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Coal Train Penny
Chip sent in this railroading memory to share with others:
A memory from my childhood. It was the summer of 69, I was Nine and my parents and I were visiting my Sister’s Family in Roseville Ohio. One afternoon I wandered down the hill her house was on, to the tracks and crossing below. A Train was coming and moving slow so, I placed a penny on the tracks and stood by to watch the Train flatten my penny. Workers on the Train saw me and immediately knew what I was doing. At first it was my delight that the Train stopped right in front of me and inches from my penny. A man from the Train disembarked and approached me. He then began to warn me that the Train could spit that penny out like a bullet and I was too close. He then walked me away from the engine (numbered 6013) and gave the signal for the engine to move. The Engineer crept the Engine forward and flattened my penny. The man peeled it off the engines wheel and then presented me with my specially prepared flattened penny.
This story gets better cause much to my surprise; the man asked if I’d like a ride on that Train! Of course I said yes and enjoyed a free Train ride to Zanesville Ohio and back! The worst part of the whole trip was, we rode the Caboose of a Coal Train. When I got back to my Sister’s, I was covered in the blackest dust imagined. I didn’t care – I had the most memorable vacation ever! I’m in my Fifties now and still have that Coal Train Penny, (somewhere!)
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Chip, as a kid back in the mid-1960’s, a few friends and myself used to walk the few blocks from our houses in Wayne, New Jersey, and put coins on the Erie Lackawanna (ex-Erie) track. There was an iron bridge that crossed the Passaic River that separated Wayne from the next town, Pequannock. We used to put coins on the track, then hide underneath the bridge until the train passed before we picked up the crushed coins. They were everywhere.
A few days before I moved to Delaware two years ago, I took a ride to the bridge (there’s a road and factories there now). I knew that the track had been closed down years ago, there’s all grass and weeds over it, but the bridge too had fallen into bad disrepair from not being used, and the ends were blocked off. That’s called Progress… I think.
Chip,thanks for the great, great memories and for knowing that we weren’t the only “crazy” kids who put coins on the tracks. We never got a train ride though!
John