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The attached photo, which recently sold on eBay, grabbed my attention because of the unusual car it depicts. The view is of the eastbound
Denver Zephyr, No. 10, having just pulled out of Denver Union Station at 4 p.m., first passing beneath the 20th Street viaduct and now the 23rd Street viaduct and about to glide past the coachyard, roundhouse and diesel shop, cross the South Platte River
and accelerate along the edge of the 38th Street freight yard, the Denver Union Stockyards and Fairmont Cemetery as it begins its overnight journey to Chicago on a clear April afternoon in 1962. But the focus of this photograph is No. 10's observation lounge
car on this day: not the regular blunt-end dome-lounge observation car, 235 "Silver Chateau" or 236 "Silver Veranda," but instead round-end dining-lounge observation car 301 "Silver Star," built by Budd in 1939 for the
General Pershing Zephyr. My interest in this photograph is not only because of the presence of the "Silver Star" on the rear end, but because I was a passenger on this train. I was a high school junior at the time and enrolled in the ROTC program at
Denver's South High School. It was the start of spring break, and a group of ROTC cadets from all the Denver high schools were aboard No. 10, heading for Fort Knox in Kentucky. Best known for its fabled gold depository, Fort Knox at that time was also home
to the U.S. Army Armor Center and School, and that was our destination for five days of education and training. We journeyed by rail only as far as Chicago, then went by bus on to Indianapolis and Louisville before finally reaching Fort Knox. But why was
"Silver Star" bringing up the markers of No. 10 that day? I learned after my return home that the regular car had experienced a problem discovered upon its arrival at the 14th Street coachyard in Chicago the previous day and would not be available for that
evening's westbound departure. "Silver Star," then between regular assignments, was in the coachyard and was quickly readied as a stand-in. While it had no dome or the amount of lounge space of the regular car, the front half of the "Silver Star" was dining
space that could readily be used for first class passengers. Thus the car that quite possibly had never been as far west as Denver before made a single round trip on the
DZ. As high school students paying our way on this adventure, we were coach passengers, so I didn't have the opportunity to ride in "Silver Star" and instead ate dinner and breakfast in the train's full dining car — and I spent most of the journey in
the dome of one of the coaches. It would be just over a year, until on my high school graduation trip — a gift of my parents — to Chicago by a very circuitous route and including a night spent at Bernard Corbin's home in Red Oak, Iowa, and a fantrip over
the Southern Iowa electric line at Centerville, Iowa, before I had the opportunity to ride in "Silver Star," by that time with an unsightly diaphragm on its rounded tail end, and then working regularly on the
Kansas City Zephyr. And at the time of my trip to Fort Knox, I never dreamed that in just over four years I would be an Army medic in a tank battalion in the First Armored Division at Fort Hood, Texas. A lot of memories churned up that this one photograph!
Hol
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