Ah, gentle reader. My beautiful wife were for some reason talking about trains the other day–taking them to California or something–and I started running down a list of trains whose names I remembered.
When I was in college, lo, those many decades ago, I used to take the train from Milwaukee to St. Louis on holidays. The Hiawatha Service would take me from Milwaukee to Chicago, and I would take the Ann Rutledge from Chicago to Kirkwood (since renamed the Missouri Ridge Runner. It continued to Kansas City, and stopping in Kirkwood was more convenient for pickup in the afternoon going downtown. On Sunday mornings when I was returning north, I would catch the Texas Eagle coming out of Texas since it would get me to Chicago earlier.
And I remember the name of a couple of the other trains leaving Chicago: The Empire Builder heading to Seattle, the Empire service heading to New York, and the Sunset Limited heading to Los Angeles. If you believe the review of The Christmas Train last year, I apparently also remembered (then) the Capitol Limited and Southwest Chief.
You know, every once and again, after watching an old movie or reading a book like The Christmas Train, I think how neat it would be to take a train excursion, say from St. Louis to Chicago to Seattle to San Francisco and back. But, holy cats, a small compartment on the Empire Builder alone would be somewhere in the excess of $1000 or even $2000–and the other segments probably as much.
It’s a picturesque thought, but dayum, I’ll drive that first.
