Lirr168
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« on: December 22, 2010, 09:22:10 PM » |
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The Sunnyside of Yesterday
For those of too young to remember, the following is memory or two, set in Sunnyside Yard, taken from glimpses I'd get riding into Penn Station with my mother. This is set between the age of seven years, up to about fifteen, so that places it between 1957 and 1965. Realize that up until 1958, the accepted way of travel across the Atlantic was by ocean liner, and the back of National Geographic always carried advertising for the Northern Pacific or Great Northern railroads. The Boeing 707 was not yet a "come on", and passenger service was still profitable, along with contracts to haul the mail. Railway Express Agency still thrived.
Sunnyside was huge. There was no other description that could do it justice. The tracks were never empty, always filled with a rainbow of passenger cars. At anytime of day, you could easily identify Union Pacific sleepers in yellow, Atlantic Coast Line Pullmans in purple, stainless steel strings for Seaboard's "Silver Meteor", MoPac cars in blue-gray, and Tuscan coaches, diners, and sleepers for the home road. I'm not talking about fifty active cars, either. I mean, perhaps two-hundred or more. Steam lines kept the cars alive. Amidst the tracks little B-1 boxcabs raced back and forth, assembling and cutting trains for imminent delivery to the heart of Manhattan. Occasionally, the overhead catenaries would crackle and sparks flew. I have to be honest here, and tell you, I don't remember seeing the big P5 and P5a motors. I think they were relegated to freight service by this time. What I do remember, and vividly so, were the GG1's, in an assortment of colors. You couldn't separate Sunnyside from the GG1 fleet. I recall seeing the big G's in Brunswick green, what appeared as black, with huge keystone's, a few in cat-whisker stripes, some in red, and almost always, one waiting for "The Keystone", painted silver, with a Tuscan red stripe, running hip to hip. When you consider the vast size of the fleet, a high percentage was always waiting, humming, available, at Sunnyside. The assignments could be to tow anything from a Jersey local, a Washington express, or "The Broadway". GG1's handled everything. Here I might make the admission that they were so common too. Each GG1 looked much like another, excepting paint, as I mentioned. When I started seriously taking pictures, I neglected the G's - not entirely, but seriously. Why wasted film on a locomotive that would be around forever? Oh yes, I took pictures of the GG1's, but by the time I started in earnest, they were being defaced with the letters "PC". Who would want a pictures of those? Look, I was a purist! I imagine the same was said of K4's and J2 Hudsons prior to the death of steam.
In 1965, my Mother took my sister and me to visit my Grandparents in Florida, riding "The Silver Star". We rode the Long Island into Pennsylvania Station, then found our track assignment. We had a sleeper, placed about midway through the train. There was a lounge car, and ahead of that, the diner. My sister was a college Junior, an English major, knew everything, so to my disgust, she exercised experimentation with "the sophistication of tobacco" on that trip. This might have been influenced by having seen Eva Marie Saint behave similarly, opposite Cary Grant, in "North by Northwest". Of course that was supposed to be aboard the "20th Century Limited", and we were on Pennsy tracks, and besides, Cary Grant wasn't on this train. Who was on this train was the wife and daughter of actor Jose' Ferrer. Molly Ferrer was my age, and we became companions on the trip south. BINGO! First crush. Other than Molly's friendship, I can say the train was the best part of the trip, family dynamics being what they were.
When I was not exploring the train with my new friend, I rode in our compartment, watching the railroad yards, seeing some of the worst sides of towns from New York to Florida, and at one point, seeing strings of wooden refrigerator cars being scrapped. I always looked for steam locomotives, but I saw none. Once I decided to try washing, using the pull down sink in the car. It filled by push-button, and there were tiny bars of soap wrapped in blue Pullman paper. I still have one of those, forty-five years later. The track was not conducive to holding water in a steel sink, and pretty soon our compartment floor looked like the foredeck of the "Titanic". I used a huge number of paper towels to mop up that mess.
My mother preferred the lounge car, as did my dopey sister. Mom would order a drink and started to argue Civil Rights and racism with some geezer from Georgia. The geezer claimed to be a professor of psychology and being a smoker himself, told my mother he wanted to do a study of my anger with my sister's lighting up. He called the black staff on the train "darkies". I didn't like him and the geezer was full of hot air, anyway. There was no study. I still don't like him, and I'm certain he's been dead for decades!
Someone else I remember was the Porter assigned to our car. He was a black man, as I guess they all were in 1965. A very deferential man, he was dedicated to the Seaboard Line, and anxious to make us as comfortable as he could. It seems to me that he not only made up every bed, he was on call 24 hours a day, for any need or want from a passenger. He brought tea, and at night, we left our shoes outside the compartment door and he shined them. It seemed to me, they couldn't pay me enough money to do half the work with which our Porter was saddled.
At night, I slept near the window, or as close as possible. I recall rolling through towns, past blinking crossings, past headlights, against north-bound freights, and standing for periods without motion. My mother told me to leave the shade down so strangers couldn't look in and watch us. Watch us? Nobody was going to watch us unless they stood about nine feet tall and were extremely bored! Eventually, however, I fell asleep. In the morning, we awoke with the train moving at a steady pace through endless orange groves. It was an amazing sight, and still registers with me today. Bless my Tropicana!
We endured a week with my Grandparents, second degree sunburns, and no swimming, because my grandparents didn't like it. When we took the train home, I remember two things; One, Boca Raton was a flag stop, and some guy stood out on the track, lazily dragging a handkerchief left and right at crotch level to flag the train, and two, spraying Bactene on my sister's back all the way home.
So what does the story about my Florida trip have to do with Sunnyside Yard? Nothing, other than the train originated there, and it opened the secret of what those innumerable strings of colored cars contained. It is probably worth saying that this was railroad passenger travel in the old sense, prior to Amtrak, and while management still believed a comeback was possible. Like a patient with some lingering terminal disease, "The Silver Meteor", "Southern Crescent", and even "The 20th Century", were doomed, while ridership grew thinner and thinner.
The last time I visited Sunnyside, it was late at night, and I was in the company of an adult railfan, on our way to Pennsylvania to photograph a steam fan trip. This was when I saw the hidden gem, last of the species, reduced to work train status, the last DD-1. By this time, she had a black rectangle on her side, with huge white numerals for the Penn Central. I walked over and touched the side, just so I could say I touched an active member of the species. I didn't have my camera or tripod, so no picture. As far as the tracks of the yard were concerned, they were still in place, but vacant. No passenger cars staged a comeback any longer, and the big show was over. In subsequent years, the tracks were torn up, the DD-1 and a B-1 switcher consigned to museum status. Something like eleven GG-1's are preserved, some in great shape, some in horrific condition. Some are kept in Pennsy territory, others scattered to as far away as Texas and Indiana. None will run again.
Of course, the Pennsylvania Railroad is gone, as is the Penn Central. Amtrak, I am told, is coming up from its faltering start. It's difficult for me to imagine a passenger train without a GG1 or an E8 Diesel on the point. A trip to Strasburg's state sponsored railroad museum show even the successor electric to the G fleet, are gone as well. But, so went the ocean liner and the Boeing 707, each replaced in turn by more modern machines, built to be replaced. Videos on computer can show the younger railfans what it looked like, but for we older fellows, there is something special in knowing we were trackside when it all was alive, and we might assume it always would be.
Richard Glueck
Winterport, Maine\
12/2010
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