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Most recent 'passenger ' train ride was on tourist line out of Chattanooga with my son five years ago. Time before that was on IRT subway line in Queens in 1994. Most uncomfortable ride was in cab on Edaville 2 foot narrow gauge in 1980: my fiance and I had to sit on the cab's window sills, for there wasn't room for four of us in the cab. Most beautiful scenery was on Amtrak from Oakland to Reno in the snow just after the rotaries cleared Donner Summit in 1978 with my earlier fiance. Best meal was on New York Central from Utica, NY to NYC in 1962-best lamb chops I ever tasted! Dumbest thing I ever did on a train was in UK in 1986, when I left my camera on the train seat when the London train I was on arrived at my stop in Swindon. I got off the train, the doors shut and I realized I didn't have my camera, ran up to the cab unit and frantically pleaded with the crusty ol' Brit engineer to stop the train-eventually a conductor, or whatever they call them in the UK, intervened and convinced the engineer to accomodate me. All this took place with a large crowd enjoying the whole escapade. On that same trip, while riding the London 'underground', I saw some of the weirdest wierd-oos ever in public-downright scary when you're in a train underground in a foreign country and most of the passengers looked and acted like the cast from "A Clockwork Orange" that aged very badly, and that you had only a vague idea where you are and not a clue as to how to get where you're going. Rode the San Deigan (Amtrak) many times in the '80s from San Juan Capistrano to San Diego-nice ride thru beautiful country but best part was twisty bits near La Jolla. Unfortunately it always ran behind schedule, so spent a fair amount of time in bar in restored San Juan station-there was/is? a great restaurant in The Depot right in the station with jazz every Sunday with brunch. Most annoying train ride was when I was a liitle kid living in Queens and my Mother insisted that I wear short pants every time we went into Manhattan on the IRT, and they had those awful plastic wicker- like seats that left little dents in the back of your legs all day. Passenger train trip I almost took but it didn't make sense to, so I didn't, was from LA to Raleigh in 1994, when my just restored Corvair blew up its transmission a few days before my 9 yr old and I were to drive it to our new home in NC to join my wife (the 2nd fiance mentioned earlier) who was already there. Airfare was $300 less than Amtrak. Plane would take 5 hrs. Amtrak would take over 5 days with a layover at night in either Jacksonville or Pittsburg (I think), and that was sitting up in coach all the way to NC! My son didn't want to fly because he wanted to see the USA out a window so we shipped the broken car, took the bus for it only took 2 1/2 days, even though Greyhound was on strike, they transferred us to a local from Dallas to Atlanta because of floods in Tenn. and we spent the night in the very hostile Atlanta bus station with food poisioning from an earlier bus stop meal. Three days later they found our luggage. At least the fair at less than $150 total for the two of us offset the shipping cost . My very last bus ride ever. The other train I wanted to take but didn't was the Durango & Silverton out of Durango when my son and I were on our way home from our vacation after visiting many n.g. train spots throughout Colo.and we got to Durango just as the train left for Silverton. Most fun ride was on the Roaring Camp and Big Trees out of Felton, CA in the redwoods near Santa Cruz with my daughter in 1975 in a gondola pulled by a Shay up steep grades while eating barbeque. Scariest moment for a relative was when my late grandfather got his foot caught between the platform and a subway car on the curved platform on a NYC subway at the South Ferry station in Manhattan around 1950. (He wasn't badly hurt.) An almost as scary, but definitely fun train ride was the cab ride in an ex-Sacramento Northern juice motor that had "very high voltage" signs in the cab about 12" from where I was riding. That was at the Orange Empire Museum in Perris, CA. in approx 1990. Shortest ride on a passenger train was on a special pulled by the just restored Santa Fe Northern in the Bakersfield, Ca yard about 12 years ago. We wrangled our way into a cab ride back and forth about 300 feet or so in the yard. I'll never forget it though because it was freshly shopped, looked like a million bucks, probably cost a lot more than that to restore, and that it gave my young son an appreciation for steam locomotives, not unlike the effect my Dad had on me when I was a kid and we took the"tubes" from Manhattan to Jersey, or the PRR in NJ, the Long Island, the New Haven in CN, visited the Sunnyside Yard in Queens, or watched the RR car ferries in NYC and Jersey--all in the fifties. Time to go-I've had way too much coffee tonite!
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