Actually, wooden stock was outlawed by the City of New York on New York's transit system in the early 20th Century. Wood stock was also banned by PRR from operation in the Hudson tunnels, and as far as I know, the Hudson & Manhattan never had any wood cars, ever.
There may have been some wood equipment in non-interchange service in the Midwest and West, but by the 1960s I very much doubt you would have found it anywhere but railroad museums.
My pre-Amtrak experiences were all as a high-schooler at best. The memories are mixed. Many of the best concern the Florida trains of, first, Seaboard and ACL, and later the services operated by SCL after the 1967 merger. SCL operated no less than FOUR "full service" trains from New York to Florida in the late 1960s. The Silver Meteor served Miami, and the Silver Star served both east and west coasts, both via the former Seaboard main and Wildwood, FL (where the Star split). The Florida Special ran via the former ACL to Jacksonville, thence SAL to Miami (ever since the FEC strike of 1963). The Champion, which in earlier years had an "East Coast" and a "West Coast" version, in the late 1960s carried cars to a range of destinations on the west coast of Florida (Tampa, St. Petersburg, Venice, Naples), along with cars for Augusta, Wilmington, and Montgomery, AL. Amazing how they managed all that en-route switching.
In December 1970 my father and I drove my mother and sisters to Union Station in Washington, DC and put them on the Silver Meteor for Florida. We stood on the platform to watch the train pull out: at least a dozen sleepers, Sun Lounge, two diners, several coaches, and a teardrop obs, all matched stainless steel. My father, who was not at all a railfan, exclaimed, "What a beautiful train!" There were not too many North American trains about which you could say that in 1970.
In March of 1971, my best friend and I put together a trip to "say goodbye" to services Amtrak would not be taking over in the eastern U.S. We started out on the Birmingham Special, a train of heavyweight coaches (only) for Birmingham, AL via the Southern. At Lynchburg we switched to the Pocahontas, the last train on the N&W main. It had one sleeper, a diner-lounge, a handful of coaches (one of which was a dome, however). At Cincinnati we switched to L&N's Pan American, which had some coaches and an old heavyweight diner (but no staff; they boarded in Louisville). At Louisville we picked up a sleeper for New Orleans, a couple of sleepers and three or four coaches for Miami (the remains of the South WInd, which no longer ran through to Chicago). They were switched out at Montgomery, then at Flomaton we received a couple of coaches and a sleeper that constituted the Gulf Wind, Jacksonville to NO.
We spent a day in NO, then left the same evening on the same consist, backtracking to Flomaton but this time on a sleeper headed for Jacksonville. We had the same old heavyweight diner, which served dinner. At Chattahoochee, SCL put on a "grill car" to provide limited (but good) breakfast service into Jacksonville). We laid over in Jax, then took the NB Champion via Waycross to Savannay, got a hotel there for the night, then rode the Nancy Hanks to Atlanta. The NH was the only train to use the old C of G station in Savannah (still there, and now the visitor center). It had an F unit, a heavyweight coach, a heavyweight diner-lounge, and a stainless steel dome car. We rode the dome. Nice train.
At Atlanta, we switched to the overnight L&N train to St. Louis, consisting of one E unit, a baggage car, and a coach. It was the last train using Union Station in downtown (Terminal Station had already closed; Southern was using Peachtree Station, and a platform at 99 Spring Street, their office building, for the Nancy Hanks).
We were the only passengers beyond Chattanooga on the L&N, and the only train using the old Chattanooga Union Station (since demolished). We ambled through the night, arriving St. Louis to find the gate from the platform to the concourse locked. We were the first passengers to get off the train for several days (the line from Evansville to St. Louis is now mostly abandoned, and the St. Louis light rail uses its ROW from East St. Louis to the end of the light rail line).
I'm afraid our N&W and L&N experiences were probably more typical than my many rides on SCL and predecessor passenger trains. There was, of course, no national reservation system, so our March 1971 trip took multiple trips and phone calls to Union Station's reservations agents to put together, and produced a wonderful collection of tickets with rubber-stamped "from" and "to" city names, handwritten reservation slips, and prepaid ticket orders. I wish I'd saved them.
And all of it had to be paid for in cash -- unless, of course, you had a Rail Travel Card.
Randy Resor, aka "NellieBly" passed away on November 1, 2013. We honor his memory and his devotion to railroading at railroad.net.