By Train

Couldn’t bear to delete it after the Season and now saving it for summer, but a day or two of it gets peeked at anyway from time to time. On my desktop: crystal ball with the Advent calendar. Snow scene. Charming New Englandish village, shops, pharmacy, homes, church top of the hill with children trudging up and sledding down. My favorite, the railway station: some days the old fashion train chugs through trailing smoke from the steam engine.

My first train ride was 1943 or ‘44 with my mother to New London, Connecticut to see my father as he finished officer training at the U. S. Maritime Service school. We drove to Pensacola and boarded the L&N for Montgomery. Steam locomotive no air conditioning in the train coach windows open smoke and cinders blowing in hold your breath and close your eyes. In Montgomery changed trains and boarded a Pullman car to Washington, DC and visited my aunt a few days. 

Her name was Evalyn Godfrey Weller so nieces and nephews called her E.G. Her house was on a bluff overlooking the Potomac canal and river rapids. Walk down the street to the street car stop. Street cars into the District, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, top of the Washington Monument, Smithsonian, National Cathedral, climbed to the very top of the Capitol dome where visitors are no longer allowed, stared transfixed with horror at the zoo’s gigantic tarantula OMG.

Train to New London, stayed at the Quaker Hotel on main street downtown. Walked across the high bridge and watched a U. S. Navy submarine glide beneath on the way to sea. On arrival, my father had given me a child’s version of his officer hat and spotting me peering over the bridge rail a sailor on deck saluted me as the sub sailed on to war. Delighted, I thought the sailor had mistaken me for an officer but my father said he knew I was a small boy and was being friendly. No, he mistook me for an officer.

Best outings during Bay High years were taking the train Atlanta & St. Andrews Bay Railroad to Dothan, Alabama and Columbus, Georgia for football games and Peanut Festival parade. No air conditioning in the coach, windows open and breathe dust or windows closed and cook. The Bay Line ran diesel locomotives, not as quaint but better than cinders and smoke from the Louisville & Nashville Railroad’s steam locomotives in the forties.

Many train trips with Linda. AmTrak from Chipley or Tallahassee to Washington, New York, Ann Arbor, New Orleans, Tucson. Some with Kristen. Happy. All happy. Trains. 

Favorite way to travel then, still and always.

Overnight, sleeping car, diner. 

Trains.

Monday/Tuesday my mother’s second night in hospital. Sedated for pain disoriented restless. Father, help me.

Tom