“Would you like to go to Chicago with me?” asked Peter one day in early April. The newly-merged CPKC had just announced their Final Spike steam tour, and Franklin Park, Illinois was the stop closest to us. My first impulse was to politely decline—I’d just taken several days off work to spend time with my son during the Total Eclipse, and a twelve-hour drive each way to and from Chicagoland didn’t sound particularly fun, steam or no. On further consideration, though, I changed my mind. Peter’s a transplanted Aussie, retired, and a big New York Central fan. The Final Spike Tour’s headliner, restored Canadian Pacific 2816, was the closest he was ever going to get in this day and age to his beloved NYC J3a. I suggested Amtrak instead of I-90 to him, and he immediately booked us seats on the Lake Shore Limited.

The Lake Shore’s reputation for on-time performance is abysmal, but we got to Chicago Union Station on time Wednesday morning, caught a Metra train across town to Franklin Park, and found a beautiful little restaurant with patio seating for a late breakfast. We walked over to the park about 90 minutes before the train was scheduled to arrive, where a crowd was already gathering. You could smell the anticipation in the air.

Finally, the moment arrived. Everybody’s attention turned west, toward the nearby CPKC yard. First, a whistle. Then, a headlight. A cloud of steam. The 2816, gleaming and hissing, strolled up to us and came to a stop with its train. Every surface, from pilot to observation railings, was clean and polished. Peter, having now witnessed an actual 4-6-4 traveling under its own power, was delighted.

First, the engine. As it happens, the 2816 is one of the many engines I’d seen when I wandered around the Steamtown property in 1989. Things were very different then. Steamtown had been a private collection of locomotives in Vermont, which moved to Pennsylvania, gone bankrupt, and had just been taken over by the National Park Service. I’d spent a weekend at a Poconos retreat with a friend, and stopped by the old DL&W yards in downtown Scranton on my way home. It was weeds, rust, and dereliction as far as the eye could see. At the time, Steamtown was the national poster child for out-of-control Congressional pork-barrel spending, and a media laughingstock. As I roamed among decaying rolling stock, I was intercepted by a ranger. It took a little effort to convince him that I wasn’t just another vandal or souvenir hunter, but then he warmed right up, told me about the Park Service’s big plans for the property, and even gave me a copy of the NPS’s feasibility study. I left doubting but hopeful.

Well, Steamtown eventually became the glorious place he described to me, but in order to make that happen, tough decisions were made. Canadian steam locomotives, which F. Nelson Blount had so enthusiastically gathered into his initial Steamtown collection in the 1960s, had no place in an American historic site. The 2816 and its Canadian sisters were sent away, and the 2816 somehow found its way back to Canadian Pacific. It seems they knew just what to do with it, and it’s beautiful today. A lot of work went into restoring the locomotive to operation, and it shows. CPKC’s announced plan to tour the engine for several thousand miles under steam suggests that the mechanical work was given as much attention as the cosmetics.

Behind the locomotive were two auxiliary tenders for water and, I presume, fuel oil. CP 2816, originally a coal-fired locomotive, was converted to oil prior to the tour. Union Pacific, and Cumbres & Toltec Scenic, have done the same with their engines, too. Who wants to hassle with handling coal any more? Both tenders were painted to match the engine, and polished to just a high a gloss.

Next were two Canadian Pacific FP-9s, restored to their original paint scheme and running back-to-back. I’m sure CPKC would like to have spectators believe that 2816 was doing all the work, but the F-units were running, and they were connected to the auxiliary tender with MU cables. I don’t blame CPKC for cheating a bit. Besides, F-units are the ‘57 Chevys of the railroading world—shapely General Motors products from the ‘50s that everybody loves. They could draw almost as big a crowd all by themselves.

I lost count of how many smoothside passenger cars made up the train. Was it nine? Eleven? They were all painted in Canadian Pacific maroon with gold lettering, and made for a spectacular train. The car I want to talk about, however, was not one of them. It was tucked in right behind the F-units, and didn’t seem to garner much attention from the assembled masses. CP 29114, a 40-foot boxcar, was painted in the same maroon as the rest of the train, marked “equipped for passenger train service,” and sported a 1937 build date.

Let me repeat that: a 40-foot boxcar. Be honest, when was the last time you saw one of those on an American main line?

We’ve learned to take 40-foot boxcars for granted. For decades, they were a ubiquitous part of American railroading. There were dozens in every freight train. They hauled almost every kind of commodity. Most households probably had a model of one packed away with the Christmas things. I have literally hundreds of models of them myself, in multiple scales. In the real world, however, they’ve been all but extinct for fifty years, rendered obsolete in the Conrail era and sent off to scrap by the thousands. There’s a few sitting around museums and tourist railroads (usually gathering rust while more glamorous cars take turns in the restoration shop), but if you sit next to a busy main line for years, you’ll likely never see a single one go by. This one, in period-correct color and lettering, even had full-height ladders and roofwalks, which most surviving cars were shorn of in the ‘70s. The only nod to 21st-century railroading were the roller bearings on the trucks.

A 40-foot boxcar is the quintessential freight car, but it’s important to note that this particular one is, strictly speaking, a piece of passenger equipment. Boxcars equipped for passenger service traditionally had signal and steam lines added, and possibly some upgrades to the running gear for higher-speed service. They’re one of the more interesting components of mail and express trains. I haven’t researched whether CP 29114 was an actual express boxcar itself back in the day, but even if it wasn’t, other cars just like it certainly were. Either way, it was an unexpected surprise to make our trip just that much more interesting.