Memories of meeting the train

Situated about 50 miles north of New York City and, as the crow flies, about eight miles from Lake Carmel, Brewster is one of the four population centers in Putnam County. Its main connection to the Big Apple is Route 6, which winds its way through the very beautiful reservoir system of the New York City watershed.

While we drove that route hundreds, maybe thousands of times, we also enjoyed the sublime experience of taking the train. Now known as Metro North, it was once, in the “way back time,” the New York Central Railroad, a marvelous collection of drama, mystery, utility and even a type of elegance born of its ability to do what it was intended to do with grace. My view of the train and its impact on my life started very early.

 City kids, we were fortunate to spend two delicious weeks each summer with our grandparents in their tiny bungalow in lake Carmel. Mom and Dad would pack up the 1942 Ford and bring two of us to our grandparents for our summer sojourn, delightful days that lasted weeks, spent outside, walking barefoot, swimming, exploring the woods and creeks … exceptional memories. And, for one week during the summer, Mom and all four of us kids would spend another week of wonder in Lake Carmel. Where we all slept is a mystery.

On Friday of that week, we would all jump into 11 L 11 (our license plate) and go to Brewster to meet my Dad who was taking the train from Grand Central Station to join us.

The trip to Brewster was an exciting expedition, since we rarely left the bungalow and its surroundings on Ogden Road. We’d pile excitedly into the car and take Route 52 to Carmel, then turn left to take Route 6 to Brewster. Anticipation for our adventure wrote a strong memory as Route 6 transformed into Main Street, making a dramatic turn around a water course and the train station.

At the apex of that turn Brewster had, like Danbury, CT, a clock in the middle of the street; four faces to tell you the time. The clock and the winding street scape were nothing like the grid pattern of streets in Brooklyn or the unpaved roads in Lake Carmel. They were like a touch of magic to my child’s mind. Much later, after we had moved to Lake Carmel, I hired the photographer and florist for my wedding in Brewster. Our Dad is buried there in the St. Lawrence O’Toole Cemetery … but that is a digression from this story.

The railroad station, across from the clock, had an irresistible sense of importance. Built as a faux half-timbered structure, it looked like the mystic buildings of my grandmother’s tales of her childhood in Cornwall. Fanciful child that I was, I most probably configured this place as England itself. After all, I thought that the palisades on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River were the White Cliffs of Dover.

 Inside, it had a sense of purpose that rivaled that of a church, with its seats organized like pews and, as its altar, the ticket and the telegrapher’s windows. The rafters, the beams that supported the slate roof, also carried a kind of ecclesiastical strength much like you would see in a country chapel. Streams of colored light came in through the leaded windows; the stuff of fairytales for me.

It was the telegrapher’s office that intrigued me the most. The chatter of the telegraph was a constant hymn in this “church.” I was maybe 8 years old and loved being inside that structure, transfixed by the rhythm of the dots and dashes and their hidden meanings.

 Outside, on the platform, it was a different story.

Schooled early on to the inevitability of catastrophe, the arrival of the old-fashioned steam locomotive held me in a delicious abject terror.

I could feel the rhythm of the wheels in my stomach as it came around the bend, a black giant with a cow catcher in the front and steam billowing out of the stack, all noise and fury as it came to a stop with more steam spilling and spitting out from around those gigantic wheels. I would hold my breath until it stopped and I was sure it wouldn’t jump the tracks. Phew – not run over by a steam engine again!.

And then, there he was, dressed in his suit and fedora, holding a copy of the Herald Tribune and a bag full of donuts. Our Dad was there. I can see myself running to meet him, grabbing the newspaper and holding his hand, with the rest of my siblings doing their own greeting dances.

Because he was a “railroad” man himself, a passenger representative for the B & O Railroad, he would always take time to recognize the men who worked on the train, even walking up to the locomotive’s cab and waving to the engineer. Inside the station, he’d stop and chat with the ticket agent and wave to the telegrapher. It was like being with a movie star.

We’d get in the car, which Mom always parked just south of the railing that protected passerby from falling into the stream that ran under the station, and we’d take Route 6 back to Lake Carmel, a complete family again, this time with donuts from the little store in Grand Central Station. Brewster and its train station had worked its magic again.

The car would fill with conversations about the week we all had; us in lake Carmel, Dad in New York City and Brooklyn. Such happy memories of roads and trains and places and people that defined our lives.