Chattanooga Choo Choo - Jun 1, 2008 -

We’re in Chattanooga, right? And everyone knows the famous song “the Chattanooga Choo Choo,” so today we visited several places related to those famous trains! We did not allow the tremendous thunderstorms that stayed in the area nearly all day to keep us from having some fun although, since we are not gluttons for punishment, we did use the truck instead of the bike. Riding the Harley in the rain is OK if we are out when precipitation begins, but there is no reason to ride during a bad storm if we do not need to do so! First we visited the 1909 Terminal Station, now a hotel complex owned by Holiday Inn. There we saw old Pullman cars converted into hotel rooms, an authentic trolley originally from New Orleans, and a Chattanooga Choo Choo wood burning train engine, last used for service in the 1940s. The Terminal Station is now the lobby of the hotel complex and it is beautiful! I read that when the terminal was new, it was an award winning architectural design, and the Holiday Inn has renovated it to look like it did when it was in use as a station. Next we watched a coal burning tourist train pull into the East Chattanooga depot, which also serves as part of the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum complex. Many old trains and cars, plus lots of train equipment such as tampers, are housed there. Just as the train pulled in, the rain stopped for awhile – great news for those debarking at the depot! We watched the engineers activate the old turntable at the depot and turn the engine around so it could make its return trip back to the other depot in town. Driving through some tunnels under Missionary Ridge, we followed the train route back to Grand Junction Depot, where we saw many more old train cars. It was all very interesting and a lot of new info for me. Fred know much more about trains than I do, since his grandparents really enjoyed trains and used to tell him about them, plus he rode on many more than I did when he was young.