Hear That Mournful Whistle Blow By Nebraska
I love stroll I took down memory lane of trains.
You know when I was a kid, I loved watching the trains go by. Where I grew up you could hear the whistles on the Nickel Plate Berkshires in the night, and during the day it was only 3 miles to “The Standard Railroad of the World” the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Actually the western extension more properly called the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway (or the Fort Wayne). The Nickel Plate was a specialist in high speed freight, while the Pennsy was the western end of the Great Trunk Route from New York to Chicago (along with the New York Central, Lake Shore and Michigan Central).
This was such a route that James J. Hill, the Empire Builder of the Great Northern seriously doubted that the Panama Canal was needed, the American Railroads could handle freight cheaper from the Orient to Europe. It wasn’t true then, quite. It is now through the incredible efficiencies of container freight. There are quite a few ships that unload on our west coast ports, are loaded onto container on flat cars (COFC) trains, that run nearly nonstop to east coast ports, and are then reloaded for transshipment to Europe.
As I was growing up, I watched government nearly kill the American Railroad through regulation. I’ve written some on it and no doubt will more, but not today. I watched as the Pennsylvania went from running The Broadway Limited as one of the premier, not only all Pullman but all compartment trains in the world to that train being a forlorn E-8 locomotive with one daycoach. Then came Penn-Central which spread the misery all over the northeast.
I can remember Dad talking about the Pennsy during World War II. One train every three minutes day and night. He used to talk about waiting 3 hours to get across the tracks. Sometime in the 90s, Trains magazine ran a picture of the Fort Wayne near where I grew up, when Norfolk Southern wanted to buy it, with a high-railer pickup pushing an abandoned couch off the tracks. Thanks, US government.
