TRAVELING IN STYLE : TIES THAT BIND : The next best thing to owning your own railroad car is to charter one of the several that now roam the rails. As one train buff puts it: ‘There’s nothing like riding out of town at the rear of your observation car. Pure heaven.’

During the Great Depression when Gordon Crosswaite was a boy in Anderson, Ind., he’d lie awake nights listening to the mournful whistles of steam engines, and he’d pretend to be on a train, traveling to some mysterious, faraway place.

The railroad yards were only half a block from his home, and he’d stand by the tracks, watching as trains passed through Anderson en route to Chicago and New York or beyond to the Deep South. After a while Crosswaite got to know one of the “hosters,” a crewman who shoveled coal into idle engines to keep up the pressure, and sometimes the hoster would allow Crosswaite to ride with him in the locomotive to the coal tender, half a block away. For an 11-year-old boy who’d never been far from the little hamlet in Indiana, it was Christmas, the Fourth of July and a birthday rolled into one.

The fantasy of traveling to faraway places would never wane for Crosswaite, not even after he’d left Indiana for a teaching career in San Luis Obispo. He never forgot those boyhood nights, listening to the steam whistles--moments burned into the memory like a sweet first kiss. And so in 1971, when a vintage rail car was up for sale in San Luis Obispo, Crosswaite scratched together a down payment, and suddenly a life-long fantasy surfaced.

Crosswaite spent several years refurbishing his rail car, preparing for the day when he could put it back into service, hooking it onto the rear of an Amtrak train and leasing it to charter groups. It was superb, with its Victorian-style lounge, galley, stateroom, bath and two bedrooms plus a rear platform where passengers could watch America pass and wave to motorists at crossings and sip a drink and pretend that a gentle land of an earlier era still existed.

As an amateur railroader, the 59-year-old Crosswaite isn’t alone. Indeed, the American Assn. of Private Railroad Car Owners lists nearly 200 members who graduated from Lionel electric trains as youngsters to the exciting world of the Iron Horse.

All this bodes well for the well-heeled traveler who, like Crosswaite, is struck with the desire to slip away to another world, riding the rails in spiffed-up coaches that frequently date from the romantic steam-engine era. Members make deals with charter groups to rent the cars for a day, a week or sometimes a month at a time.

Laddie Shrbeny, director of special movement for Amtrak, receives more than 100 requests a month from private-car owners who want to hook up with passenger trains. Sometimes his job gets outrageously frustrating. His most complicated assignment involved a couple of car owners who decided to travel 15,000 miles “from sea to shining sea.” The problem was, they wanted to do certain sections together, then go their separate ways and rendevous at a later point.

Shrbeny agonized over that one. The logistics involved were horrendous. Making sure that the cars rendezvoused later would boggle the mind of NASA’s Mission Control.

Some AAPRCO members reserve their carriages for their private use. The majority, though, lease their cars to individuals and groups. And while such travel is a joy, it’s expensive. To charter Crosswaite’s car for a two-day round-trip journey between Los Angeles and San Francisco with 25 passengers figures to cost about $240 apiece. That’s for transportation and meals. Passengers do not sleep on the train. Still, it’s pure luxury. Fresh linen. Fresh flowers. Dining on board recalls the golden era of railroading.

On the other hand, Crosswaite has leased the car for as little as $850 a day plus a couple of hundred bucks for the crew and Amtrak’s fee, which can run anywhere from $1.10 to $2.10 per mile. Switching is extra. And occasionally, Crosswaite says, he turns a profit.

Some cars feature shiny cherry-wood interiors of the ‘20s, while others come off strictly as Art Deco. A Detroit industrialist spent $1 million restoring a vintage car that originally was wired by Thomas Edison for auto tycoon Henry Ford.

Brett Eisele, an industrial real estate broker in Casa Grande, Ariz., has been a self-described “rail nut” for years, although it wasn’t until recently that he got his own car.

“I stole it for $45,000,” Eisele says. On the other hand he spent a bundle refurbishing the interior with its wood paneling, brass railings and spacious bedrooms. Eisele recalls sipping a beer aboard his private car one rainy night, listening to the click , click , click of wheels while crossing a bridge near St. Louis. “Pure heaven,” he muses.

A car in mint condition today fetches anywhere from $300,000 to $2 million. Eisele, unlike a majority of association members, uses his 1926 vintage car with its cherry-wood interior strictly for personal pleasure.

“There’s nothing like riding out of town at the rear of your observation car,” says Eisele, who grew up in Nashville, Tenn., and who, like Crosswaite, succumbed early to a virulent case of wanderlust, listening to those lonesome steam whistles at night, a glorious sound that reminded a boy of adventure that waited somewhere beyond that plume of smoke.

Each winter, political consultant Dick Horstmann charters his 1916 car to a little old lady in New Jersey who escapes to the warmth of Florida and returns home in the same grand style come springtime. Another rail buff employs an Italian chef who turns out heavenly pastas in a modern kitchen. Other chefs prepare meals on old-fashioned coal- and wood-burning stoves.

Tad Finlay of Finlay Fun-Time Tours of North Hollywood hooks his cars to the rear of public trains for jaunts to Mexico, Canada, the Deep South and other points. Finlay is a grown-up (age 68) who never got over the habit of playing with trains. With him it’s a disease that’s gone unchecked since boyhood. What’s more, he’s still whistling “Dixie”--which happens to be one of his destinations.

Finlay is a train freak with an incurable addiction that he passes on to others. It was during the ‘50s, while he was employed as a traffic engineer with the City of Los Angeles, that Finlay turned a boyhood hobby into an adult dream. He chartered a train for city employees for a weekend blast in Las Vegas. It was a whopping success. Afterward, Finlay put together another trip, this time to Sun Valley, and he did a third excursion to Salt Lake City for skiers.

