The Trains of Memory

By Carl Fowler

Clients frequently ask us about the origins of Rail Travel Center®.  My standard answer has been that I had a good old idea in 1982 to bring back touring by train.  The more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize that’s only part of the story.  Rail Travel Center comes from the trains of memory. 

I remember with great fondness train rides from the past.  When I was a little boy my father used to commute daily from East Orange, New Jersey to Hoboken on the Lackawanna RR’s Morris and Essex electric commuter line.  Each afternoon my mother would take me with her to the East Orange station to meet daddy’s train.  Shortly before its arrival, the Lackawanna’s crack streamliner THE PHOEBE SNOW would blast through on its final dash from Buffalo to Hoboken.  I will forever remember the excitement of her passing—the brightly painted cars, and especially, the beautiful observation-lounge car with its dark red painted train-board showing “Miss Phoebe”.

For my fifth birthday I got an unforgettable treat, a ride on THE PHOEBE SNOW from Brick Church Station in East Orange to Blairstown, New Jersey, returning on THE POCONO EXPRESS.  We had an early lunch in the diner and sped across the hills of northern New Jersey on a flyer that skipped all the little stops we usually made on the commuter trains.

For me that trip began a lifetime of train travel.  In some way I cannot define, it struck a chord.  How thrilling it was to enter the diner and order a hamburger (which was too big and thick to finish).  The coach seats reclined, and the observation car (a square-ended streamlined car) had chairs that faced the rear.  We could watch the tracks race away.

In 1958, we moved to Florida and made a trip to Winter Park to check out our new home on THE WEST COAST CHAMPION of the ACL.  This train was 19 cars long—dwarfing even THE PHOEBE SNOW.  There were two diners and two lounge cars and sleeping cars that seemed to stretch on into infinity on the rear of the train.

Leaving New York and speeding south towards Washington, the scenery was the familiar northeast of (then) prosperous cities, huge factories, tidy suburbs, mixed hardwood forests and frequent passing trains.  But in the morning in south Georgia and northern Florida, it was a new world.

The hills and factories were gone.  In their place the land was deep swamps and slow moving rivers.  Everywhere were pine trees, and the sidings were filled, not with commuter trains awaiting our passage, but long cuts of pulp-wood cars.  I remember being saddened by the tar-paper shacks beside the line, but excited to see the citrus groves and the myriad of lakes in central Florida.

In 1962 my folks gave me my first long solo trip by train.  I chased them from the Catskills (where we had a summer place) to Florida, but went the long way home.  I wanted to ride the Southern Railway’s ROYAL PALM, which traveled by day over the Appalachian Mountains from Cincinnati to Atlanta.

To reach her I took the local New York Central “plug” THE DEWITT CLINTON from Hudson to Albany, changing there to the legendary (but a little faded) EMPIRE STATE EXPRESS for Cleveland.  Cleveland’s Terminal Tower was an amazingly large station.  I still remember the trolleys on the lower level (still there today) and the late night quiet as I waited for the overnight mail train to Cincinnati.

The Cincinnati Station was even more amazing, a huge sweep of arches, murals, echoing halls and trains arriving from everywhere.  THE ROYAL PALM had declined from its glory years in the 1950’s, but still carried a diner-lounge car.  The Southern was using an older heavy-weight diner on this trip.  I had never eaten in a car with wood panels and domed lights.  It seemed warm and friendly, but I also recall feeling sad that there were so few people on the train and that the hamburger cost almost $3.00!  The scenery on the Southern’s “Rathole” Division was really spectacular.  Sadly, only freights pass that way now.

A final change at Jacksonville brought me back on THE WEST COAST CHAMPION for the final dash home on the Atlantic Coast Line’s Tampa mainline.  There would be many more trips on that train.  I went to college in Denver and tried to never go from Florida to Denver over exactly the same route twice.  From 1965 to 1969 there were still many choices for what the tariff called “diverse routings.”

I recall the spotless new coaches and the superb (and really reasonable) diner of the Kansas City Southern’s SOUTHERN BELLE from New Orleans to Kansas City.  The KCS really tried to stay in the passenger business, purchasing new cars well into the late 1960’s.  Sadly its efforts were unndone by the U.S. Post Office, which foolishly cancelled all the Railway Post Office cars—a blow that made most trains of the late 60’s hopelessly uneconomic.  Can we even remember how good and reliable the railway mail service used to be?

The Burlington’s DENVER ZEPHYR was still running in two sections before and after each college term in the period 1965-1967.  The DZ was the last complete train delivered to a US railroad before Amtrak.  I remember the art-deco touches in the décor, the mural lounge, the leather panels in the “Chuck Wagon” car and the dining car menu that was longer and more elegant than anything I had enjoyed on the majority of trains I knew.  And of course I remember the thrill of riding in the vista domes!

