed in the uniforms that they wore in those days.

    My family and I took a train trip about 15 years ago from North of Winnipeg to Churchill. You have to take either the train or a plane to get to Churchill because roads don’t go that far North. We went there to see polar bears and the tundra. We were not there at the right time to see the polar bears, but we did see a large number of beluga whales on a boat trip in the Hudson Bay.

    To get to Churchill you travel over night on a train which is just like the one I traveled on when I was a kid but it is pulled by a diesel engine. Our seats could be converted into bunks at night and we also used a small sleeping compartment. There was a fold down seat at one end of the passenger car where a porter could sit and the train had an old style dining car. We could see the Northern lights out of the windows as we traveled at night. The train stopped along the route to pick up people who used it for local transportation out in the Canadian wilderness. On the train we traveled from the Northern woods into the almost treeless tundra region of Canada.

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    1. that sounds wonderful jim. how long was the trip. did you stay for a while in churchill? those old dining cars are my favorite, the guy who taught me european travel always said it was best to but second class seats rather than first class . save the 50 bucks and go spend it on beer and munchies in the dining car and meet the interesting people form the neghborhood.. i found that to be true unless it was on long long trips then the difference between first and second class had to be looked at. in china the difference between first and second class seats is noticable in spades. on a two hour trip second class is ok . on a day trip you find out more than you want to know about local culture.

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      1. tim, we stayed in Churchill for several days. The train trip is only about one day or part of a day, with a portion of the travel taking place at night. At least that is what I remember. We got on the train after traveing many miles North of Winnipeg by car to a place where you can’t travel much farther North in your car.

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  5. About 12 years ago we boarded the Empire Builder in Williston, ND with our children and travelled to Portland, OR (and also made the return trip). It was great way to travel and the children loved it. We have been on subway trains in Montreal and London, and now husband has decided that he and I need to go to Wales in a year or so and that will mean some train travel. A woman I work with remembers when there was still passenger train service between Bismarck and our town. That would have been a great trip, but it was in a time when all the stores were near the depot, so you could shop in Bismarck without needing a vehicle.

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    1. As I recall, the train was 6 hours late getting into Williston because it had hit a car on the tracks somewhere near Chicago and actually killed someone.

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    2. My parents took me on the Empire Builder when I was 5. Even then, it left the Twin Cities in the middle of the night. I’m pretty sure we must have boarded the train at the old Milwaukee Rail Depot, because that always feels familiar when I now drive by it (or maybe that is just what I have told myself so many times now, that it really is a memory?).

      I remember there was a big fountain by the depot that had colored lights that changed from time to time. In all my 5 years living in small town Iowa, I had never seen anything so wonderful.

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      1. Our son and some other teens from ND had a great time regaling some East Coast teens with absolutely true factoids about the Dakotas, including the jackalope hunts.

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      4. We always left from the beautiful depot in downtown Saint Paul. I hear they have restored it but I haven’t seen it.

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  6. I used to travel by train a lot when I was a kid because my dad worked for the Great Northern Railway. We would go to Chicago, Glacier National Park, and Seattle where the relatives lived. My brothers and sisters and I would roam the train, hang out in the dome car and the club car and sneak Frango mints from the dining car. We had roomettes which would be magically transformed from seating areas into bunks while we were having dinner. The most memorable trip was when we had the use of the railroad president’s private car for a trip to the Seattle World’s Fair. The car was attached to the end of the train. We had our own cook, Herman, and our own porter, Gene. Gene could fold a dollar bill into a ring. We could go out on the platform and watch the tracks spooling away behind us. Mom didn’t want us to go out there when we went through the seven mile Cascade Tunnel because she thought we would get sooty. We did though. I turned six on that trip. What a birthday.

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    2. Keelin, you must have had my dream childhood. The trip I took at age 5 was also for the Seattle World’s Fair. You’ve really captured the magic that was the train in those days. Thank you.

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      1. Thanks all. I check in on you guys but don’t often have something to contribute. It was fun to share a happy memory.

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  7. In the late 1970’s I also travelled by train through Europe on a college seminar. I remember now how hard it was to figure out where our platforms were in those huge train stations when the loud speakers were distorted and the announcer was speaking in German or French.

