heyday

That story about the big engineer broke my heart. I imagine Beagle's dad had been chuckling previously at the thought of the surprise he was going to give his kid, and how wide with glee would open the eyes of the big engineer, and then bam, the kid blows up.  Well I guess this sort of thing happens all the time with little kids.  I can see your dad walking away with Beagles and kicking some gravel and thinking, 'stupid kid.'

I think maybe the first time I noticed The City of New Orleans was when my ears perked up at the mention of Kankakee.  Kankakee?  There's a song that mentions Kankakee?  It's still a stop on The City of New Orleans, and on the more frequent Illini that goes only as far south as Carbondale.  I'm surprised that Beagles caught it at Union Station because I always got in at the Illinois Central station on Roosevelt, but maybe some other railroad company ran the one that Beagles rode,  The twelfth street station, as it was called, was torn down many years and the train runs by the lake approaching from the south then heads west on something called the St Charles Air Line which goes over the tracks to maybe Halsted and then backs down to pick up the tracks that take it to those long underground tunnels that take it into Union Station.

I'll wager Dagny (Dagny, I've long wondered where that name came from and do young objectivist couples name their daughters that and just now googling to make sure I got the name right I came across a site where you could buy Dagny toddler's clothes.  Frightening thought, toddlers in day care building their own Galt's Gulch.  (I wonder how objectivists feel about Trump, I have to think that half of them must love him to pieces, and the other half hate him to pieces.)) Taggert thought of replacing the rails in the tunnels with Reardon steel, but I would have thought that Beagles would have heard of Chicago' railroad supremecy before that/  Back in the heyday of passenger traffic it you wanted to go from ocean to ocean, except maybe in the deep south, you had to get off your train in Chicago and get on another one to continue your voyage.

Heyday.  I had to look that one up too.  It seemed to me that it should have been hayday, like in rolling in the hay.  But it turns out that it's heyday, like in I guess everybody says hey to you like you are flying so high, like you are riding the St Charles Air Line riding down to New Orleans and heading for your first stop in Kankakee.