RAILforum: Post A Reply

»	RAILforum » Passenger Trains » Amtrak » What is your favorite passenger train » Post A Reply

Post A Reply
Login Name:
Password:
Message Icon:
Message: HTML is not enabled. UBB Code™ is enabled.	[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doodlebug: [QB] I’m going to try to tie the original topic of favorite trains – pre-Amtrak and Amtrak – back together with the evolving secondary, and less widely appreciated, topic about the passenger railroading changes in my hometown. I think the topics are related and Hamlet, in its small way, is illustrative of the evolution of train travel nationally. Here’s an aerial photo of Hamlet as it looked in the 1950s when I was growing up. The white-roofed Seaboard depot is at the center. The top of the picture is generally east, and the station is set in the northwest quadrant of where the railroad’s north-south (left-right) and east-west (top-bottom) mainlines cross. This is why Hamlet was called the “Hub of the Seaboard.” [IMG]http://ourhamlet.org/assets/images/Main_St_aerial.jpg[/IMG] Notice all the dark-colored (actually Pullman green) heavyweight passenger cars along both mainlines and on the curved tracks on the left. These old cars were the ones that came through town in daytime and were switched among the various connections or, if they were diners or grill cars, were dropped and picked up by trains that carried them just during meal times. These cars were not used on the trains we’re remembering here with such affection, although earlier in their service lives they may have been luxurious. They were workaday cars for workaday local passenger trains that stopped in every town big enough to have its own post office. You could buy a cold ham-and-cheese sandwich wrapped in wax paper on these trains. They carried ordinary people who had to visit a big-city doctor in Raleigh, ordinary people who didn’t own cars or who had only one car and it was needed by someone else that day. Because this was the 1950s South, these trains carried lots of black passengers who brought their own fried chicken in a box from home because that was cheaper than the ham-and-cheese. These trains were called “Chicken Bone Specials” for that reason. They are the ancestors of the [i]Palmland,[/i] on which [b]palmland[/b] enjoyed his very cold beer, and today’s [i]Palmetto[/i]. The trains we’re remembering here were memorable because in every sense they were not the ordinary trains that filled most of a railroad’s passenger schedule. On the Seaboard they were stainless steel and carried names that began with “silver:” [i]Silver Meteor, Silver Star[/i] and [i]Silver Comet.[/i] They came through town in the middle of the night because they were taking people from really big cities like New York and Philadelphia to tropical vacations in Florida or, in the case of the [i]Comet,[/i] to the South’s only real city at the time, Atlanta. They had lounge cars and formal dining cars and in the case of the [i]Meteor[/i] and [i]Star[/i], they had separate lounges and diners for coach and sleeping car passengers. These trains stopped in Hamlet because the diners needed more ice and the diesels needed more fuel; otherwise the Carolinas and Georgia were the pre-airline version of flyover country. As GBN has pointed out many times – correctly – when you’ve seen one pine tree, you’ve seen them all. Unlike the upper-crust trains out West, these Seaboard (and rival Atlantic Coast Line) trains weren’t about sightseeing. They were about taking the Northeast’s wealthy out of the sleet and snow, insulating them immediately from the outside world in a cocoon of service and slumber, and depositing them the next morning in paradise. An irony here is that the [i]Silver Meteor,[/i] the first and best of these trains, was created in 1939 as an all-coach streamliner, a fast, cheap way to Florida. The all-Pullman [i]Orange Blossom Special,[/i] which always had a heavyweight consist, was the Seaboard’s original luxury train. But streamlining, a faster schedule, due in part to the [i]Meteor’s[/i] use of diesels rather than steam power – just the concept of modernity – quickly made the [i]Meteor[/i] the more popular train and sleepers were soon added. The [i]Orange Blossom Special[/i] died, remembered only by Johnny Cash. For [b]notelvis,[/b] the small, white building with the slanted roof just beyond the left end of the depot is the entry staircase for the tunnel to the second platform. You're correct that, in the first picture, the Doodlebug is sitting on the east-west mainline even though it arrived from Savannah to the south. The Seaboard had two mainlines between Hamlet and Savannah, the one used by most passenger trains through Columbia, S.C., and the mostly freight route on a flatter line through Charleston, S.C. The freight line, which the Doodlebug served, joined the east-west main (Wilmington, N.C.-Atlanta/Birmingham) at a point out of view to the top of the picture. The cars on the curve on the left would be for trains to and from Atlanta. The [i]Silver Comet[/i] stopped there rather than along one of the platforms to avoid a back-up move. The curve at the top allows trains from the east and from Charleston to head to the hump yard north of town. This layout is very similar to the station in Selma, N.C., where the Amtrak [i]Silver Star[/i] and [i]Carolinian[/i] leave the CSX "A" line and turn west on the Norfolk Southern for Raleigh. [/QB][/QUOTE]