Saying Goodbye to the Last Train

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
2/20/15

 

It turns out that I did not fully grasp a lesson in reality on that Sunday night in September 1957 when I saw the last Resort Special pull away from the train station in the little northern Michigan village in which I had grown up. It was Labor Day, just a week before I would enter college.

I had lived in that village before we moved in 1954 to a larger nearby town, but my longings remained behind. That evening, I had come back to the place at which I had earned my first dollar -- in four separate tips, respectively: once for toting luggage, thrice delivering Western Union telegrams.

As a lad, I was fascinated with the railroad and learned a great deal about the business from a kindly station agent who, in effect, was my surrogate grandfather -- I having been born some time after my own grandparents had died. The romance of the rails is with me still, but it was the disappearance of the last car of the last summer special around the curve at the south end of town that stands out to this day.

It would be 25 years on before the track was ripped up and the right-of-way let go to seed. The actual last train hauled rails and crossties as they were systematically taken up all the way from Charlevoix -- some 38 miles north -- south to Manistee for 81 more miles. The line of steel that for almost 100 years had connected tiny Nowherevilles to Everywheres coast to coast was severed, and gone were the sleek trains of my youth.

The Resort Special was inaugurated as a summertime train by what was then known as the Pere Marquette Railway in 1904, running in two sections: one from Chicago, the other from Detroit. Both ran overnight through Grand Rapids north to Charlevoix and Petoskey, securing the future of both as resort destinations, which they are still to this day.

The railroad suspended the Special from 1943 to 1945 at the bidding of the U.S. government, which needed every available Pullman car for use in troop transport during the Second World War. Its return in summer 1946 was celebrated by northwoods lovers in what we then called "down below" -- including the cities of Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis from which Pullmans departed every evening but Sunday to connect with the Special going north from Detroit or Chicago.

Those early summer mornings as the highly polished steam locomotive heralded its imminent arrival at the depot with detraining passengers eager to get to their lodgings, or the hazy evenings as the Special headed back whence it came with departing vacationers, made me think that I was at the center of something important that would go on forever.

I reveled in every suitcase I carried for an appreciative passenger, every trunk I helped the station agent load onto the baggage car, every "All aboard" called out by the conductor, every wave of the flagman's lantern and every throaty exhaust of the locomotive as it pulled the succession of dark green cars out of town toward the Big Cities. It was all right, because another run of the Special would be coming north early the next morning -- with the exception of Mondays.

I once had the opportunity to make that journey overnight to Detroit in a lower berth of one of those cars. I can still smell the aroma of Pullman-laundered muslin sheets and the mesmerizing odor of coal smoke and steam. That trip was made in 1947 when I was eight years old.

The last time it could have been made on that train was 10 years later when I was 18. In vain, I wished at that moment on that evening that I could be on board. But all I could do was to stand, a solitary figure, watching the red markers on the last Pullman of the last Special disappear into railroad history. That's when I began to understand what it meant to say goodbye.

The railroad had made clear that the Special, after 50 years of service, would no longer run. The automobile, the early freeways and more dependable air travel had made the train obsolete -- or so the newspaper stories said.

Six years later, all passenger service on that part of the railroad ceased to exist. Twenty years hence, the track itself was gone. All that remains today is the built-up right-of-way covered with weeds and growing trees. I do not like to look at it.

Psychologically, I became an adult on that September night 57 years ago. I wasn't at the site when the last train ever lumbered down the right-of-way that, in its last years, had been left to decay. Even if I had known on what day that would occur, I would not have been there.

Although I have learned much in the past 57 years about the need to say goodbye -- not the optimistic au revoir or auf wiedersehen -- they remain the most difficult words to speak in any terminal way. The learning continues but, rather than getting easier, gets harder.