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  8. Most romamntic rail trip was the night train from Frankfurt to Berlin in 1986 to visit relatives (brother in law a captain in the army at that time). Boarded at 8 pm. Stopped at East German border around midnight so armed guards (machine guns, dogs) could check under train, around, through, etc., looking for spies, contraband, whatever. If we dared take pictures, we risked having our camera confiscated and us being thrown off the train in the middle of the night, middle of nowhere, with no passports. Got to Berlin about 5 am. Never was so glad a trip was successfully completed.

    Most luxurious, coolest train trip was from around Montpelier in south of France to Paris on the TGV (Trains a` Grande Vitesse), the French National high speed railroad which moves at top speeds near 200 mph. The ride was like floating on air. Smooth as butter. Very comfortable, even facing backwards.

    If we had high speed trains in the US, I’d take them as often as possible instead of airplanes. I still like hitting the road in the ol’ Toyota, especially heading west, but give me a train over a plane any time.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. on my way to meet up with my daughter in florence i booked a flight to florence without being certain or caring much about the route. 1 or 2 stops what the heck… i had my ticket all picked out and the options were for number of hours layover at the airport finishing off the last leg. i laughed and said to my self why in the world would anyone choose a 12 hour layover vs a 1 hour layover? where the heck is this airport? it was charles de galle in paris and a 12 hour layover vs a 1 hour is exactly what i did and jumped on the trian at 8am when i got to paris to go have espresso at notre dame and head on over to the louve and the eifell tower. on the way back i had stayed the max time allowed before being concerned about cutting it too close at the gate for the second leg and last connecting flight of the night and wouldnt you now it i was chatting away and didnt realize i was supposed to get off at the transfer station and of ii went into the burbs of paris with the locals. when i realized it i jumped off and went over to the other side of the tracks to catch the return train and it was the longest 20 minute wait i ever experienced. i guess i dont have the luxuary here of having you wonder if i made it or not… if i didnt i wouldnt nbe writing now but i got my heart started. the suburbs of paris are a little different than minneapolis. kind of old feeling, no 7-11 or wal marts within view.

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  10. About 14 years ago, when my folks finally decided that their “temporary downsizing” into a little condo would be permanent, they invited me and my siblings to take some of the furniture that they had been storing for several years. I didn’t want to drive a u-haul from here to St. Louis empty so Child and I took the train to St. Louis, with an overnight in Chicago, and then drove the u-haul w/ the furniture back home.

    Once you let go of the “I would be there by now if I’d flown” mentality, the train is a great experience. Child and I had the Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri pages of an atlas and we put stickers on all the little towns as we went through them. She made a friend the first day and they played with the friend’s Barbies for a couple of hours. Seats were big enough and had enough room around them so that Child took a nice nap (me too) and it was very comfortable for relaxing and reading. We had brought all our own snacks/meals, so didn’t sample what the train had to offer, but all other aspects were very nice!

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    1. Worlds colliding. Am reading “Bring the Cannoli” by Sarah Vowell and just yesterday read the essay where she describes staying in the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel, which apparently has rooms in train cars and rooms built like train cars!

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  13. One of my earliest memories is of riding a train during WWII. I was 3. The train was paneled in dark wood and had red velvet seats, much like the trains you see in cowboy movies. This was old train stock that had been retired and then dragged out of mothballs because of of wartime shortages. I slipped away from my mother and went to the back of the car, where I was turning some huge metal wheel there. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the conductor hadn’t caught me. What do those big wheels do?

    I used to take the train home from Grinnell to the Twin Cities. In Great Britain Kathe and I rode the Flying Scotsman. Our family went to Chicago once by train.

    In 1993, I took the Empire Builder to Montana for a deer hunt in extreme northern Montana. The trip home is my favorite train memory. I bailed out of my coach seat because the next seat was filled by a cowboy drenched in cheap cologne. I went to the lounge car for drinks and fresher air. A snowstorm had covered the world in fresh snow to a depth of six inches, and that trackless snow was beautiful in the blue light of the moon. The world outside the windows of the lounge car was dreamy and indistinct, with no sharp edges or straight lines, just mounds of virgin snow that was bathed in blue light.

