Owning Your Own Yesteryear Railroad Car Is the Pricey Height of Indulging a Love of Trains

By Russell Max Simon

Journal Staff Writer

Monday, October 3, 2005

To recapture youth is to own a vintage railroad car. That's what many of the owners who rolled into Santa Fe late Sunday, aboard 22 vintage rail cars, said about their expensive hobby.

Every year, members of the American Association of Private Railcar Owners- devotees of a long-past "golden era" of rail- tag along behind modern Amtrak trains on a tour of classic rail lines.

Due into Santa Fe at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, the trains were held in Albuquerque for hours because of mechanical problems. But it's not about getting there, the owners said. It's about the journey.

"Getting there is half the fun of the trip," said David Hoffman, owner of the Northern Sky and the Northern Dreams rail cars. The other half, Hoffman said, is the company of friends and family and the general leisure time the pace of rail cars allow.

"You know how it is flying today- it's a hassle. We just get hassled at every turn. On a train you get on and relax and play cards, or look at the scenery and read a book. As you soon as you get on the train, your vacation has started," Hoffman said.

Hoffman grew up riding the Super Chief with his family from Chicago to Los Angeles to visit relatives. Later, he took his own kids to visit relatives on the same train. When he turned 50, with the kids off to college, Hoffman decided to buy two rail cars: Northern Sky, a lounge car built in 1955, and Northern Dreams, a sleeper built in 1956. Both cars ran the Chicago to Los Angeles line for the Union Pacific.

Hoffman, like many of the owners, charters the rooms out to paying guests. Rates for the AAPRCO trip, a 12-day round-trip journey from Chicago to Phoenix and back, with the AAPRCO convention in the middle, range from about $3,800 to $7,000 a person, depending on how long the trip is and the type of car.

The price tag for riding in them, however, is nothing compared to the price tag of owning them- as much as a million dollars, according to Santa Fean Fred Springer. In the early 1990s, Springer bought a Vista Canyon car, a type the Super Chief used on the old Santa Fe Railway, and spent several years restoring it and upgrading it to comply with Amtrak's electrical and mechanical standards. Meeting those standards alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Springer said.

Springer, like Hoffman, bought the car he grew up riding. Springer's childhood route was the Santa Fe Railway from Temple, Texas, to Albuquerque. Now, to go from Temple to Albuquerque on Amtrak involves a detour to Chicago. The only way to ride the route today is on Amtrak "special," where an Amtrak train pulls the vintage cars behind for $1.95 a mile.

"What happens is you travel a lot by train and the nostalgia gets you... You're recreating the rail travel of your youth that you can't recreate on Amtrak today," Springer said.

Springer, 77, said he and his wife put roughly 50,000 miles on his rail car before donating it to the Arizona Railway Museum in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb.

DeWitt Chapple, owner of a rail car built in 1922 for executives, said owning the car was the fulfillment of every train-lover's dream.

"People have different hobbies, and if you're interested in trains, this is sort of the epitome. I don't know if it's a gene, or what," Chapple said.

The rail cars will be at the Santa Fe rail yard all day today. On Tuesday, the cars will continue to Phoenix