Tour Guide (i)

Thom was the only operator outside the museum now. Had been for almost two weeks. From his familiar chair back stool, swivel, he had the view he’d had for a decade: He could see the Castillo in the distance, and to the right a good view down St. George Street. All the other outside guys had been bought into the main office or put out on the streets making sales calls.

Tours Reale sightseeing trains had been a locally owned business until a year ago when Khan’s Museums of the Incredible bought the company. Fred Towery started the motorized tours in 1946 using surplus WWII jeeps, painted gold with red trim, to pull two canopied trailers with benches for 12 on each. It was the newest way to see the Oldest City.

Fred worked in a motor pool of the US Army at the Frankfurt airport in the early days after occupation. His unit was given the task of devising a way to move small groups of congressmen and officers and journalists through the rubble of the city on a tour. They took a jeep chassis, build a floor above the wheel wells, added four benches, each seating three, and added a medal canopy. After getting the nod, his team built three more, could join them together in tandem as needed and move easily in and around the narrow streets cluttered with rubble of bombed out Frankfurt.

When Fred saw his handiwork at work, he imagined it on the streets of his home town. The bigger cars of the 1940’s were having a hard time on St. Augustine’s narrow 16th century streets already. What would it be like in the post war years when business was bound to be good? There would probably be bigger cars and certainly more of them.

He developed the whole business plan before he left Germany and the Army so that when he got home he knew what he was going to do: give tourists a way to see the entire city without driving themselves, and provide all the museums with customer delivery, he called it. He called the business Tours Reale because he thought it looked Spanish, and by saying it with a slight accent--tours re-ale--it gained some credibility, sounded like Spanish for the real tour.

Over the years the jeeps were replaced with tram tractors configured to look like a train engines, the trailers were made more comfortable, build lower to the ground, could accommodate more rides, and throughout all the changes the original colors, gold and red, were kept.

Fred pretty much ran the business and until he died. That was in 2000 and that’s when Khan’s made an offer to the family to purchase the business. The company already operated the largest attraction in the city and adding a customer delivery system made sense. Tours Reale became Khan’s Tours Reale, but the company would forever be known as it always had been known as: the gold trains.