It came right down the middle of street. You could walk right up and touch its huge wheels, which were above our heads. Wildwood Crest had a small one room train station in the middle of New Jersey Avenue where the trains from Philly deposited their passengers several times a day during the summer. Let me tell you, it was a first class show to watch the steam engine come down the tracks from the Wildwood with its smoke bellowing into the air, which was a couple of miles away. The closer it came, the bigger it got! The Crest Station was only a block from my Grand Mother’s summer home and quite often the engine came to its full stop right at our corner. It was an adrenaline rush to stand right next to the engine while it was rolling to a stop and be dwarfed by its 73” drive wheels and see the coal blazing in its fire box. The best part of the show was when the train powered up steam to depart. With piston rods ramming back and forth, the huge drive wheels would spin round and round try to make contact with the steel tracks in its effort to overcome inertial forces which seemed to have it stuck fast to the track. Then finally, with clouds of smoke billowing from its smokestack, slowly, ever slowly, the engine’s wheels broke free from the track and started pulling its passenger cars forward. From time to time we would put a penny on the track for the train to flatten. We were never disappointed with the result.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 18:24:31 +0000
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