transport: trains

When I was a child, I was convinced that there was a certain type of criminal who specialized in pushing people in front of on-coming subway cars. I used to ride the subway with my Mom in NYC quite a bit and she was always warning me not to get too close to the yellow line because someone would "push me into the path of the train" -- I didnt realize that she meant that this might happen accidentally. Rather, I believed that every station had armies of "bad guys" looking to toss people in front of trains as they come into the station and that anyone who got too close to the edge of the platform was going down.

i thought that the train running behind my house would come off the track and run into the house if i didn't wake up and stand on the couch looking out the window screaming at the top of my lungs... mom and dad were glad we moved from that house

We could hear a train loud and clear (a couple miles away) at my aunt's house and I would stand along the back fence and look both ways across it to see where the train would come steaming through the yard.

My grandfather told me that if train conductors waved out their little windows their arms would get stuck and they would have to stay that way. Then we would wave at the passing trains, more often than not getting the engineer to wave back. I always felt a little guilty about making the poor guy be stuck, but that didn't stop me from waving.

I just read this belief

I used to believe that St Pancras station was actually St Pancreas. It wasn't until I was corrected - at age 21 - that I realised what I was saying...

I'm 38 and have just had a belief shattered!

Up until my late 20's I thought Amtrak was owned by Amway. I grew up in Amwaylandia, you see, and everything was owned by them. I mean, the big hotel in town was the Amway Grand Plaza, so why not Amtrak?

One morning when I was four my father left to catch a train into the city for work. He returned a short time later because the trains were not operating that day. My mum then told me that there was a 'train strike'. This was the first time that I heard the word stike (where you stop work to protest for higher pay and or better conditions), I actually thougth of the word 'stripe'. Being very young I had no idea what a strike was so I pictured all of the trains in the city being covered in black stripes (such as being tagged with graffiti) and infested with nasty black vines which made them unsafe for taking passengers during the strike.

when i was a child i used to belive while the train crossed the bridge on the river it would collapse, if i looked down from the window coz the train would be so heavy and would loose its balance

I used to think the underground railrooad was actually a well built under ground railway system built by the blacks and abolitionists to escape the slave states under GROUND!!!

On subway platforms in NYC, there are these bright orange bars painted near the edge of the platform to warn you to stay back. My mom once told me that if i step on that bar, i'd get run over by the train. So natuarally i rationalized that there was a very small but very dangerous train which would run your foot over if you stepped on this bar.

I used to believe that it was a strange coincidence that every time the train I was sitting in passed a railroad crossing, the gates were closed. When we travelled by car, the gates were almost never closed.

Lots of people here admit shamefacedly to clearing up childhood misconceptions only in their teens or even twenties. Is late sixties a record?

When I was little we used to go for holidays at Brighton. A special train called the Brighton Bell took us there. My memory from age 2 was reinforced for several years by the picture of it in my trains picture book. The name Brighton Bell made perfect sense to me because it was, unusually for that date, an electric train. A steam train on that route would no doubt have been called the Brighton Whistle. I had no occasion to think about it after the age of maybe six, but about thirty years later a magazine article about the history of sea-bathing jogged my mind and I thought "Er, maybe that should be the 'Brighton Belle' ?" But by then I was hardly sure this was a real memory it would have been trouble to find out. So I waited another thirty years for internet and Google to be invented and sure enough the other day found out there was this famous and in its day avant-garde train called the Brighton Belle; images on the net fit with such very pale memory as remains to me.

So that misconception is cleared up now, shows I do get there in the end. I get there slowly but oh yes I get there I get there.

When I was a kid, me and my neighbourhood buddies often played in the trees and bushes that were growing beside the railway embankment. Climbing the trees, building tree houses...

For some reason we thought we were not allowed to be playing there. So every time we would hear a train coming, someone would yell "PHOTO!!"

And we would all quickly turn our backs to the passing train, covering our faces with our hands.

We believed the engine driver would take our pictures and report us to the police :-)

My mom always said that if the guy in the caboose waved at you and you didn't wave back it meant you were not wearing any underpants. Imagine a small child standing there waving like crazy and sometimes there would be no one on the caboose.

when i was young, my mother would take us kids to london on the under ground once a year to see farther christmas. i thougth a man would sit in front with a big spade, when we got to the tunnel.

Although I am too young to remember the old trams in Britain (except in Blackpool), my parents and I have been involved with the National Tramway Museum in Derbyshire for many years and I have been going there from an early age. When I was small I thought the tram drivers just had to turn the controller handle round and round as if it were a coffee grinder, and that the controller handle made the wheels go round and round. So whenever my parents got me to grind some coffee for them in the coffee grinder, I liked to pretend I was driving a tram!

i live in chicago, and when i was little, my mom and me took the electric train downtown. i fell asleep and when i woke up i looked out the window and i said, "mommy look....we're in China." to my dissapointment, my mom said, "no that's china town...we're still in chicago." i was mad, but hey...kids believe everything.