    When I heard music, I was surprised to see a hippie (who looked like Charlie Manson) cross-legged in the aisle, playing guitar. He was so serious about his music that his girlfriend kept lighting cigarettes and holding them up for him to puff between verses. He was playing Neil Young songs. Nothin’ but Neil Young. And he was good.

    Along came another young kid (who looked like the actor Randy Quaid) and he asked for the guitar. These guys were strangers to each other, but both were good enough to work coffee houses or bars. Randy Quaid played and sang about six Neil Young tunes, then passed the guitar back. Charlie Manson then did another six or so before relinquishing the guitar again. The hippie chick kept cigarettes going for both of them.

    The two guys knew enough Neil Young to get us from one end of North Dakota to the other. I got dozy after a while, my head lolling over against the windows. Outside the perfect snow-clad dreamscape slid silently by, and soon I was home.

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      1. Just wonderful, Bill. She had a cold, so she wasn’t much more mobile than I, but we talked up a storm for three days and watched some great stuff on DVD or TV. Molly is now in love with Cesar Millan’s show and the Incredible Dr. Pol (two of my favorites). The most fascinating thing was watching “Mad Men” with Molly, who is an expert HR person. She was just fascinated with that peek into gender relations in the 1960s.

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    3. Robin, when she was fresh out of high school in the mid ’60s, travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway. But that’s her story and you’ll have to get it out of her…

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      3. Such a long time ago, Edith and PJ! This will be too long, I know, but . . . . My friend and I were 16 in 1966 and just graduated from high school in Japan, traveling back to the States for College. We took an overnight boat to Nochodka on the east coast of the Soviet Union and from there traveled west on the Transiberian Railway. I wish I remembered the factual details better — I have mostly visual memories from that long trip. Had we gone the entire way by train, it would have taken a week or more, but 4 days in, we were about half way across Siberia, I’m thinking Novosibirsk, at which point we flew the rest of the way to St. Petersburg because of time constraints.

        The Soviet Union had just opened to “tourism”, but that was kind of a euphimism. It was grey and bleak, armed soldiers at the major rail stations, walls plastered with huge posters of the proletariat state (stuff like tractors and factories and sturdy ruddy faced agricultural workers flinging wheat sheaves over their shoulders). Some fleeting memories — Hot sweet tea drunk from tall glasses in silver filigreed containers, ancient women in babushkas knitting and old men slurping borscht from huge flat saucers, everyone on the train arguing and bantering back and forth for hours on end, lots of smiling & friendly miming (with us), raucus card games, intense chess matches. We did take some apparently contraband photos at the stations and our film was immediately confiscated, unfortunately. Talk about naive!

        Truthfully, my most lasting impression of that train trip besides our friendly/curious fellow passengers was the Siberian landscape. Coming from Japan–a vertical landscape of steep mountains climbing out of the sea–to this endless flat featureless place was overwhelming. Of course it wasn’t featureless at all, but compared to teeming bustling Japan, this beautiful empty place was eerie and unnerving. Flat grasslands with tiny blue wildflowers (it was June) stretching to the horizon in every direction. Not a hill or bump to be seen. Or a road ora vehicle or a sign of habitation. Every few hours we’d stop in the middle of nowhere, but presumably “somewhere”, because there would be one solitary whitewashed cottage with bright flower boxes perched at the side of the tracks. Perhaps someone would get on or off. Where were they going? How would they get there? No vehicles or roads that we could see. Nothing but flat plains, wildflowers and blue sky stretching out forever…

        I grew up riding trains in post war Japan as a child. These were steam engines that preceded the famous bullet trains. There were grades of trains–Express (fastest) to the “donko” which stopped at every little hamlet along the way. The train would stop for maybe five minutes, we’d leap off and buy food — bento (rice lunches), green tea in tiny brown clay pots, and tiny tangerines. As the train pulled out of the station, our father would tease us by running alongside the train, grabbing the handrail and swinging on at the last minute. We kids would be manically shrieking with panic and excitement. It was a ritual 🙂 One time, when he misjudged the train’s speed, we had to haul him in through the window by the seat of his pants. Those were the days 🙂

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        1. Lots of tunnels in Japan, too. We’d slam the window shut to keep the soot out of the cars, but we’d still be black around the nose and eyes when we reached our destination. It was a given that we kids would hold our breath whenever we entered a tunnel till we came out the other end. Train games.

