ClassicTrainsMag.com 81My grandfather, Kenneth Macfarlan,
worked as a freight clerk for the Penn-
sylvania Railroad in Philadelphia, hence
we were loyal to the Pennsy even after
Poppa’s death in 1955. So, in late summer
1957, when my mother decided to take
my 4-year-old brother Donald and
7-year-old me from our home on the
South Side of Chicago to see her big sister
Molly and her family in Malvern, Pa., 22
miles west of Philadelphia, she booked us
in a bedroom on the Broadway Limited.
We would travel to Pennsylvania in
style, and we would return to Chicago in
style, because, after all, we were a Pennsy
family.
So imagine our excitement on the day
of our departure as we stood trackside at
storied old Englewood station watching a
Tuscan red E8 lead the Broadway Limited
around that sweeping curve at 63rd StreetRoom service on the Pennsy
A young boy holds out for dinner on the Broadway
Appealing to adults and 7-year-old boys
alike: Artwork from a 1949 brochure depicts
the Broadway’s dining car. CLASSIC TRAINS coll.“Why didn’t you file a report?” de-
manded McLachlan’s superintendent.
“I never felt anything and thought
somehow we all got lucky and they got
away,” retorted McLachlan.
“In those days, it was the responsibili-
ty of the railroad to fence the track. If
livestock got hit, the New Haven was lia-
ble,” says McLachlan. “All of a sudden,
each of those four cows was a prized
milker, every one worth a half million!
The New Haven was good about those
kinds of things. The legal department
took care of it. The farmer probably got a
couple of thousand each and I never
heard anything more about it.”
The incident cemented a nickname
McLachlan had acquired in the wake of
his RS3-vs.-bovine crash: Cow Killer.
McLachlan’s crew at the time razzed
him and proposed putting “Cow Killer”
decals on the front of all his motive pow-
er. Despite that, McLachlan asserts, “I felt
bad for the cows. I love animals.”
As proof, he cites a midday trundle up
the Berkshire line on a local freight when
he spied a mother goose and five goslings
running ahead between the rails.
“The mother wouldn’t leave her flock,
but the babies weren’t big enough to hop
over the rail.”
McLachlan halted the freight in time.
He and his crew got off and lifted the
baby geese over the rails. “The mother
had a fit squawking at us, but the littlefamily went on their way and so did we!”
McLachlan, now 84, of Newtown,
Conn., is a font of stories of old-time rail-
roading in simpler times. When asked his
favorite, he laughs mischievously and re-
lates the night he and a conductor, Rob-
bie Kelley, got their Budd car tangled up
in a thicket of willow trees toppled over
the rails by a thunderstorm.
“We were running on-time near the
Connecticut/Massachusetts border when
bam, right around a curve we run into a
bunch of willows.
“Robbie, a devout Roman Catholic
going to mass every day, alights from the
train followed by me with our axes. We
start furiously chopping when a passen-
ger in everyday clothes gets off the train.
He asks, ‘Can I help?’”
“We were none too happy to be out
there chopping away, and Robbie spurns
the passenger’s offer: ‘Just what I need,
another SOB in the way. Who the hell are
you, Paul Bunyan?’”
Smiling, the man replied, “No, I’m
Msgr. John Curtis of St. Mary’s Catholic
Church in Pittsfield.”
Pete McLachlan laughs about the inci-
dent 40-some years later. “I think Robbie
felt so small he could’ve crawled under
the rails.”
When the monsignor detrained in
Pittsfield, he turned to Robbie, grinned
and said, “I’ll remember you, my son.”
— Chuck FulkersonRon’s Books
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