Well, this is a wonderful treat. I was going to save some of it for tomorrow's five or so hours of train travel across the south of England, but, well, here we are; a few evenings of 'just one more post' and I've happily consumed the lot!

It has made a timely companion to my current dead-tree reading material: a book called "The Journey Matters", by Jonathan Glancey. This is a collection of trip reports, but with a twist - they are fictionalised accounts of real services from the golden era of 20th century travel. This also creates a slightly strange piece of science fiction: an un-aging plane and train enthusiast sampling one mode of transport after another across the decades. I mention it for a few reasons. Firstly, it introduced me to the Whyte notation for locomotives you also used. Second, it comes with notes on what, if anything still survives of some of these services - from which I had just added the Friends of the 261's Cedar Rapids to my long list of possible future adventures. So I was delighted to see it featured here - although Glancey's 'trip report' actually covers an earlier incarnation of the Afternoon Hiawatha; still streamlined and featuring an observation car at the end of the train, but hauled by steam! Finally, like you I suspect he would have liked to have been born 50 or perhaps even 100 years earlier for these to be real memories rather than imagined ones... there are a few chapters on actual trips later in the book I have yet to reach, but I get the strong sense that Glancey considers modern travel a pale imitation of the past.

Having had a few goes myself, I sympathise with the time it takes to put a report together of even a fraction of this length - my contributions here have slowed partly because it's so much easier to wrangle photos (or even video) on my blog, and partly because I was fortunate enough to get back to travel with a vengeance in 2022 (I write only at a desktop PC, so no opportunity to bash out a few paragraphs on the move). My thanks, then, for sticking with it (and supplying many more ideas for that travel shopping list); by way of a possible trade, my only report from 2022 may be of interest to you, being devoted to a hop-on, hop-off ride of the California Zephyr.