By now he was steaming.

Finally, after running a fourth trip to Mexico, Finlay quit his job as a traffic engineer and got down to serious railroading. It was a gamble. The public had taken to the skies, but Finlay believed there still were travelers who gave a toot for trains.

He sensed that there was an audience waiting in the vestibules for that elusive peacefulness that’s impossible to find high in the sky. So, with travelers wearying of the stress and the crunch of airports, Finlay began selling nostalgia. Only he added good times, setting up bingo parties, pouring margaritas in Mexico and lining up Dixieland bands for his tours to New Orleans.

Finlay operates eight cars, including one that’s paneled in solid cherry with Tiffany lamps and leaded windows. Others feature bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, lounge, library and bath (both tub and shower). The late Jackie Gleason stocked three Finlay cars with gourmet foods and cases of booze for a trip from Los Angeles to Philadelphia in 1972. Another departed rail buff, Howard Hughes, chartered an observation car and a sleeper for a run to Boston, and actor John Travolta rode the rails with Finlay to Houston on a filming assignment.

Finlay’s crews date from the old Pullman Co., the oldest being 73-year-old Virgil Smock, who worked the campaign trail with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His “Southern Belle Express” ties in with cruises on the Mississippi aboard the Delta and Mississippi Queens, an all-inclusive Lucius Beebe-Huck Finn adventure that prices out at $2,959 for 18 days.

Finlay’s Fun Time Express travels across Canada from Vancouver to Montreal and on to the Gaspe Peninsula, Halifax and Nova Scotia before heading back West via New York, Washington, Virginia, Kansas, New Mexico and Arizona. (Other Finlay tours do runs to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula).

In Orange County, 27-year-old Bryan Reese’s Classic Rail Travel does trips to San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Northwest and the Colorado Rockies as well as fall foliage swings through New England.

Reese, who moonlights as the engineer on the Knott’s Berry Farm steam train, has been a rail buff since the Christmas he got his first model train. For his New England tour he puts together four cars (a lounge, diner and two sleepers) that follow the route of the old Super Chief through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois.

Reese books cars for as little as $500 a day plus Amtrak’s mileage and switching charges. One car carries a piano and a three-piece Dixieland band, and each month Reese does three-day Los Angeles-San Francisco trips, hooking up behind the Coast Starlite to Oakland, from where passengers are bused to San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf for a couple of nights at the Ramada Inn. Meals on the train recall the golden days of railroading with white linen, fresh flowers, china and silver, a party that figures out to $450 per person including the hotel at Fisherman’s Wharf and a sightseeing tour of San Francisco. Riding the rails on longer trips prices out to about $2,500 per car per day, with 40 passengers to a car along with waiters, stewards, porters and chefs.

Rod Pick, 34, heads Sentimental Rail Journeys of Thousand Oaks with a four-day, three-night trip to San Francisco for $485 plus a Colorado tour aboard a 1926 Pullman parlor car with an open platform.

In Durango, passengers sign in at the Victorian Strater Hotel and do a side trip to Silverton by narrow-gauge rail. Pick produces other vintage car jaunts to San Diego, the jazz festival at Monterey and beyond to Canada.

In San Marino 900 members of another group, the Pacific Railroad Society, jointly own 10 cars that do a variety of trips--everything from one-day outings to Mojave to a couple of weeks exploring Mexico. Dues ($15 a year) entitle members to discounts on excursions and a subscription to “Wheel Clicks,” a monthly newsletter.

David Rohr of Golden Spike Tours tells how “there’s nothing like sitting back in the lounge of a private car and watching the world go by.” Rohr’s tours take in the Hot-Air Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, N.M., Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Mexico’s Copper Canyon, the Kentucky Derby and Canada.

In Napa Valley, Town & Country Travel operates the Silver Ritz which T & C describes as “America’s counterpart to Europe’s Orient Express.” At Los Angeles’ Union Station, passengers pile aboard vintage cars (1940s Art Deco) for lunch and supper during a swing north to Napa Valley and four nights at the Silverado Country Club.

David Anderson, a 20-year-old art student, watched from the window of a vintage car en route home to Seattle, sketching distant mountains, his eyes reflecting a scene featuring orchards, a barn, a tumbledown farmhouse and endless fields of alfalfa, the grass stirring in a gentle wind.

“The train,” he said, “. . . what a marvelous way to travel.”

For additional information on the rail travel described above contact:

Gordon Crosswaite; telephone (805) 528-1002.

Tad Finlay, Finlay Fun-Time Tours, 11306 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood 91601; telephone (818) 761-7733.

High Iron Travel Corp., P.O. Box 5344, Denver, Colo. 80217; telephone (303) 825-8885.

Dick Horstmann, Lehigh Black Diamond Ltd., P.O. Box 353, Syracuse, N.Y. 13201; telephone (315) 472-4293.

Larry Haines Charter Referral Service, 224 Orr Drive, Somerville, N.J. 08876.

Pacific Railroad Society Inc., P.O. Box 80726, San Marino 91108-8726; telephone (818) 795-7243.

Rod Pick, Sentimental Rail Journeys, P.O. Box 4574, Thousand Oaks 91360; telephone (805) 499-9306.

David Rohr, The Golden Spike Rail Private Railroad Cars, P.O. Box 3429, Fullerton 92634; telephone (714) 680-5090.

Bryan Reese, Classic Rail Travel, P.O. Box 6102, Laguna Niguel, 92677 phone (714) 495-6314.

Laddie Shrbeny, c/o AMTRAK, Room 6142, 400 N. Capitol St. N.W., Washington D.C. 20001; telephone (202) 383-2416.