Fast Trains
I grew up in Canton, Massachusetts and spent my earliest years toting around after my mother. This meant I spent more than a few days on the platform at Canton Junction waiting for my father's train to arrive -- he commuted on the New Haven in and out of Boston five days a week. Most of the time the trains I saw were other commuter trains, a local freight and sometimes a bigger freight. But every once and a while a an express passenger train would curve in off the viaduct and blast threw the station leaving a trail of old papers blowing around behind it.
I was always scared and excited when I saw one of the FL-9s curving in off the viaduct. It would pass on the track nearest to the station and its power frightened me like nothing else did in those days. Forty-five years later, its the fear that I remember most vividly. But I loved the trains themselves too. The bright white, orange and black diesel pulling a string of stainless steel coaches, the kind you never saw on a commuter train. I had never experienced anything like that until 2006 when I went to England.
This is no slight to the Acela, or the Northeast Regional trains that Amtrak runs. They are big, powerful and fast, but maybe it is just because they are so familiar to me they didn't capture the same wonder that those New Haven named trains did. Maybe it was because the level of traffic on the New Haven seemed higher in my memory than the schedule Amtrak and the MBTA keeps today. I can't say, but when I went to England in 2006 and stood on the platform at Huntingdon in East Anglia on the East Coast Main Line, I felt had traveled back in time somehow and was reliving my earliest days on the platform at Canton Junction.
In 2006, the Great North Eastern Railway was still alive. (The GNER is a great cautionary tale for anyone who thinks privatizing the North East Corridor is a good idea, by the way.) The GNER put on a marvelous show in August 2006. I was only on the platform at Huntingdon for about 30 minutes, as I waiting for a friend to pick me up, but it seemed every few minutes one of their high-speed train sets would fly through the station with the whoosh, whoosh, whooshing as the cars shot past. The East Coast Main Line through Huntington was four tracked and there was also a busy commuter service running. As I stood there and watched the trains I could only think that this must have been what it was like to stand in the electrified portion of the New Haven in 1920, 1930, 1940 or 1950.
Unfortunately, the handsome livery of the GNER is no more. The railroad went out of business a few years back, although, I heard another British company has the rights to use the livery now, so it may return. Kind of like those New Haven painted locomotives that pull commuter trains in Connecticut. Not the same as the old railroad but certainly a nice reminder.
I was always scared and excited when I saw one of the FL-9s curving in off the viaduct. It would pass on the track nearest to the station and its power frightened me like nothing else did in those days. Forty-five years later, its the fear that I remember most vividly. But I loved the trains themselves too. The bright white, orange and black diesel pulling a string of stainless steel coaches, the kind you never saw on a commuter train. I had never experienced anything like that until 2006 when I went to England.
This is no slight to the Acela, or the Northeast Regional trains that Amtrak runs. They are big, powerful and fast, but maybe it is just because they are so familiar to me they didn't capture the same wonder that those New Haven named trains did. Maybe it was because the level of traffic on the New Haven seemed higher in my memory than the schedule Amtrak and the MBTA keeps today. I can't say, but when I went to England in 2006 and stood on the platform at Huntingdon in East Anglia on the East Coast Main Line, I felt had traveled back in time somehow and was reliving my earliest days on the platform at Canton Junction.
Unfortunately, the handsome livery of the GNER is no more. The railroad went out of business a few years back, although, I heard another British company has the rights to use the livery now, so it may return. Kind of like those New Haven painted locomotives that pull commuter trains in Connecticut. Not the same as the old railroad but certainly a nice reminder.
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