Railroad stories and film analysis

[trainman203]

In the old forum, I narrated some very detailed analyses of great railroad scenes in older movies from the steam era. Unfortunately, all of those appear to have been lost in the data loss at Bachmann concerning the forum.

However, I had published several stories of my experiences on the railroad back home as a youngster. All of those have survived in my own data, but were also lost in the Bachmann event.  The two that come to mind at the moment are the story of T&NO West Tower back home in the 60's, and exploring an abandoned B&O tunnel in West Virginia in the early 1970s. There was also a narration about watching a mail train stop in my hometown in the very early 60s.

I had started a multi part description of the now long-abandoned Missouri Pacific branch line in our town as I saw it as a teenager.  It was also lost but I still have the completed parts in my own data.

My question is - how much of this stuff does anyone want to see?  And where to start. I don't want to unnecessarily take up space here if no one is interested. Please advise.

[jward]

I for one would love to see it again. These are stories of a bygone era that we'll never see again.

[trainman203]

Jeffery Ward requesting the stories is enough for me.

I'll republish the ones from the past first, since I suspect many new people haven't seen them.

My trackside railfanning days were from about 1961 to 1966, with a hiatus briefly interrupted in 1972. The first narrative will be in an account of a mail train stop back home in the very early 60s. Number 5 was a remnant of a former name train called the Argonaut that had run all the way to the west coast, until the late 50s when it was cut back to Houston, lost its pullman car, and lost its name. After that, the train became an almost entirely head-end car consist- mail storage cars, express reefers, a couple of railway post office cars, and one or maybe two coaches at best.  These mail train stops were the bread and butter of Railroad passenger service, an every day workaday event in almost every small town in the country, until 1968 when the railroads lost their postal contracts, and the ability to financially keep passenger trains above water, which led to the founding of Amtrak, a few years later.

We actually rode Number 5 to Houston a couple of times before it was discontinued, once in the Pullman, while it was still on the train (a story in itself), and the other in a coach with broken air conditioning, attesting to the fact that the railroad was trying to run the passengers off of the passenger train so they could discontinue them.

All of these narratives describe every day life at the time, but the railroading of those days is long gone, and there aren't many of us around anymore who can recall it as it was. I hope some of y'all enjoy these stories.

[Terry Toenges]

I saw them the first time but I can always read them again.