Long gone

Once upon a time, you could catch a train out of Warwick to go to Boston, Philly and even Chicago Warwick - In the summer of 1939 the Lehigh & Hudson River Railway announced that it was terminating passenger service from Warwick to Greycourt. The problem was a lack of riders and a flood of red ink over the bottom line. Passenger trains had chugged through the Warwick Valley for 77 years. But now, as the Great Depression lumbered to an end, some travelers discovered the convenience of buses while some others were buying cars. In fact, the L&HR’s passenger train earnings for 1938 were an anemic $1,380, down from $116,000 in 1914. The Middletown Times Herald placed the railroad’s losses on passenger operations at $2,000 a month. Sure, you could take the L&HR train to Greycourt in the Town of Chester, catch the Erie to Middletown and ride the famed Erie Limited to Chicago, or get a more prosaic train for the trip to New York. With fairly uncomplicated connections, the L&HR could get you on your way north to Albany, west to the Catskills and Lake Ontario, east to Boston, and until such service ended in 1934, south to Philadelphia and Washington. Those were the options but people had found other ways to get out of town. ‘History in the making’ And so, a group of 25 people from Warwick, who themselves may not have been regular railroad riders, arranged to be on the last train out after they read the L&HR’s end-of-service announcement in the local papers. The notices ran on July 5 and said service would be discontinued in three days with Saturday’s afternoon train. That was it. Not a farewell, not a thank you, not even a pleasure-to-have-served-you. One of the people who would ride the last train was Roy Elston, an officer of the First National Bank who later would be its president. Elston told his younger daughter Peggy that he wanted her to accompany him to hear the last toots of the whistle on the final 20-minute ride to Greycourt. “I would like you to do this because it is history in the making,” Peggy Elston Smith recalls her dad telling her. Smith was just 6, soon to start first grade at the Hamilton Avenue School. Of course she would go with her father even if her older sister chose not to. “It was just Dad and me,” Peggy Elston Smith says now. For her it was to be not only her last ride, but her first as well. She had never been on the train before. And so, on July 8, 1939, a pleasant sunny Saturday, Roy and Peggy Elston climbed aboard the train. “I was all dressed up,” says Smith who, many years later, would marry, raise a family and eventually retire from the Warwick Savings Bank where she had been a teller and mortgage clerk. ‘The death of cherished ideas’ Among the other passengers were John and Julia Beattie and their daughters Jean and Mary Lou. Jean Beattie May, who was 9, recalls that her father brought his movie camera and placed a few pennies on the track at the Warwick station and let the train squash them as it rolled in. “He said it would be something we’d always have to remember the last train,” May says. The pennies may have done their job for a while. But, she says, she hasn’t seen them in years. Mr. Beattie was not a rail customer. “We always drove,” May says. Later in life, she would study art history at Bradford College near Boston and hold administrative positions with museums and the Ford Foundation. She married and is the mother of two daughters. The Beattie girls wore matching dresses and bonnets and carried a homemade sign announcing the last train. One woman carried a parasol. A little boy was dressed in a sailor suit. One man wore a top hat. The train left the Warwick station at 3:56 for the 10-mile run and stopped about half way at Lake Station to pick up some more last-day riders. “To the majority who sought to be among those present on this history making event, it was a gay occasion,” The Warwick Valley Dispatch reported. “But in their midst were others, to whom the occasion bespoke the death of cherished ideas.” The Times Herald would have none of this sentimentality. In a finger-wagging editorial, it took a swipe at residents living along the line who wished to retain rail service “though it did not suit their convenience to do anything personally toward the provision of a sustaining patronage.” The passengers were not troubled. They sang all the way, led by Raymond R. Goodlatte, who “directed informal marching up and down the aisle” of the single passenger carriage, a reporter for the Times Herald wrote. At Greycourt passengers disembarked and the train proceeded to the roundhouse to be turned around. Then they re-boarded for the trip back home. No one was waiting for them at the Warwick station. The mayor wasn’t there. There was no marching band on that summer Saturday afternoon 69 years ago. “Historically Speaking” is an occasional series about the people, the places and the events large and small that define Warwick.