Word: trains
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most of the farmland community of Crete, Neb., was asleep last month when 19 cars of a Burlington freight train jumped track on the outskirts of town...
...DAYS, of course, we had to ride the train from Boston to Seattle--four days and three nights, coast to coast. In fairness to the Great Northern and Northern Pacific, one has to admit a limited nostalgia when looking back. The railroads could each you many things--you gained a sense of "the vastness of America," to which, your parents insisted, your richer classmates aboard those jets remained forever oblivious...
Youth Fare, appearing as it did after my friends and I had made 18 transcontinental train trips, was an Emancipation Proclamation for the middleclass student. Across the country, youths in the 12-22 age bracket swarmed to the airports; by 1968 six million per year were taking advantage of the reduced fares...
Penn Station in New York is brightly lit and gilded plastic. It is not a proper home for trains. The dispatcher sits in a glass booth suspended over the main hall. You know that he served his apprenticeship in an airport form the way he issues commands, as if it is all a game of Railroad, in which the people below are his playing pieces. If the Secretary of Transportation ever institutes high-speed train service on the East Coast, he will employ men like this Penn Dispatcher. The result will be an airline on wheels...
Somewhere across New Jersey, rain and the night overtook my train. The moisture that formed on the windows was too thin to form teardrops. And I was tried. As we pulled into 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, I knew I shouldn't leave the train. Perhaps, if I stayed on, if the train continued, perhaps I would discover the power and energy which America once invested in its railroad. I got off, though, even though I knew the station would look square and dark, a mausoleum. For in a few days I had to return to Boston. By plane...