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Great Rail Trips of the World by Jacobs Soft Cover 1985 128 pages
Great Rail Trips of the World by Jacobs Soft Cover 1985 128 pages FIRST PAGE is bent ove , MISSING a tiny piece.
This book has been many years in the making - the result of scores of train trips in the United States and Canada in Europe and Egypt. Australia and New Zealand, Mexico and South America, the Far East.
For us it began as a child, long before the Air Age, in the dusk of winter evenings when the Hiawatha a blur of lights, hurtled by with a deep-throated blast from its steam-belching locomotive on its adventurous way from Chicago to Milwaukee and points west as thrilling to us as a shuttle blast-off to today's generation.
It continued on rail trips over the Chesapeake & Ohio to Virginia where, we recall, kerchiefed black ladies greeted hungry passengers with trays of inviting, golden brown Southern Fried Chicken ... on the Florida East Coast to Jacksonville. Daytona to Miami ... on the Illinois Central to New Orleans ... the Overland Limited to Oakland . . . all to the wails of lonely steam whistles in the dark of night - whoo-whoo-whoo-o-o - a plaintive sound that haunts us still, one that can't be duplicated by diesel and electric locomotives.
Those were the days when Pullman cars had open sections of facing scats that, at night, porters made up into lower and upper berths with dark green curtains on each side of the center aisle for privacy. Wealthier passengers took a spacious drawing room (with private toilet) that, together with one or two smaller bedrooms occupied one end of the Pullman; men's and ladies' washrooms were at the other.
Crack Limiteds had an observation-lounge car (with open air platform) at the tail end, a dining car (source of perpetual wonderment and delight) somewhere in the middle.
During our college years came rides between Chicago and New York on two historic trains: Broadway Limited and Twentieth Century limited. And then, later on. vacation trips to California on the most glamorous trains of their day: Santa Fe's star-) studded Chief and Super-Chief
We traveled thru Europe during the Belle Epoque of the 1920s and '30s. when train travel was at its zenith, when the Orient Express, Train Bleu, Hecht d'Or and other legendary trains were the epitome of luxury travel. In those days, hotel buses and attendants awaited your train's arrival in Florence and Rome, for example, to transfer you and your luggage (which might well include a wardrobe trunk) to the hotel. These, by the way. were the days when the Grand Tour was still in vogue, when one often spent up to a month or more (as our family did) in a single city.
Those were the days when you crossed to Egypt by steamer, rode from Alexandria to Cairo, then overnight to Luxor and on to Aswan, by train -literally the only way to go.
One of the frustrations which must be endured stoically by modern tourists trying to see the ,world before it's too late is the numbing speed with which important arrivals are thrust on them. There is no longer time to travel hopefully. Transit by air has become about as stimulating and educational as a shot of sodium prandial.
This is not to denigrate aviation's contribution to human welfare. There are conceivable if not readily discernible - advantages in being able to eat breakfast in Paris and keep a dinner date in New York. But I am firm in my belief that the majority of globetrotters today learn less about Spaceship Earth from their encapsulated journeys across oceans and continents than. they would glean from making bicycle tours in their home countries.
However, since vet), few people with a persistent itch to seek faraway places are likely to settle for a bicycle tour, what alternatives are there to hurtling through the stratosphere at 600 miles an hour? Which is exactly what this book is all about. This observation. which reflects much of our feeling, was written by Osmar White. well-known Australian author/journalist.
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