Garrard Smock Jr., member of a clan of Pullman porters dating back to the turn of the century and a symbol of the vanished age of luxury trains, died of pneumonia Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 86.

Known as “Babe,” Smock traveled on such legendary trains as the 20th Century Limited and served the likes of President Franklin Roosevelt during a career spanning nearly a quarter century.

Smock’s father and two brothers already were working for the Pullman Co. when he became a porter in 1937 at the age of 18.

At one point the family worked together on the Lark, a first-class Southern Pacific train running from Los Angeles to San Francisco. That was considered unusual enough to land them in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”

Smock’s grandfather also had been a porter for 27 years and died in 1929 while making a bed on the Santa Fe Limited.

A photograph of Smock, his father, Garrard Sr. and brothers, Virgil and George, in uniform was on the cover of a book published last year called “Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.” Smock and Virgil continued to work for Pullman until 1960.

In 1997, Smock and his brother Virgil, then 81, went to Chicago aboard a special Pullman car in honor of Black History Month and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.