You Can Enjoy Michigan Aboard Twilight Limited, Published 5 September 1956 ABOARD
THE TWILIGHT LIMITED Of all the trains leaving Detroit for Chicago,
none is finer than the Twilight Limited. Perhaps I am prejudiced,
because it was on the Twilight that I used to begin my courting trips.
For, before marriage, when the Angel In Human Form still was in Des
Moines, Iowa, I used to figure I was really on my way when I came
aboard the Twilight.Time have changed, trains have disappeared, but the Twilight still rolls on. So it felt like old times when I went back into the fish bowl observation car of this splendid limited. I say "fish bowl," because the glass goes almost to the floor in the Mercury observation cars. So you find me behind this beautiful glass bivouac, as we rolled across the Michigan countryside In August, with its verdure and golden grain, its forests and its beautiful clean towns. Thus there's the gag town Ypsilanti which the Mercury curved gracefully through and then a full pause at beautiful Ann Arbor. More gloomy is the railway division of Jackson. But soon its depressing effects are compensated for by Battle Creek, the breakfast food capital of America. Then Gag Town II, when we rest at Kalamazoo. By this time you are pretty well across Michigan. At high speed we decribe ellipses across the landscape, we lean over to take great curves at high speed, we race like mad on the level. (Yet the old steam engines a generation ago were doing the run faster, in those halcyon pre-Perelman (sic) days.) Niles and back goes the time, for as we cross the Indiana state line, we are on Central time. Then before you know it, Lake Michigan at Michigan City. Indiana. The sand dunes and after that, the steel mills at Gary (?). You now pick up the four lane highways and see where passenger revenue is being diverted. Pullman and its big works, the Illinois Central electric, picks us up and we race into Chicago, in the shadow of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. If you want to enjoy Michigan, the NYC's Twilight's the answer. |