trains

If you looked really hard out the train window while going through the tunnel under the river, you would be able to see the fish right up close...

Sue

i live in chicago, and when i was little, my mom and me took the electric train downtown. i fell asleep and when i woke up i looked out the window and i said, "mommy look....we're in China." to my dissapointment, my mom said, "no that's china town...we're still in chicago." i was mad, but hey...kids believe everything.

Mallory

I used to think the underground railrooad was actually a well built under ground railway system built by the blacks and abolitionists to escape the slave states under GROUND!!!

Draqula

My grandfather told me that if train conductors waved out their little windows their arms would get stuck and they would have to stay that way. Then we would wave at the passing trains, more often than not getting the engineer to wave back. I always felt a little guilty about making the poor guy be stuck, but that didn't stop me from waving.

Lily

I used to think they let people draw and write on the trains to make them pretty. (NYC in the 80's)Sra. Narcissa

Anon

When i was younger, and i didn't understand how trains and subways worked. i would never know how they could have one train going one way, and another train going the other.

i used to think that they had people waiting at the end of the track, to take the train off, and turn it around, so it could go back the way it just came from.

badger

At the end of the underground line the train would disappear, and a new train would be made out of thin air to follow on the opposite direction.

Anon

Firemen start fires. I saw a program about steam trains and the person who started and stoked the fire on the engine was called a fireman.

Nile

Lots of people here admit shamefacedly to clearing up childhood misconceptions only in their teens or even twenties. Is late sixties a record?

When I was little we used to go for holidays at Brighton. A special train called the Brighton Bell took us there. My memory from age 2 was reinforced for several years by the picture of it in my trains picture book. The name Brighton Bell made perfect sense to me because it was, unusually for that date, an electric train. A steam train on that route would no doubt have been called the Brighton Whistle. I had no occasion to think about it after the age of maybe six, but about thirty years later a magazine article about the history of sea-bathing jogged my mind and I thought "Er, maybe that should be the 'Brighton Belle' ?" But by then I was hardly sure this was a real memory it would have been trouble to find out. So I waited another thirty years for internet and Google to be invented and sure enough the other day found out there was this famous and in its day avant-garde train called the Brighton Belle; images on the net fit with such very pale memory as remains to me.

So that misconception is cleared up now, shows I do get there in the end. I get there slowly but oh yes I get there I get there.

eppenguin

When I was 3, I went on a trip with my father that involved going on a commuter train. I was the only child on the train that I could see, and I was terrified that the conductor would come and throw me out because this was obviously a grown-up train.

Anon

Living in Chicago means riding on the "L" train. One of the stops was for a street called California and I thought it really WAS California. The only thing I didn't understand was wht we skipped all those states in between.

Ligit

A friend of mine and I (around 3rd grade) were looking at a globe and pointing out various places like the United States, the oceans, etc. She then told me that the thick line running around the middle of the globe was the railroad track. It floated over the oceans and allowed people to get to wherever they needed to go!

H Bomb

When trains (subways) go underground, my little sister thought that the lights were shooting stars.

Katie

I thought that Left Luggage at a railway station was on the left hand side and I never figured why there was no right luggage. I finally twigged when I heard the expression when I was in my twenties!

Doh!

My mom always said that if the guy in the caboose waved at you and you didn't wave back it meant you were not wearing any underpants. Imagine a small child standing there waving like crazy and sometimes there would be no one on the caboose.

C.A.

i used to think that in the subway there was a guy in front of the train steering the train around the tunnel, it made me wonder why they made the tunnels so narrow for him.

chris chan

i used to believe that all train tracks were electric. Told to me by my parents to stop me playing on them once.

graeme

Although I am too young to remember the old trams in Britain (except in Blackpool), my parents and I have been involved with the National Tramway Museum in Derbyshire for many years and I have been going there from an early age. When I was small I thought the tram drivers just had to turn the controller handle round and round as if it were a coffee grinder, and that the controller handle made the wheels go round and round. So whenever my parents got me to grind some coffee for them in the coffee grinder, I liked to pretend I was driving a tram!

Alan

As a South London child, going on the Tube was a treat - I used to read the station names on the Northern Line map and believed that space rockets took off from Euston.

Paul

i used to believe that.... when trains went over the Forth Rail Bridge in Edinburgh the would go up along the top and back down instead of through the middle.....if uve seen it ull know what i mean

Louise