Travel By Train ??

    As a young boy growing up in Dallas, my family had many opportunities to visit Union Station. In the 1940's it was crowded with lots of military personnel coming and going to various bases or headed for home. My earliest recollection is in the 1950's when my Dad and I made a visit to Union Station to welcome his brother (my uncle) to town after a train trip from Colorado Springs.

 
    Union Station in Dallas was originally built in 1916 to facilitate the flow of World War I soldiers across the country and to help make Dallas one of the commercial hubs across the southern part of the country. The building today is a far cry from the one I remember in the 1950's and 60's. My wife's sister was coming to visit us for the weekend and took the train from San Antonio to Dallas.

  
   I guess everything is relative to size. As a youngster, I remember Union Station as a massive building with a large domed ceiling and a crowd of people trying to get to their destination. The parking lot was a classic example of confusion as travelers almost came to physical confrontations over a parking spot for their cars. When my wife and I arrived to welcome her sister, we drove to within twenty feet of the building and found a parking spot. The train was about ten minutes late, but a vendor with a push cart selling soft drinks saved us from the heat of the day. In the above photo you can see Reunion Tower looming over the top of Union Station.

 
    Union Station now has a dropped ceiling spoiling the view I had been telling Momma about all the way to Dallas. Now they don't even have a restaurant in the building, but there are vending machines on hand. When I asked one of the stewards about a restaurant or cafe, he replied, "There is a Subway across the street." Crowds are another thing missing from my descriptions of this Dallas landmark. I could almost count on one hand the number of travelers in the terminal. What a disappointment!

   
  The trains are a lot cleaner and more colorful than I remember them as a youngster. The yellow and white trains are part of the DART system (Dallas Area Rapid Transit). All of the suburban points were represented and the trains were constantly arriving and departing. The red, white, and blue trains (on the right) are part of Amtrak and this would be one of the trains bringing sister Gerry from the Alamo City.

   
  This particular train started its run in Laredo, Texas and made stops in San Antonio, Austin, and Waco before coming into Dallas. As you can see, the train is painted up colorfully in a Texas motif,..but it was headed on to Oklahoma City and a couple other stops before ending up in Chicago, Illinois. Made me wonder how the other states feel about a Texas colored locomotive chugging through their countryside. (Not my problem!)

   
  The sisters were quick to spot each other and my train story has a happy ending. Geraldine will be spending the weekend with us before heading home to Oregon....and nope, she is not going by train. One of those new fangled flying machines will take her from DFW Airport to Portland...  but she does have memories of her train trip to take home.