After I had become acquainted with the various train crews, and they knew who I was and where I worked, I started to get acquainted with the railroad.
There were two trains, numbers 10, eastbound daily except Monday, and number 11, westbound daily except Tuesday. These trains were mail and express trains only; no passengers carried. The train consist was mail and express cars on the head-end, and an old commuter coach on the rear. The train was usually powered by a K-5
2900-series Pacific passenger engine.
One day during the first summer I worked for the railroad, I decided to take a train ride. Train Number 10 arrived in my home town at 1:37 p.m., 7 minutes after my tour of duty finished. Instead of riding in the coach, I chose to ride in the mail car, and the ride was interesting. I got off at Meadville, Pennsylvania, a medium-sized town about 25 miles east of my home town, decided that I would wait there and ride Train Number 11 back.
I arrived in Meadville, had time for lunch and a movie, walked back to the passenger station to wait for Number 11, due to depart at 8:30 p.m. I was sitting on a bench on the platform, talking to the crew of Number 11, when we noticed a west-bound train approaching. The train consisted of ten coaches, no head-end cars, pulled by a 2900-series engine.
The train pulled in, and stopped to change crews. I casually looked up, right into the face of a young man, probably my age, or possibly younger.
It struck me then that what I was looking at was a train filled with German prosoners-of-war. Here I was, 16 years of age, sitting idly on a railroad platform in the United States, looking at a man of probably my age, who had been in a war, captured, and sent to prison in a foreign country.
What could he possibly be thinking when our eyes met?
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