Late Train to West Palm

I've often written about trains and even wrote a piece about my return home on this trip. This was my first long distance train experience and also my only experience in a train wreck. Even though it would have driven many people nuts, I enjoyed spending the down time reading and making new friends. This trip was in December 1986. I mentioned the Homestead Steel Mills in the piece. The picture is of me in 1989, standing in front of the mill which, at the time, was slowly being scrapped.

Everything suddenly slid forward and the brakes squealed. I grabbed the overhead luggage rack and held on as a clicking sound ran down the side of the train. In front of me was the conductor, holding on to a seat and trying not to fall. His face let me know that were in trouble. We were about 30 or 40 minutes out of West Palm Beach, riding though orange groves south of Sebring. Moments before, I’d left my new found friends in the lounge car and headed back to my seat in order to gather my stuff and be ready to debark. The excitement was over in just a few seconds. Then silence. The conductor ran toward the front of the train. The rest of us looked the window. We were surrounded by orange groves. On the embankments on both sides of the tracks were shingles, pieces of insulation and lumber. We waited, wondering what had happened. A few minutes later, the conductor came over the intercom to tell us that we had been indefinitely delayed. We had hit a house! I made my way to the back of the train. Sure enough, as I looked out from the window at the back of the train, sitting on both sides of the track a couple hundred feet behind us were the two halves of a house. Abe Lincoln had nothing on me. I'd now seen a “house divided.”

-

A friend had dropped me off at the train station in the predawn hours the day before. In contrast to warm and sunny Florida, it was a dreary December day. But there was nothing unusual about that, almost all winter days in Pittsburgh are dreary. The train, the Capitol Limited which runs from Chicago to Washington, was late. I sat on my luggage reading and napping as my stomach gnawed. I had planned to eat breakfast on the train and there was no place in station to get anything to eat. The train finally arrived just as it was getting light. After finding a seat and having my ticket punched, I headed to the dining car for breakfast. We ran along the Monongahela River, past the old J&L and Homestead Steel Mills. A few mills were still running and from the window you could see the glow of the furnaces. At McKeesport, the tracks began to follow the Youghiogheny, a fine river that I'd known about from my kayaking days. The rain and fog made everything seem sad. Along the way, the train kept having to stop. Late that morning, talking to the conductor in the lounge, I learned that one of the baggage cars had a hot wheel that kept overheating. Every time we stopped, we lost another half hour or so and I was worried that I wouldn't make my connection south. We were several hours late arriving in Cumberland, Maryland, where the tracks began to follow the Potomac River toward D.C. In Harper's Ferry, they uncoupled the train and sat the trouble car off on a siding, but by then I realized we'd arrive in Washington after my train to Florida was scheduled to depart.

-

There are two trains daily that make the run from New York to Miami. The first, the Silver Star, was my train. Luckily, there was room on the second train, the Silver Meteor. It runs a couple hours behind the first train. I called my sister and let her know that I'd be on the later train. She wasn't home, but I left a message. I ate dinner in the crowded station (the Washington station was in the process of being rebuilt) as I passed a few hours reading as I waited on my new train. It was night by the time we boarded and after a beer in the lounge car, I headed off to sleep, enjoying the rocking of the southbound train. The long day of waiting on top of a long semester in school had taken it's toll. I was tired.

-

I woke up to the sun rising in a clear sky. We were riding through forests of pines and wire grass. The land was flat and strangely familiar. It was also warmer. I changed from my jeans to shorts and a tee-shirt and found my flip flops and then headed to the lounge car for coffee. We got into Savannah around mid-morning. I got off the train and stretch my legs as it made a 15 minute stop. I'd learned that during the night, we'd lost several hours of time. I again tried again to call my sister, and left her another message, telling her to be sure to call Amtrak before driving to West Palm to pick me up. I spent much of my second day on the train in the lounge car, drinking beer and talking to several other graduate students who were studying at the University of West Virginia. It was them that I'd left shortly before the accident.

-

The train was running late and wasn't prepared for a six hour delay. They had no food for another meal in the diner and the lounge car was running out of sandwiches. To create good will, they offered everyone a free drink, but then didn't have enough to go around. We waited and grumbled and waited some more, not sure what all had happened. We learned that the engineering crew had been taken off the train in order to make sure they weren't using any illegal drugs. After all, who'd believe that a house was sitting on the tracks. A new crew was heading our direction, along with an inspection team that would see what kind of damage was done. Reports filtered back that the front engine was damaged, that the steel beams upon which the house was supported had been dragged under its wheels. Supposedly, we were told, that second engine was okay. We also learned that the truck moving the house had gotten it stuck on the railroad berm. The train came around the curve at 80 miles an hour and there, in front of it, was a house. The engineer hit the brakes hard, but there was no way to stop it.

-

If I'd been on the Silver Star, I'd gotten into West Palm Beach late morning. The Silver Meteor was suppose to arrive later in the afternoon. My sister, who lived in Stewart, a ways north of West Palm, had worked the night shift at the hospital. She'd didn't go home afterwards, but headed to the train station and was shocked to find that I was not there. Folks in the station told her that everyone coming from the west would be on the next train and they suggested that she call and make sure the time before driving down. This she did. She didn't leave her house till about 45 minutes before we were to arrive. It wasn't till she arrived at the station that she learned of the accident. Like me, she'd spent the day waiting...

-

Click here to read about the excitement of my return trip to Pittsburgh.