Tag Archives: trains

Moonsky Star ’94

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On September 11, 1994, we boarded a train in Beijing that would take us to Ulaanbaatar, which is about 1,200 miles. That was the first leg of taking the Trans-Siberian, though the company which arranged our trips called the route the Trans-Mongolian, as it didn’t originate in Vladivostok. A quibble.

One thing do to before the train left was visit the engine.

And stand on the front, to pose for pictures. I think the woman stepping off the front was Iris, a Swiss we met on the train and corresponded with for a few years afterward. Of course, I had to pose as well. Yuriko didn’t want to do anything that silly.

The booking company was called Moonsky Star, located in Hong Kong, as noted on the self-printed booklet we received when we booked passage from Beijing to Moscow, about 4,880 miles all together. After Ulaanbaatar came Irkutsk and then Moscow.

The booklet was most informative about the trains, the accommodations, the cities and other places along the route, visas, and more.

The chimp was the company’s cartoon mascot. Formed in the late ’80s, as passage across Eurasia had become somewhat easier, Moonsky had offices in the warren-like Chunking Mansions in Kowloon, which I understand is still there, and about the same as it ever was. Looks like the potential for a terrible deadly fire.

Some years ago, I checked, and Moonsky Star was still doing business; but today I checked again, and it seems to have closed up shop. Could be too many other ways to get tickets these days; or the pandemic as last-nail-in-the-coffin; or the fact that Russia’s at war at the moment, and demand to ride the Trans-Siberian might be in a slump; or who knows what else. Maybe the proprietor retired or died.

Too bad in any case. I don’t have a bad thing to say about the company, which delivered the goods for us, allowing us to spend about two weeks getting from a remarkable point A to a remarkable point B with much in between.

Thanks, Grandma

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Fifty-five years ago, my grandmother — Grandma, always — took me on a train ride from San Antonio to Austin. I found evidence of it tucked away in an envelope at my mother’s house some time ago.

train ticket 1967

Grandma thoughtfully made a note of the fact that it was my first train ride, and the date: July 8, 1967. I was visiting Grandma for a while that summer, as I did in the years before we lived in San Antonio.

Come to think of it, the next summer while I visited her, my family moved from Denton to San Antonio. (Not the stuff of a sitcom; I knew perfectly well we were moving.) Grandma was the one who first took me to visit the house that my mother had bought, and would live in for nearly 50 years.

I find it amusing that a child counted as half a person for the purposes of train fare. Grandma thus paid fare $4.41 for one and a half riders. Adjust that for inflation, and she paid more than $38 in our current, beleaguered dollars.

Good old Missouri Pacific. Mopac.train ticket 1967 train ticket 1967

We must have been visiting someone she knew in Austin, but I don’t remember anything about that. I do remember wisps from the ride itself, mostly the view out the window. I’m sure she knew a train ride would be a thrill for a six-year-old.

But there was more to it than that. I also remember that she told me that it might not be possible for me to ride a train when I was older, so she wanted to take me. Certainly Grandma knew, by 1967, that the writing was on the wall for U.S. passenger train service, or at least Mopac. Maybe she wanted a last ride herself, before passenger trains went the way of the buffalo.

(Outdated analogy. Like the buffalo, passenger trains came to a population bottleneck known as Amtrak, rather than total extinction.)

I imagine an older version of myself — not even now, but perhaps from mid-90s — appearing to her and saying, Grandma, I’ve ridden a lot of trains. In Europe and Asia — and once across Russia from Asia to Europe. I’ve taken the bullet train, and even Amtrak from San Antonio to San Francisco in 1990, though it was distinctly second rate.

And those are just the intercity trains. I’ve lost count of how many different subways and light rail lines I’ve taken, but it would be dozens.

She probably would have been a mite skeptical of those assertions.

