My Favorite Trains 3: New York Central Passenger

When I got into N scale in 1993-1994, I just had a few scattered cars and a single Atlas GP35 engine. Then in 1994 Kato came out with smoothside passenger sets with matching E8/E9s. I looked at the available roadnames and there was only one choice: New York Central.

The New York Central was one of the first railroads I remembered. It ran about a mile from my house, paralleling the Norfolk & Western. When I was extremely young (probably 3) my dad took me down to the tracks at Weber Road in Columbus, Ohio, and we watched the RDC that still ran from Cleveland to Cincinnati pass by.

This is likely a photo of that RDC, taken in Cleveland in 1970 and by then sporting a Penn Central logo.

I later learned that what I was witnessing was the last days of pre-Amtrak passenger service and that that little RDC stood in the shadows of a great passenger tradition of the NYC: the Twentieth Century Limited, the James Whitcomb Riley, and other storied named trains of the past. This Kato set has the typical "lightning stripe" passenger livery. You can see the lightning stripes on the nose of the lead locomotive:

Trains in this two-tone grey scheme plied the rails near where I grew up from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Those NYC rails I grew up near had a long history. The tracks were laid in 1851 to connect Columbus and Cleveland. In 1865 Abraham Lincoln's funeral train passed over them on his long final journey from Washington home to Springfield. They had later become part of the "Big Four" (Chicago, Cleveland, Cinncinnati & St. Louis) which later was merged into the New York Central. In 1968 NYC merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad to form Penn Central. Out of its bankruptcy Conrail emerged in 1976 and in 1999 Conrail was purchased by Norfolk Southern and CSX and split. This line became part of CSX and carries trains to this day.

This group watches trains at the next crossing north of Weber Road at a place called Cooke Road: http://www.crtraincrew.com/

Next time, the story of a modern-day passenger train on which I took a memorable trip in 2008.