WWII, marriage and RRs

They can’t delete this from real trains. It’s a real story about how important a role trains could have played in your actual existence. Thanks for sharing it.

YES I EMPHATICALLY AGREE, DONT DELETE THIS POST....it is a great time capsule of AMERICAS history!  Yup it is about your parents, yet there are many stories like this about Americas' GREATEST GENERATION!   FWIW...i have my uncles WW2 scrapbook...in are letters a friend of his (fellow B 17 mechanic) waxes longingly about getting leave to go back to Chicago, to woo my mom.

Turns out he was bypassed by a Manhattan Project scientist ( my dad).

I have a large print of the steam-era Hiawatha leaving Minneapolis' Milwaukee Road depot in a light snow with a Twin City Line streetcar visible on Washington Ave. that hangs in my front room. It used to be in the front room of the house I grew up in because my mom liked it. She said it reminded her of going down to the depot on the streetcar to pick up my dad.

He came back from fighting in Europe in August 1945 (if you see the old newsreels of the fireboats in New York harbor shooting water into the air by the Queen Mary on VJ Day - he was on the rear deck of the Queen) but then had to be stationed at Camp (now Fort) McCoy in Wisconsin until he had enough "points" to be discharged. So for about six months he'd take the train home Friday night and mom would take the street car to the depot to get him, and he'd go back to camp Sunday.

He finally got discharged and went back to his mail route in February 1946, and my sister was born almost exactly one year later.

Not sure if I’d call your Dads lucky because of the danger they faced in service, but their stories are great.

My Dad grew up with a heart issue and was rejected for active service during WW2. Undeterred, he went to work at the Raritan Arsenal in NJ, packing and loading ordinance for shipment to theaters of action. On both rail and ship.

I have an 8x10 of my grandfather in his uniform and when I re-framed it I discovered a stub of a train ticket hidden behind the photo.  I think it was from his trip home at the end of WW2.