It was a one-way ticket. We returned by bus the next day.bus ticket bus ticket

Go Greyhound. Grandma also noted that it was my first bus ride. She was being thrifty in not taking the train back, I think. The bus fare is recorded as $1.35 (just short of $12 now), though I don’t know whether that was for the two of us or just me. Even if she paid double that herself, that would have been less than the train.

She probably didn’t think buses would quit running. I don’t remember the bus ride at all.

Future me could pop up again: Grandma, I’ve been on a lot of buses, too, in lots of states and countries. I took one across Australia once. But even in America, I’ve gotten around — all the way from Boston to Los Angeles, once, and that was just part of the trip!

Isn’t that nice, she’d say, thinking at least that her grandson has a healthy imagination.

Boscobel & Fennimore

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Road trips aren’t just about the destination, but sights and oddities along the way. Recently in southwestern Wisconsin, for instance, we stopped in Boscobel, looking for takeout. We found it at Udder Brothers Creamery. How could we pass up a place with a giant cow? Also, a giant wild turkey?

Note that the turkey not only proclaims Boscobel as Wisconsin’s Turkey Hunting Capital, but as Birthplace of the Gideon Bible as well. We wanted to be on our way, so we didn’t investigate that further at the time.

But now I know: “The birthplace of the Gideons was the Central House Hotel on September 14, 1898, in Boscobel, Wisconsin,” says Wisconsin Historical Markers. “Traveling salesmen John H. Nicholson of Janesville, Wisconsin, and Samuel E. Hill of Beloit, Wisconsin, shared a room in the crowded hotel because of a lumberman’s convention.

“In Room 19, the men discovered that they were both Christians; they talked about starting a Christian traveling men’s association. The following May the two salesmen, joined by a third, William J. Knights, rekindled that idea, and on July 1, 1899, founded the Gideons.”

Dang. I should have at least found the plaque. Down the road from Boscobel is Fennimore, another Badger State burg we passed through. Hunger wasn’t the main consideration there, so we spent a little more time, especially at a small park featuring The Dinky.
Fennimore, Wisconsin train
It’s a narrow-gauge (3-ft.) locomotive in operation from 1878 to 1926. “Trains ran daily between Fennimore and Woodman by way of Werley, Anderson Mills and Conley Cut, meandering 16 miles through the Green River Valley,” its historical marker says.
Fennimore, Wisconsin train
“At the peak of narrow gauge operations, the state had 150 miles, some used in logging operations in northern Wisconsin, now all abandoned.”
Fennimore, Wisconsin train
Narrow gauge, for sure.

Thursday Sundries

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I’m glad to report that Jimmy Carter has become the oldest person ever to be President of the United States, at 94 years, 172 days, topping George H.W. Bush. For many years, life expectancy was such that no one bested John Adams, who died at 90 in 1826. Finally Ronald Reagan lived longer than Adams in 2001. Since then, so have the elder Bush, Ford and Carter.

I’m not glad to report that we’ve been getting a raft of calls from an “800 Service” lately, asking me to contact “Apple Support Advisor” for unspecified but ominous reasons. Ah, spring is coming, and that must be the season for phishing.

Turns out it isn’t even a new scam, but this one didn’t say anything about iCloud.

Email subject line recently from a news outlet that has my address: “Meet R. Kelly’s lawyer.”

I don’t think so. Some years ago, I introduced my daughters to the concept of the List of Things I Don’t Care About. A lot celebrities are on the list. More are added all the time, mostly without me being conscious of it. R. Kelly’s been there a long time, but since his recent legal problems, he’s on the list with a bullet.

Here’s something I’d never heard of until the Internet offered it to me completely by chance, despite the fact that it happened in Texas, near a place that I drive by often when I visit that state: the Crash at Crush.

“On September 15, 1896, more than 40,000 people flocked to this spot to witness one of the most spectacular publicity stunts of the nineteenth century — a planned train wreck,” the Texas State Historical Association tells us.

“The man behind this unusual event was William George Crush, passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad… As the arena for his spectacle, Crush selected a shallow valley just north of Waco, conveniently located close to Katy’s Waco-Dallas track.