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        3. Thanks, Robin. I still have a couple of those silver filigree glass holders, but haven’t been able to find glasses that fit in them.

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        4. Oh, I carried mine around for years, but lost it somewhere along the line. I’ve never seen anything quite like those tea glasses anywhere else, have you? Distinctive

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  14. I’ve taken the train a couple of times in Europe. When you see these trains go by, they are almost a blur and you’d think that when you are inside one of them, the scenery would be a blur, but it isn’t. You don’t really feel like you’re going all that fast, except that you get to your destination much more quickly than if you drove!

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  15. I’m traveling to Portland Oregon this summer. I’d love to go by train, and the rates are reasonable. But the travel time (one way) is 41 hours. Almost two days! And my experience of AmTrak is that there would be delays.

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    2. i would factor the 48 hours into the trip and hope for delays. if you think of it as paying for massage by the hour it is a better ideal the longer it takes. i used to have to go to portland every year and alway intended to take the train but the 2 days was important for girlfriend, buddies, whatever. sure wish i had taken the damn train. throught the rockies. always wanted to do the canadian rockies train trip too.

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    3. i checked into getting the sleeping quarters seeing as the train leaves here at 11 pm and the sleeper portion of the equation is an added fistful of money. sleeping in a chair is a way for me to go and i would but to suggest it for you is more than i would be comfortable with.

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  16. LIke you Dale, I love the train. Probably starting with that first trip when I was 5, but also kept alive by literature. The description of the line being built through South Dakota in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Shores of Silver Lake is one of my favorite sections.

    The train I took from Tubingen to Cologne could have been the model for the Hogwarts Express.

    The summer I worked in Sante Fe, I loved going to the La Fonda Hotel for lunch, as it was an old Harvey House and at least then, still had that feel of transitional elegance.

    The s&h and I took the Empire Builder from Minneapolis to Milwaukee when he was about 3. He doesn’t remember it-we may just have to take another train trip……

    Friend of ours is moving to Ketchum, ID to be a camp director-we’ve started to save up to go next summer. I think we should take the train as far as we can go.

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    1. It was the Empire Builder that we took on our trip. At least to Chicago… the train the next day from Chicago to St. Louis wasn’t as big/fancy as the Empire Builder, although it was very nice too.

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      1. Thanks Steve! We rather expect it all to be just lovely.

        We’re going to start throwing our change into a LARGE jar starting today.

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    4. that is a trip i would recommend going by car so you cand stop and take your time. ketcum is nice but there is so much between here and there and once you ge there you want to be able to explore the area. once you get past renee its all good. pretty much running on adrenalin until the worlds largest cow. after that the mountains and other stuff take over.

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  17. It’ll come as no surprise to most baboons that trains were a major part of my travel experience as a child and in my youth. When I wasn’t riding my bike, we’d take the train to get to wherever we were going as our family didn’t have a car until after I left home. Most of the small local trains weren’t that much fun, with endless stops in every little nook and cranny.

    Early train travel that I have a sketchy memory of include my first solo voyage in 1954 as an eleven year old. My mother put me on a train in Nykøbing for the three-hour ride to Copenhagen. There she had a friend meet me at the station to make sure I got on the right train to Esbjerg on the west coast of Denmark. In Esbjerg I boarded the huge ferry for Harwich, England. There was some consternation when the ferry’s cabin steward realized I was traveling alone. She shook her head in disbelief and said: “Those crazy Danes. You don’t send an eleven year old child on a trip like this alone.” She took me under her wing and cared for me as I got violently seasick when we encountered rough waters in the North Sea. She refused, however, to throw me overboard no matter how much I insisted that I was a good swimmer and that I’d prefer to swim the rest of the way, and she saw to it that I caught the right train to London once we arrived safely in Harwich. I remember getting off the train in London, and standing there on the platform with my suitcase (this was before anyone had thought to put wheels on them), wondering what I’d do if my aunt couldn’t find me. I probably didn’t stand there long, although it seemed long at the time, before a woman threw herself over me. My Auntie Bridie, who I hadn’t seen since I was three years old, had somehow found and recognized me. The remaining train ride from London to Plymouth was uneventful. A month later I made the return trip to Denmark without incident.

    Other longer train rides in Europe were from Copenhagen to Basel in 1961; from Moscow to Kiev, and from Moscow to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), both in 1964.

