This is a fun one for me. Dad’s description of his first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains reminds me of my own adventure while driving my 1972 Ford Pinto to New Mexico via Colorado by myself in 1974. The Pinto had a metal fascia in the middle of the back seat that was ideal for stashing . . . Well . . . Use your imagination . . .
Colorado was and still is awesome! Especially after driving east across the Great Plains!!! I had taken two weeks off from my job to visit friends in New Mexico and decide if I wanted to quit my job to play music full-time or keep working my way up in a plastic automotive parts manufacturing company. I don’t regret the decision I made at all, although the latter choice would have been much more conventional and easier.
Please enjoy this and I hope it spurs your own romantic/adventurous thoughts of taking a train trip across this beautiful country we call home.
David T
Train Travel Relaxing
By: Don Tschirhart
There are many people who have a romantic feeling for train travel.
Remember those “good-ol’ days” of comfortable seating, compartments or bunk beds for sleeping, delicious food served in a dining car by spic-and-span “Negro” waiters.
My first rail trip, while certainly exciting and interesting, wasn’t all that comfortable, not when I traveled with 40 or 50 recruit soldiers.
We were going from Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, to Fort Dix, N.J., a two-day trip, overnighting in train bunks through Ohio and Pennsylvania.
I knew that waiting for me at Fort Dix would be six weeks of basic training: awakening to a trumpet; fall-out for flag raising; morning exercise; hours of a drill sergeant’s loud “hup, two, three” cadence and “to the rear march”; long lines at the mess hall; cleaning barracks floors and latrines with a toothbrush; learning how to shoot a rifle and submachine gun; long hikes into the woods and marching in parades to the martial music of John Philip Sousa.
On that first train trip the weather was balmy. Someone got the bright idea to open the windows and let fresh air in while we slept. We went to sleep clean. We woke up black as the coal dust which covered us, our bunks, the seats and our clothes. No one realized we were to travel through coal mining country. The train threw up black dust which permeated our car. Because it was dark no one noticed it until morning.
People wonder why I love western books. It all started with a train trip from Detroit to Camp Stoneman near San Francisco, in January, 1947, en route overseas.
For the first time this flatlander saw snow-covered mountains. We stopped in the small Wyoming town of Green River and I got off the train to stretch my legs.
Stores lined both sides of the main street. At the end of the street was the most majestic mountain vista.
I was hooked.
For someone raised in midtown Detroit, with its highest point being the 44-story Penobscot Building, it seemed unbelievable to view those 10,000-plus-foot, snow-covered mountain peaks glistening in the sun.
I thought, “This is the America all people should see.”
Margie and I have visited the west often, and even lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for 18 months, and I have never gotten over my love for the western mountains.
Air travel has just about driven passenger train service out of business.
How much romance is there in boarding a plane, sitting back and traveling across the country in seven hours seeing only indistinguishable landscape, a few bumps that are mountains, a sandwich and maybe peanuts and a couple of pops, beers or wine before landing in some distant airport?
Maybe that’s the problem with our world. Everyone is in a hurry. No one has a chance to think the way you would if you were seated on a train watching the world go by.
Since just after World War II and my first train trip it’s been only once in the 1960s that I boarded a train, a 7-hour trip to Chicago.
It was so crowded people sat on the floor or in the toilets. Children squawked. A snack bar sold food that was almost eatable. I vowed to think twice before getting on a train again.
I broke that vow a little while ago when Margie, her sister, Dorothy and I boarded the Michigan Star Clipper Dinner Train for a two-hour luncheon trip to celebrate Dorothy’s birthday.
The train didn’t travel very far, at what appeared to be 5 miles an hour, from its station in Walled Lake through swamps and beautiful autumn-colored trees. We stopped and had lunch next to a picturesque part of Wolverine Lake.
Two lovely young ladies and an Irish tenor entertained us while my ladies ate Pennsylvania Chicken Supreme and I a Baked White Fish.
The most fun came from a group of eight older women sitting next to us celebrating the 70th birthday of one of them. Their hilarity was infectious and enjoyed by everyone near them.
That short train ride made me think of my past train travels and what it might be like to travel across the country by train in 2004.
Would it be like the gracious travel of more than 50 years ago? Should I go through the American Rocky Mountains or should I go via the Canadian Rockies?
Would the town of Green River still be as beautiful as I remember it? Would it be just a memory that should not be revisited?
Hmmm!
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