SEASONAL RAILROAD READING.

It's time for the seasonal movies of the American High to return to television, preferably in black and white; twenty-inch cathode ray tube television optional.  One of those is White Christmas, which is a reunion of the men who won the War.  There's a bit of train riding involved.

Soon Rosemary and Vera join them for a nightcap, everyone breaking into the song “Snow,” accompanied by Kaye’s rhythmic “choo-choo” sounds. It’s corny, but these people know how to sing close, jazzy harmonies. And you can’t do better than composer Irving Berlin.

At this point a couple of establishing scenes appear, and they’re both howlers. You probably know them: the evening train out of Florida is played by a Santa Fe San Diegan racing down the California coast (the Pacific Ocean standing in for the Atlantic), and the morning arrival in Vermont by a Southern Pacific train in the mountains. Director Michael Curtiz hardly could have chosen scenes that were more wrong.

The use of California passenger trains is common in movies: although a lot of the North by Northwest train action took place on the New York Central, and the most dramatic parts of It Happened to Jane took place on the New Haven (standing in for Cape Ann, Maine; anything can happen in a cartoon, and there was a steam locomotive and some fallow track available in Connecticut) in both pictures Southern Pacific get into the act, if you know where to look.

To ferroequinologist Kevin Keefe, though, working out a real-life American High itinerary is all in the spirit of train rides past.

I decided the nightclub scene at Novello’s unfolded on Florida’s east coast, always a draw for New Yorkers, so I’m going with Hollywood (what else?), a beach town 17 miles north of Miami. That gave me two railroads to choose from, either Seaboard Air Line or Atlantic Coast Line.

I went with ACL and its train 76, the Havana Special, an evening run out of Miami over Florida East Coast that stopped at Hollywood at 10:28 p.m., just about the time our stars got on the train to head north. Under normal circumstances, Bing and company might have chosen ACL’s more prestigious East Coast Champion, but its daytime carding out of Miami doesn’t jibe with what happens onscreen. Same thing with SAL’s Silver Meteor, whose northbound schedule wouldn’t allow the connection I want in New York for Vermont.

Back in the day, the Seaboard trains called inland, where the Amtrak service and Miami's commuter trains run today, whilst the Coast Line trains were on Florida East Coast, current home to the Brightline trains (if the rest of Florida is generally under sensible quarantine, why aren't those trains running?)  Seaboard Coast Line, now an operating unit of CSX Transportation, is a merger of those two carriers.

There's a bit more in the article about how the movie is still a cartoon.  Noting that the lounge car came on at Jacksonville in the wee hours is too much humbug for Christmas week.  Then you've got a problem getting through Manhattan.

The beautiful thing about using the Havana Special is that, assuming it ran on time, you could make a convenient connection via taxi with Central Vermont train 66-77, departing Grand Central at 8:30 a.m. on a New Haven-Boston & Maine routing to meet train 307, the Ambassador, a joint operation with B&M, at White River Junction, Vt. In 1954, steam still ruled CV passenger service, so I’d like to think our stars might have taken a moment to use the stop at White River Junction to check out the big 4-8-2 being coupled to their train before departing at 3:20 p.m.

Problem is, our heroes are being roused from their sleeper on a Vermont morning, and the premise of the movie is they're all short on funds, which rules out overnighting in New York and riding the Montrealer (or the Mount Royal, if you really want to have some fun, although that had come off by 1954) onward.  Anything can happen in a cartoon.  Unfortunately, getting there by rail is no longer the possibility it once was.  "But the movie is a reminder of how passenger trains remained a part of daily life in 1954."