Getting the score before transistor radios
Learning about an extra service on the 20th Century Limited
In addition to being a retired railroader, a woodworker, a railfan, and railroad modeler, I am also a fan of Major League Baseball. Can you imagine my surprise when several years ago, while attending a baseball card show with my boys, I found and purchased the card shown here.
Just take a look at it and imagine how it may have been used. Picture yourself as a baseball fan traveling westbound or eastbound over the Water Level Route of the New York Central Railroad, perhaps on business, during a World Series game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. You are riding in a coach or parlor car and during that era (the Dodgers and Yankees played each other six times between 1947 and 1956), you are totally isolated from the game, unable to listen to a radio broadcast. You cannot even keep up on the score!
Well, guess what? New York Central’s passenger traffic department was concerned about you. Judging from the circa 1947 E-unit design you see here, I am guessing this particular form was probably first used during the 1949 World Series.
Imagine you were riding in a parlor car on train 51, the Empire State Express, from Grand Central Terminal in New York to Michigan Central Station in Detroit. Train 51 was scheduled to depart GCT at 8 a.m. and arrive in the Motor City at 9:15 p.m. This means that between l p.m. — the approximate time of the first pitch in that era of afternoon games — and, say, 5:04 p.m., you would have been traveling westward between Rome, N.Y., and a point in the vicinity of Welland or Waterford, Ontario.
Again, it would all depend upon the date and train you chose to ride, and it definitely would not have applied aboard either of Central’s 20th Century Limiteds, which departed after game time from both the Big Apple and the Windy City. But can’t you just picture a Pullman conductor or porter or perhaps a NYC conductor or brakeman, their blue uniforms adorned with bright brass or silver buttons, strolling through the Pullmans, parlor cars, or coaches informing the passengers of the game’s score and details?
Listen to what the Pullman conductor might have said at the end of Game 5 on Oct. 5, 1949: “After a one-out single and a walk, Jackie Robinson’s sacri