Former Pullman porters are all aboard for Train Day tribute
— -- As U.S. rail buffs anticipate the expansion of high-speed rail under President Obama's stimulus plan, four railroad veterans will board a Philadelphia-bound Amtrak Acela Express today to remember a slower, but certainly more genteel, era of rail travel.
The men, ranging in age from 86 to 95 whose collective passenger train service totals more than a century, worked as Pullman porters or dining car employees from the 1930s to the 1970s. On Saturday, they'll be feted as part of National Train Day ceremonies at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. This is the second annual Amtrak-created commemoration, which features musical performances, displays and other rail-related fare at stations in Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as smaller events in about 130 communities nationwide.
Perhaps no image personifies the golden age of U.S. rail travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries more than that of the Pullman porter. Originally hired by sleeping car inventor George Pullman shortly after the end of the Civil War, they swelled to 20,000 in the first half of the 20th century. Pullman recruited recently freed "house slaves" who were adept at providing refined service, says Lyn Hughes, curator of Chicago's A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum on the city's South Side.
"They were happy to do this job because it meant freedom and the opportunity to travel and be paid," she continues. "But they were more than just men who attended to the needs of passengers. They were confidants, people you could hold a conversation with. They had a quiet dignity."
Indeed, the Pullman porter ranks, made up exclusively of African American men until the 1960s, was for many, an entree into the middle-class.
Frank Rollins, 93, who worked first as a dining car waiter for the Illinois Central Railroad and later as a Pullman porter on the Chicago to Oakland, run, recalls that most porters "were homeowners and family people and most I met put their kids through college."