“In early September 500 workmen laid four miles of track for the collision run and constructed a grandstand for ‘honored guests,’ three speaker’s stands, two telegraph offices, a stand for reporters, and a bandstand. A restaurant was set up in a borrowed Ringling Brothers circus tent, and a huge carnival midway with dozens of medicine shows, game booths, and lemonade and soft-drink stands was built.

“At 5:00 P.M. engines No. 999 and 1001 squared off at opposite ends of the four-mile track. Crush appeared riding a white horse and trotted to the center of the track. He raised his white hat and after a pause whipped it sharply down. A great cheer went up from the crowd as they pressed forward for a better view.

“The locomotives jumped forward, and with whistles shrieking roared toward each other. Then, in a thunderous, grinding crash, the trains collided. The two locomotives rose up at their meeting and erupted in steam and smoke.

“Almost simultaneously, both boilers exploded, filling the air with pieces of flying metal. Spectators turned and ran in blind panic. Two young men and a woman were killed. At least six other people were injured seriously by the flying debris.”

Say what you want about the 19th century, they knew how to stage a spectacle. A dangerous spectacle, but it must have been quite a sight.

The article doesn’t say, but I assume the conductors had some way of keeping the throttles open after they themselves left the engines before they gathered too much speed.

Another thing I didn’t know (there are so many): Scott Joplin named one of his pieces, “Great Crush Collision March,” after the event. Guess it counts as one of the lesser-known railroad wreck songs, unlike the more famous “The Wreck of the Old 97.”

The DuPage Society of Model Engineers’ Labor of Love, in the Basement

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In the basement of the DuPage County Historical Museum is something you don’t see in too many local museums. Or too many places, though the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has an enormous one: a model railroad display. The DuPage County model railroad isn’t as large as Science and Industry’s, but it’s plenty big enough: over 2,000 feet of HO track and train cars, and seemingly countless model buildings and vehicles and trees and people and animals, all visible at closer and further range behind a series of windows.

The DuPage Society of Model Engineers created the display 50 years ago as a clear labor of love, and it was ready for the public to see when the museum opened in 1967. I read that a model of this size and complexity isn’t ever really complete, so I imagine there have been a lot of changes over the years as enthusiasts come and go. Members of the society are on hand on the 3rd and 5th Saturdays of the month to oversee its operation, so we got to see three middle-aged gentlemen operating the display, including replacing one of the trains on the track when it derailed.

Supposedly the display highlights some of DuPage County’s railroads and landmarks, but it’s really a blend of actual places (such as the Adams Library) and more fanciful re-creations of the American landscape between about 1900 and 1950. Three HO scale trains were running, one freight train and two interurbans. One of the interurbans featured a sleek art deco engine and cars, something like the Pioneer Zephyr, though not quite the same (the actual Pioneer Zephyr, long since retired, is at Science and Industry).

“That an Amtrak train?” Yuriko asked.

“No, Amtrak doesn’t have that much style,” I answered.

We also saw, in no particular order, train yards, train sheds, a roundabout, water tanks, depots, stations, small factories, storage sheds, bridges, stores, houses, churches, cars, trucks, signs, horses, dogs, cats and tiny figures of people doing innumerable things: walking, riding bikes and motorcycles, working, playing, lying around, even hang gliding. There was a biker gang and a haunted house in the style of 1313 Mockingbird Ln. If I’d looked longer, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were hobos.

The detail was incredible. Beside many of the tracks were extra ties or random pieces of lumber. The coal yards seemed to sport little lumps of coal. Inside a sewing machine shop were two customers and a sewing machine with the minuscule letters SINGER on it. As I mentioned, most of the display evokes the first half of the 20th century, so horse and buggies were in one place, and chrome-heavy cars another. The billboard and window ads were mostly period as well. My own favorite: a sign for Carter’s Little Liver Pills.