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All Aboard! Train Travel to EHS
The experience we know as the start of school, parents driving or flying with their children to Episcopal and helping unload their belongings for a tearful goodbye in front of the dorm, is a relatively new development. In the early days of EHS, those goodbyes were frequently exchanged at hometown train stations.
The experience we know as the start of school, parents driving or flying with their children to Episcopal and helping unload their belongings for a tearful goodbye in front of the dorm, is a relatively new development. In the early days of EHS, those goodbyes were frequently exchanged at hometown train stations. The difficulty and expense of travel did not always permit parents to travel with their children to the School, so a student might board a train in the vicinity of his hometown on his own – or perhaps with an older brother or classmate – for the long trip to Alexandria.
Bill Clay, Class of 1925, recounts journeys to EHS from Savannah, Ga. “Some of my most vivid memories of those long-ago days are the long trips to The High School on the Atlantic Coast Line railroad, leaving Savannah around 8 p.m. and arriving in Alexandria about 18 hours later if the train was on time.” Charlie Cook ’52 and Bill Cook ’55 traveled from Western North Carolina by boarding the train in Nashville for a 24-hour trip. While the journey was long, it was not necessarily lonely.
Sometimes other Episcopal students were on the train, and if they were in a spirited mood, they would ask the younger boys to chant school cheers, sing songs, or recite the schedule. Pegram Harrison ’51 recalls boarding the steam-powered Southern Crescent at Peachtree Station in Atlanta with approximately 15 other students late in the day for an overnight trip. The boys passed the time waiting on the platform for their train by placing pennies on the track to be crushed by incoming trains.
These pennies were recovered by the boys as souvenirs. Aboard the train, the students entertained themselves with trips to the dining car and comic books, which were not simply read. “I remember it being a great sport to push comic books into the fan blades that were so valiantly trying to cool the cars,” said Harrison.
Bill Blake ’51 boarded the Southern Pacific in Lake Charles, La., in the morning. The highlights of these trips were visits to Bourbon Street while waiting to change trains in New Orleans. Otherwise, the trip was long and uncomfortable from New Orleans, since the train lacked sleeper compartments and passengers had to sleep in their seats.
While train travel could be arduous, it did have its advantages. Hugh Richardson ’48 remembers that the steamer trunk tags issued by EHS revealed dorm assignments, so train travelers learned this highly anticipated information in advance of their non-train-traveling classmates.
Unlike earlier generations of EHS students, the majority of whom traveled from the South, Tim Hidell ’01 took the train to Alexandria departing from Wilmington, Del. He remembers being so eager to return to Episcopal that he would depart the train at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and hail a cab to the School. This way he avoided the long delay in D.C., and arrived at School sooner than had he waited for the train to continue to Alexandria.
The journey from the South concluded at the Alexandria station. Harrison remembers, “…being awake to see the Masonic Temple arise by the dawn’s early light, disembarking in Alexandria, and wondering how to get to EHS from the station.”
