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Home for Thanksgiving from Farm Lane station


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#1 CNJRoss

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Posted 21 November 2017 - 08:26 AM

Classic Trains 'Mileposts' blog, 11/20/17:
 

Home for Thanksgiving from Farm Lane station

 

 

Thanksgiving week is for riding passenger trains — time for Amtrak’s annual trial by fire. The holiday conjures images of swollen consists on the Northeast Corridor, stand-room-only coaches, station concourses overrun with humanity.

 

My favorite Thanksgiving memory takes me to a place more prosaic: a windswept wooden platform at an isolated grade crossing, unremarkable except for the fact that the place was swarming with hundreds of college students.

 

I was in that crowd, huddled and freezing on a bench on November 25, 1970, awaiting the 2:45 p.m. arrival of Grand Trunk Western’s westbound Maple Leaf at Farm Lane station (officially, East Lansing station) at Michigan State University.

 

SNIP

 

And what of Farm Lane? Amtrak elected to drop all service on GTW on May 1, 1971, only to bring part of it back in 1974 as today’s Blue Water to Port Huron. The East Lansing station then moved to a location on busy Harrison Road, a mile west of Farm Lane. In 2009, that lonely grade crossing was replaced by a grandiose grade separation.

 

For today’s MSU students, riding the train is a far more comfortable proposition, thanks to the new East Lansing station, a steel-and-glass affair built in 2015. Too bad they’ll never know what it was like for us hardy souls who, decades before, waited for the Maple Leaf in the cold at Farm Lane, eager to get home to family and mom’s Thanksgiving dinner.

 

More here.






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