    I’ve taken only two train rides in the US (not counting subways and the like) from Carbondale to Chicago, IL, and the other from Seattle to Portland. The train ride from Carbondale to Chicago was in 1970. I remember passengers, mostly students, being herded aboard like a bunch of cattle by an old black conductor. The train was dirty and uncomfortable, and using the word service for whatever surly attention passengers received from various train personnel would be a misnomer. That train ride elucidated for me why travel by train was not popular in the US.

    The train ride from Seattle to Portland, fifteen years later, was a much more pleasant experience. For one thing, the view from the train as we headed south along the coast was gorgeous; the train was clean, the personnel pleasant and the woman I happened to be seated next to, delightful. She was an elderly, retired woman from Los Angeles who had visited one of her adult children in Seattle. She always took the train, she confided, “because you can talk to people; unlike on planes,” she said,” where people won’t talk with you even if you sit beside them for eight hours.” She was traveling on some sort of senior discount pass, and she wasn’t going straight home. No siree, she was going to make a detour to Las Vegas before returning home. “The pass is good for 30 days,” she said, “and I have plenty of time.” She wore colorful clothes and a big cartwheel of hat, and she chatted with everyone. In the dining car she was joking around with the black waiter who exclaimed “My God, you must be Bella Abzug” when she jokingly called him “boy.” A fun and memorable few hours on an American train.

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    1. Wow, eleven years is mighty young to be doing a solo train trip. When my daughter was 15 we put her on the Empire Builder and she went solo to Montana, where she spent six weeks wrangling sled dogs for my buddy. When she stepped off the train again in Saint Paul after that she was still 15, but she was clearly more adult and sure of herself.

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      1. I don’t recall being worried about it, BiR, I was a pretty confident and self-reliant kid. Of course, I think the world also seemed like a smaller and much less dangerous place than it is now.

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  18. Oh, I don’t know if you want to get me started… I join others above by beginning in Iowa – I must have been about eight, and my mom took us on the train from Storm Lake to visit my grandma in Sioux City, just an hour and a half, maybe. I remember standing at the station and being thrilled as the train approached, finding our seats in the coach car, and that’s about it.

    I didn’t realize I was in love with trains till we took a trip to Utah in 1995 – son Joel was 14, and we brought his cousin Vin, 17, with us. Drove to Omaha to catch the California Zephyr (at 10 pm – the good news is you sleep through Nebraska). Since our coach seats we “two behind two”, when we put our seat backs down for the bed, we figured two of us could sleep underneath on the blanket, and two above, which seemed to work for that one night. (Of course, we were all much younger then!) We had the next day to travel through the Rocky Mountains – it was so incredibly dramatic with all those tunnels and sheer dropoffs.

    For my 50th birthday, I asked for (and got) an Amtrak/Via (Canada) Rail Pass (traveling in both countries was required) – 30 days with (at that time) unlimited stops. The idea was basically to go around the perimeter of the USA, stopping to visit friends or relatives along the way. I planned a week-long stop in the Bay Area, and 3 day stops in Deming, NM; Folly Beach, NC; and outside Indianapolis. (I ran out of time and didn’t get to NYC.) The visits were great, too, but the train trip itself was exquisite.

    Have been on a couple more trips, by now, and next time will take enough photos to do a proper blog essay. By now I am more comfortable in a “roomette”…

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      1. Yes, a roomette sleeps two, and it’s easier to rationalize if you have a traveling companion to share the cost. But once you’ve reached a certain age, it’s SO much better than trying to sleep in coach.

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        1. …and the one time we used a roomette, all meals 3/day in the dining car) were included in the price, which helped $-wise.

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    2. That’s my dream, Barbara, to get a rail pass and just wander for a month. Too late for 50, too late for 60… Maybe 65 or 70?

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  19. When I was young, my only cousins lived in Milwaukee and once a year or so we would visit them, usually taking the Milwaukee Road rather than driving because there weren’t freeways at that time and so a trip to Milwaukee by car meant threading your way on highway 12 through every small town between here and there. When I was about 8, we took the train to Washington DC, where my Dad’s uncle worked for the census bureau. It was early spring. I know this because there was snow on the ground in DC when we got there. I remember the platform at the Milwaukee Road depot the morning we left. Because it was cold, steam rolled out from under the engines and across the platforms as we boarded. We changed trains in Chicago and I remember the engine on the train to the east coast from there was one of those streamlined diesels with a name. I adored the Vistadome car and the dining car, where you could get chicken and noodles served in a china dish with a little cover.

