Howdy

My name is Joe Toth. I was born in Dallas, Texas at 4:08 AM on July 4th, 1946. I was raised just north of Big D in Farmers Branch. My grandparents had bought a few acres and raised chickens and sold eggs.

The farm was on old US 77 (I-35 would take the place when it was constructed). To the back of the property were some woods and beyond the trees the Frisco ran from Sherman to Ft. Worth. To the front was US 77 and then a small wooded area followed by Denton Road and the Katy´s Denton Branch.

North of Farmers Branch at Carrollton, the Frisco crossed both the Katy and Cotton Belt. I was exposed to trains at an early age. When I was three and a half my mother took me on a train trip to Chicago on the Santa Fe. From there we rode the rails to New York City. The line we took remains a mystery. My mother thinks it was the Nickel Plate Road. If so, we changed trains in Buffalo and probably took the Lackawanna?

Fast forward to 1959. My stepfather moves us to Tampa, Florida. There I start to hang around Tampa Union Station and watch the pretty girls board the trains of the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line. We took the train to Tampa from Dallas that June. T&P to New Orleans, with an all day layover (the street cars were neat as Dallas had converted to busses in 1956), then on the L&N to North Florida where the Seaboard took us to Jacksonville and on into Tampa after a change at Jax.

Back to Texas in 1961 and then I would really start to chase trains on my bike. Evening brought a Frisco freight through Farmers Branch with a million big yellow auto racks headed to Ft. Worth. Covered wagons still ruled the rails. EMD F units and Alco FA´s in God intended ABBA formation.

A move back to Tampa in 1962 and a visit to a local hobby shop that spring had me meet my best friend I ever had in life, Robert E. Taff. He passed away suddenly in 2006. He had been a locomotive engineer for Agrico Chemical Co. in the Bone Valley phosphate mines in Central Florida.

We railfanned Tampa at night during our senior year of high school in his dad´s 56 Pontiac. Gas was cheap and McDonald hamburgers cost a whopping (no pun intended Burger King...sorry!) 19 cents!

After graduating from high school I joined the US Army Transportation Corps. Movement Control school at Ft. Eustus, Virginia during Fall 64 and Saturday morning steam-ups! Chrístmas took me home to Tampa on the ACL and back to Virginia on the Seaboard. I wanted to ride both railroads.

Orders for Germany and German Federal Railways with steam, diesel and electric power. I was assigned to a German Army Transport group. A couple of German words is all I could speak but somehow I learned it. I speak German with a Texas accent!

Met my wife, she worked in the post PX, and we returned to the States. I was discharged at Ft. Wadsworth, NY. She had flown to her aunt a week ahead of me. Her uncle was retired off of the Erie-Lackawanna! So we talked trains.

We moved on. Dallas, Texas, August 1967. HOT! I hire out on the Cotton Belt in Dallas. The SSW was then working out of SP´s Miller Yard. A year later, 1968, I am switching boxcars at Hodge Yard in Ft. Worth. Get cut off and hire on with John Santa Fe. I mark up on the East Dallas extra board.

There I stay til the move back to Germany in late 1976. My wife had two brothers, both employed with the Geman Federal Railways. By then the only steam was in NW Germany. This area was all diesel and electric. I hire out in train service as a switchman. Buffers and screw couplers were not new. There was European equipment at Ft. Eustus used to train GI´s in case they got stationed in rail service in a country that didn´t use the Janney.

I retired last August after spending the last 20 years of that career as a passenger service represenative at the Nuremberg passenger station.

My photo collection was left with a friend when I made the move to Germany and I never got it back. No details, no bad mouthing, just part of life.

Hope this Frisco Faster Freight profile report gets OS´ed!

Thanks y´all!

Joe

The Trinity River Bottoms Boomer of Dallas, Texas