The trips fade together a bit, but mostly they remain clear in memory—and now even some of the frustrations seem OK.  On the Frisco’s SOUTHLAND we were delayed outside of Jefferson City for almost two hours by a terrible dispatching error which allowed three freights to pass the supposedly superior passenger train.  It was the dotage of Frisco passenger service, but the remnant of the once-proud SOUTHLAND took on a friendly peacefulness during the long delay.

The conductor invited me to step down and watch the freights pass.  Frogs were singing in an adjacent pond and a summery haze was forming over the Ozark foothills.  A local farmer came over and got scraps for his dog from the diner.  The one-man diner crew (cook, steward and waiter all in one person) prepared an amazingly good ham lunch while we waited, and passengers in the (one) coach seemed resigned.  Time passed and finally, so did THE SOUTHLAND, first on to Birmingham, then on forever into recollection.

I try to keep a record in my memory of all those trips.  I know I’ve gone over 350,000 miles by train—indeed if I could recall all the trips with my folks the figure would probably be over a half million miles.  It grows by 25,000 miles each year now.  For 34 years this habit of travel was my private joy, but in 1982 I was honored to be hired by Travel Center, Inc. in Tacoma, Washington as a travel consultant.

For years I had been an employment officer and later a program administrator for the Colorado State Employment Service.  I had always told my clients that when they applied for a job, they needed to convince their employer that they could do something different for that company.  Trying to follow my own advice, I told Travel Center owner Larry Clark that I thought I could make something of his appointment to sell Amtrak tickets.  Larry called my bluff.  He said, “Great!  Last year we sold $500 worth of Amtrak tickets.  Next year I’d like $50,000 and you’re hired.”  Wondering what I had done by shooting off my mouth, I went to work in a new job that for me was really a dream.

I waited a few months for Larry to tell me what to do, but he never did.  Larry hired you to do a job and then let you (and expected you) to do it.  I decided that the only way we would ever really increase our Amtrak sales would be to get clients to come to us really wanting a train trip.

In college I’d put together day-trips on the Rio Grande’s YAMPA VALLEY MAIL for the dorms at the University of Denver.  I decided to try a variant on that idea by combining a train trip with a tour.  The idea was hardly revolutionary.  Before the decline in the late 50’s of U.S. passenger service, virtually all tours were by rail.  The Union Pacific ran an extensive in-house program as late as 1967.  I tried to copy the design of a UP tour.  It worked !

I put together an overnight get-away to the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, Oregon.  We took out one ad in the Tacoma News Tribune and, to our amazement and delight, we sold out.  We repeated the trip and it sold out again.  We tried a longer tour to the Canadian Rockies and it sold out too.  From this start, Rail Travel Center grew. Happily we long since far exceeded Larry’s Amtrak sales goal.

Now we operate train trips throughout the U.S., Canada and the world.  Travel Center was purchased in 1986 by a new ownership group and the decision was made to spin off Rail Travel Center® as a separate entity.  The Frisco SOUTHLAND runs on only in memory, but the great trains are not gone at all.

Rail Travel Center®’s success reflects the general renaissance in train travel throughout the United States.  Amtrak carried over 20,000,000 passengers in the last fiscal year.  Many routes now actually cover their out-of-pocket expenses from fares and new cars and equipment have made rail travel an increasingly attractive option to millions worldwide.

Amtrak’s ACELA EXPRESS, while less heralded than the TGV or the bullet trains, streak from Boston to Washington at 125-150 miles per hour.  The old ACL route to Florida still hosts long SILVER METEOR, PALMETTO and SILVER STAR trains daily.  And the Georgia pines remain, waiting to amaze 21^st century travelers as they did my family in 1958, with the contrast between the lay of the land up north and the face of the earth down south.  This sense of change, of really “going somewhere,” is a unique asset of travel by train.  Every airport is the same, but not the view of America as seen by rail.

The trains of memory will forever charm and warm my private thoughts.  Terminal Tower no longer hosts Amtrak, and THE PHOEBE SNOW—even most of its route—is  long gone.  THE ROYAL PALM died in fits before 1971 and the Kansas City Southern was betrayed by postal bureaucrats who thought Zip Codes and “Universal Air Mail” (with most letters trucked hundreds of miles from regional sorting centers) would provide better service.

But trains have returned to Cincinnati’s Union Terminal.  Amtrak brought passenger service back to the Baltimore and Ohio/CSX line from Pittsburgh to Chicago, through Youngstown and Akron.  Once again you can take a train from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.  The ZEPHYR still streaks across the plains to Denver, with Amtrak’s wonderful double-decker Superliners replacing the well remembered Burlington domes.

Rail Travel Center seeks to make the trains of memory a treasured part of its clients’ lives as well.  Over 60% of our customers have taken more than one Rail Travel Center® tour.  We have been blessed by their valued patronage and will continue to try to recreate the way travel once was and will be again.

Our regulars know I close the narration of every tour that I am privileged to escort with a few lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

 “…My heart is warm tonight with friends I’ll meet, and better friends I’ll not be knowing,

and there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take no matter where it’s going.” 

Website created and maintained by Glenn Spiegel, Effective Websites.

Last modified: August 10, 2007