Although the lighting isn't the best, here's a photo I took on February 01, 1978, FORTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO, of a Rohr Turboliner train protecting Amtrak Empire Service pulling into the 125th. Street Station on the northern part of Manhattan Island, New York. This is the first station out of Grand Central Terminal and this was when Amtrak was still using GCT. It no longer does and all Amtrak operations have since been consolidated into Pennsylvania Station. This was accomplished with the West Side connection, a project that involved rehabilitating part of a former New York Central freight-only line that ran down the west side of Manhattan Island.

[en.wikipedia.org]

GCT is still used by Metro-North trains and, more recently, Long Island Rail Road trains, thanks to a new connection that took fifty-four years to build.

[en.wikipedia.org]

I remember taking a MTA subway to the subway station at 125th St. and Lexington Ave. and walking about a block west through a rough neighborhood in central Harlem to the 125th St. Amtrak-Metro North station, shown here. After interpreting the subway system map and figuring out which lines went where, I did a lot of exploring in New York and I must have looked like I knew what I was doing because, on a couple of occasions, some locals approached me and asked for directions. Of several trips I've made to the Big Apple, this 1978 visit was the only one where I visited the World Trade Center and went to the enclosed observation deck in the South Tower. Who would have imagined what would happen there twenty-three years later.

The Rohr Turbo train shown here has since been removed from service and has either been placed in storage or scrapped. One problem with these trains is that they were fuel guzzlers and were built in an era of cheap fuel. They were built by the Rohr aerospace company in Chula Vista, CA at the same facility where the first generation of BART cars were also built.

Here are a couple of photos I took of one of these trains when it was on a positioning move from the Chula Vista factory to where it would be operating in the Empire State:

[www.altamontpress.com]

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