The "400"

I wasn't sure what to write today.  It is Throwback Thursday, it would have been my Mom's 90th birthday today and it is my 400th blogpost.  I decided to incorporate all of them.

Our family picture from 1951.  Mom and Dad are 27 years old.
Dad is holding my baby sister and I'm in front of mom.

My mom was born on April 17, 1924.  She was the ninth of ten children.  Her mother died when she was only thirteen years old.  Most of her siblings had gone off on their own so that left her younger brother and herself to run the household and help take care of her grandmother.  Her father worked on the railroad and would be gone from dawn to dusk.  When she was ready to attend high school there was no high school nearby.  They had to rent a room in town, and she would live there all week.  She would go home on the weekend.  No wonder she grew up to be such a strong person and very protective of her family.  When she graduated from high school, she worked until until she met my dad and got married.

Mom with her mom in 1926.  They died on the same day 74 years apart.

 
This being my 400th blog it reminded me that Mom worked in Milwaukee for a while and lived with a friend.  She also had a sister and a brother who lived there.  To get to Milwaukee they took the train.  The passenger train they took was called the "400".  The train was named the 400 because it could travel the 400 miles from Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul via Milwaukee in 400 minutes.  I heard about them taking this train a lot when I was growing up.  To make the trip so quickly, the train had very few scheduled stops.  This was before the interstate system and a car trip from Central Wisconsin to Milwaukee was a major trip.  The train was a major form of transportation.

The railroad track is abandoned now.  A bike trail has been constructed along the old railroad bed.  It is called the 400 bike trail and runs from Reedsburg, Wisconsin to Elroy, Wisconsin.   It is a wonderful place to hike or bike.  We need to return soon.  It's been five years since we have been there.

This was Mother's Day 2009.  It was so cold that day that  we had to bundle up.