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    1. Now that’s classy! No amount of speed or convenience can substitute. To think we’ve traded that for sitting 5 hours on the tarmac in a plane breathing recycled air with a stranger snoring on your shoulder and nothing to eat but a few peanuts.

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  20. Hello. This is my first entry into the blog. I have had several train experiences that did not include Renee. (They occurred before I settled down and came to my senses.) The first one was a round trip journey between Columbus, Wisconsin (the depot for Madison) and New York in the summer of 1974. In between, I took the train from New York to Portland, Maine, with a brief interval in Boston. I took the train through New Hampshire because hitchhiking is illegal there. A second trip took me from Thunder Bay, Ontario to about Schreiber Ontario, during my first hitchhiking trip around Lake Superior. (This passenger route ended in 1990.) A third trip was from Philadelphia to Columbus, Wisconsin in the summer of 1976. I took Amtrak from Seattle south to San Francisco and later from San Francisco back to Columbus in January, 1977. I made a brief trip between Columbus and Chicago, when I went to visit a friend who was married and living there. It was the first time I’d been to the Art Institute of Chicago. My final adventure without Renee involved taking the Polar Bear Express from Cochrane to Moosoonee, Ontario at the southern end of James Bay in September, 1977, as part of my last hitchhiking tour around Lake Superior. Life changed after I finally got my driver’s license at the age of 24, in the summer of 1978. Great to read that you’ve taken the train to Churchill, Jim.

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    1. Aren’t the names of all these trains/train lines wonderful? Thanks, everyone for some great stories. Do you think it’s too much to hope that train travel will enjoy a revival in the interests of conservation and common sense and just plain fun?

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  22. A few rides in my childhood from Two Harbors to Ely and back or from Two Harbors to Duluth and back.Fun memories.Free by employee pass.
    1956: Duluth to Oakland, CA and back. An adventure. Kind of hell on seedy, dying passenger service in coach cars on reduced fair by employee pass.
    1958 Duluth to Kalamazoo and back on seedy, dying passenger service in coach cars on reduced fair by employee pass. But a fun family memory.
    1963 on the last passenger run from Chicago to Duluth. It fell apart around Solon Springs. Then my father met my on the steps and chewed mew out over 50 cents worth of charcoal.
    63-65 many many rides into the Chicago Loop by the Illinois Central, the line that ran “The City of New Orleans.”
    A few fun short tourist runs here and there such as Duluth to Two Harbors and the Black Hills.
    Two years ago the Grand Canyon Railway into the park.
    My wife would not really be able to board a train any more.

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  23. Like PJ, I had a train mishap at about 11 (or maybe even younger). I had been visiting my aunt, uncle and cousins in NJ. My aunt put me on the train that would go straight through to Hartford, CT so there was nothing fancy I would have to do.
    However, there were different parts of the train. Some cars would, indeed, go through to Hartford but some were disconnected and left in the New York or New Haven station.
    She forgot or was unaware and put me on the wrong end. She realized what she had done after it was too late and called my parents in a panic.
    Meanwhile, the car stopped in New Whatever and the conductor told me I had to get off. Somehow I must have asked for help because I did end up on the next train to Hartford and my parents were there to meet me. Ah, the pre-cellphone days. I don’t even know if I called; I doubt I would have known how to make a collect call at that age.

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  24. A while after 9/11, the airlines and railroads offerred a package where you could fly one way, rail one way – I wish they would keep doing something like that. I’m an advocate of light rail, too. But if/when that Bottineau Corridor that Dale mentioned above becomes a reality, guess who’s going to lose a bit of their back yard?

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  25. As part of my family’s dream vacation when I was 16, we flew to Chicago and boarded a train bound for LA by way of the Grand Canyon. We had two or three overnights on the train and spent a day at the Grand Canyon. I remembered it as the Empire Builder but clearly it couldn’t have been from the other itineraries described by you all.
    I wouldn’t mind taking a long trip by train again.

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