Sixty-two years ago, this past August, I packed a steamer trunk with a year’s worth of personal belongings and boarded a Union Pacific Railroad passenger train en route, through Chicago, Illinois, to Washington, D.C. Accepted to George Washington University, the first member of my family to attend college, and the son of a pipefitter/sheet metal worker in the Union Pacific’s Cheyenne rail yards, I was entitled to free use of a railroad pass to take me to university.

In the words of the late Steve Goodman’s country folk song, City of New Orleans, eight years later, like “the sons of Pullman porters, and the sons of engineers,” I was riding my “father’s magic carpets made of steel.” For five years, twice annually, I made the two-day round trip from the western edge of the Great Plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains across two-thirds of the country to the nation’s Capital, which I entered through its magnificent Union Station.