She was not at all impressed

My father Sol pulled the car up to the train station to drop off my mother, my sister, and me. He was also dropping off the luggage before leaving his car in the employee parking lot, one of the perks of working for the railroad. He greeted the redcap by name and showed him the coach number on our tickets before handing the suitcases over to his care. My father had worked in and around this yard for more than seven years and knew just about everyone it seemed.

We waited in the beautiful old station on West Broadway in Louisville for my father to return and then made our way to our sleeping car. We were going on vacation to the 1965 World’s Fair in New York and we were going to be taking the train all the way. I was eight and it was my first train trip.

Since my father was a railroad employee, our family’s tickets were free. Our only expense along the way to New York was to be the meals we ordered in the dining car but apparently my father knew the men who worked there too since they never allowed my father to pay for meals no matter how many times he tried.

After getting my mother and sister settled into the sleeping car, Sol took me down to the end of the platform. We climbed down a stairway leading to the track and then climbed up the steel ladder on the side of a giant diesel locomotive at the head of the train.  I was dazzled by all the buttons, lights, levers, dials, and switches that seemed to occupy every available surface inside the locomotive cab.

The engineer let me stand on the “dead-man’s switch” on the floor that had to be depressed for the locomotive to keep moving.  He let me sit in his chair and then he showed me how to operate the air whistle by pulling down on a handle connected to a chain overhead.

The engineer eased on the throttle and the big diesel engines behind us let out a deafening roar.  The train pulled slowly out of the station and headed north through the yard on its way to Ohio where it would turn east towards West Virginia. Each time the train approached a grade crossing the engineer prompted me to give two long pulls on the train whistle. I was flying high! When we came to first platform on the route, we left the locomotive and walked back to the sleeping car. “You won’t believe what I just got to do!”, I blurted out to my twelve-year-old sister before I got even half-way into the door. She was not at all impressed.