With all the talk about riding trains, I guess I'll chime in a bit.
When I was still a baby in 1940, my Dad took a job with the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, MD. He went there alone from Ardmore, OK on a train, found a place to live, started the job, then sent for Mother (remember no telephones, no cell phones in those days, just the US mail, or telegrams, for contacts) so Mother took me on the train to Chicago, changed there, and on to Baltimore, hoping Dad got her letter and would meet the train; he did. Now my sister was born only a year and a half after I was, and before she was born Mother took me on the train back to Ardmore, OK. And as soon after my sister's birth as Mother felt able to travel, we went back to Baltimore. I'll never forget someone asking Mother if it wasn't a terrible job traveling on the train with 2 babies, and Mother said, "Nope, the trains in the early '40s were always full of soldiers and they played with the babies and i was able to relax."
Very shortly after my wife and I got married, her aunt and uncle, with whom she had been living in Dallas before our wedding, moved to Denver, CO. He told us that if I would drive one of their cars from Dallas to Denver for him, he'd buy us train tickets back to Dallas. So in 1965, we took an overnight train ride from Denver to Dallas; the only train TRIP I can remember.
But I sure spent a lot of time close to train engines. My paternal grandfather met every train passing through Ardmore, OK for many, many years, put the outgoing mail on the train and took the incoming mail from the train back to the post office. I went with him many, many times as a youngster and as the train stopped, he'd pull right up beside it to off load the outgoing mail and load the arriving mail. In later years, when I worked for the post office in Dallas, I sometimes had to go meet the train (wearing a pistol that I'd have never used under any circumstances) to receive or send vauable registrered mail.
