Two friends–a train and a woman–who grew old together traversed the rails from Dallas to Kaufman for the last time Thursday night.
Eighty-one-year-old Mrs. Lee R. Stroud of Kaufman boarded the one-coach Texas & New Orleans line at Union Terminal at 8 p. m., sixty-two years since first riding it the day after her wedding in 1890.
Southern Pacific, which owns the line, ended almost three quarters of a century of service along that route Thursday because the passenger traffic no longer justified it.
“Just call it a sentimental journey home,” the white-haired traveler said.
As Miss Ada Amanda Daugherty, she came to Dallas and was married to Stroud, a Kaufman attorney, on June 19, 1890.
The newlyweds spent their wedding night at the old Grand Windsor Hotel and went to Kaufman on the Texas Trunk, the predecessor to the T&NO. “Oh, it was a swell train in those days with many coaches in those days,” she said. “There was Pullman service as well.”
“And as time passed, I often rode the train just because I felt we belonged together.”
With the announcement that passenger service was to be discontinued, Mrs. Stroud bought a ticket and journeyed to Dallas Wednesday morning on the first half of the final round trip. Only one other passenger was aboard– often there is none!
“I’ll miss it all right, because for many years I lived only four blocks from the track, and the sound of the whistle at night was the last thing I heard before going to sleep. And in the morning before 7:00 a. m. when the northbound engine went through, I awoke to start the day.
The train bell tolled the changes as the years rolled by.
*As I worked on this article, I journeyed back into my childhood and the memories of TRAINS. I thought about watching Jack Trott and others hang the old leather MAILBAG on the tall pole with the hook next to the “tracks” between the two crossings still in town now, about behind Mama’s Daughters’ Diner today. It was rather exciting to see the hook come out from the train car and grab the bag off the pole hook. As I remember it, a man operated the “arm” hook from the train! And I am also pretty sure the train often “I reared ten children– seven are still living–and seventeen grandchildren. Why, for forty-five years there wasn’t a time when I wasn’t sending a child to school,” she laughed, as left a bag on the hook at other times for the Postmaster to take down and set on the counter inside while letters were put into boxes. My memories of the “old days” included Cleo Hinton as the earliest “Postmistress” and Jack Trott, following her as Postmaster.
I also remember one Sunday that my Dad “got the mail” and came out to the car with a note that said, “Paul, you forgot the postage. I put it on. You owe three cents, yes, 3! (Jack)” *Mr. Trott often put up mail late on Saturday evenings or after her gray eyes twinkled. “Now there are five greatgrandchildren.”
Yet, she managed to take it easy at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Edith Stewart, 800 North Craw-Church on Sundays.* I also remember when a few of my “unnamed” friends and I participated in putting some pennies upon the tracks, because the “big boys” had given them to us and told us to do it–and then to gather the “smushed” coins and to give them most of them!
Then we lived in fear because they told us that one time pennies had made a train “de-rail,” and some boys had gone to jail for it, and that if it happened, we would be to blame. Those were some of the lonest hours, waiting for the next train to come through ford, while she awaited her departure.
Just before entering the train, the sprightly greatgrandmother paused as she mused, “I grew up loving that train, and it will and pray it would not “DERAIL.” Of course, no wreck occurred, and then those big boys went down and took all the pennies!
A little nicer memory was formed when Mrs. Ollie Stark and Mrs. Paul Themer (Cub Scout Den Mothers) led us seven Cub Scouts on a hike along Pacific Street next to the tracks–and we sometimes got down to the cleared spots next to the rails. We even found a rather small snake that the two women identified as a CORAL SNAKE, as they looked into our nature handbook. And it did have the exact seem so lonely without it.”
Then, the “all-aboard” punctuated the evening air, and soon Mrs. Stroud was alone with her colors and markings that the book showed!
And I will close with another Forney Train memory, which occurred more than once when the Don Themer family lived on West Pacific Street at the intersection of the “trailer park street.” Freight trains would come up that hill towards the town crossings and really have to burn that diesel and churn those wheels, and the whole area shook. More than once, we missed some minutes of a favorite show, and a few times the train shook the surroundings so much, thoughts, as the wheels clicked off the era–ending forty-one miles to Kaufman.
(BY: Robert Miller)
that some of our really nice glassware in the cabinets banged against each other and BROKE! And this is no lie!
Must close…….This morning when I took my regular “drive-around,” a really large freight train had us waiting quite some time, and, of course, I counted the cars…….3–1– 88–1–101–2. Those freight cars and “ocean crates” must have really been loaded! And while I counted, I thought of Mrs. Lee R. Stroud and wondered if some day, I would see the “last train of Forney” come through…..and be sad!
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