The Colorado Railroad Museum is a non-profit railroad museum The museum is located on 15 acres at a point where Clear Creek flows between North and South Table Mountains in Golden, Colorado.

Robert W. Richardson and Cornelius W. Hauck opened the Colorado Railroad Museum in 1959. It is dedicated to preserving for future generations a tangible record of Colorado’s flamboyant railroad era and particularly its pioneering narrow gauge mountain railroads. In 1964, the nonprofit Colorado Railroad Historical Foundation was formed to assume ownership and operation of the Museum.

The museum houses a large collection of 3 ft  (914 mm) narrow gauge rolling stock, and provides narrow gauge train rides on special event days known as “Steam Up days”. And also runs one of the three Geese motorcars on Saturdays. There is also a Depot General Store which has hundreds of DVD’s, books, and railroad posters. If you love trains it is guaranteed that you will find something at the Depot General Store.

The museum is a must see for train buffs of all ages. It is open year round, daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.During Summer time, June, July and August, we stay open an extra hour until 6:00 p.m. Prices for museum enterance are:

Children (Under 2) Free

Children (2 – 16) .00

Adults .00

Family (Two adults and children under 16) .00

Seniors (Over 60) .00

Group rates and Special Events Admission are also offered.

http://www.coloradorailroadmuseum.org/visitor-information

Article by Larry Truett

For the past your I’ve been compiling a list of Railroading Museums for my website, ModelTrainsWithLarry.com. These museums all look like fantastic places to visit, but what are the most popular? I’ll start with this list for the New England region of the United States. New England is the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

The most popular railroading museums (based on online chatter) in beautiful New England are:

10. Railroad Museum of New England in Thomaston, Connecticut

9. Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Co. and Museum in Portland, Maine

8. Old Colony and Fall River Railroad Museum in Fall River, Massachusetts

7. Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport, Maine

6. Beaver Brook Farm and Transportation Museum in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire

5. Connecticut Trolley Museum in East Windsor, Connecticut

4. Rutland Railway Association Museum in Rutland, Vermont

3. Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven, Connecticut

2. Boothbay Railway Village in Boothbay, Maine

…and the most popular railroading museum in the New England is…

1. Danbury Railway Museum in Danbury, Connecticut

Museums not making my top 10 were Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum in Lenox, Massachusetts; Gorham Railroad Station and Historical Society in Gorham, New Hampshire; Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts; Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum in Willimantic, Connecticut; Wiscasset, Waterville, and Farmington Railway Museum in Alna, Maine; Swanton Railroad Depot Museum in Swanton, Vermont.

So Connecticut and Maine really dominated this list, but all of the states were in the top ten. Well, all except Rhode Island, but that is partly because I don’t know of any railroading museum in little Rhody.

I compiled this list by searching for the railroading museums listed on a number of search engines and ranking them by the number of web pages, discussion forums, photos, videos, etc that are available online.

Check out my complete list of Railroading Museums at http://www.ModelTrainsWithLarry.com.

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A quintessential, lower-New England town, Thomaston, Connecticut, was characterized by its Saint Thomas and First Methodist churches; its single, wind-swept, leave-blanketed Main Street; and the carved, jack-o-lantern faces peering out of the windows of its 19th-century buildings on a blue, but temperature-nipping Halloween weekend.

The red brick Thomaston Station, flanked by small hills whose increasingly thread-bare trees had relinquished their colorful leaves to autumn’s wind, had been fed by a single main track and was located next to the sprawling, equally red-bricked, but now closed Plume and Atwood Brass Mill.  They both had a story to tell.  Like the life-representing leaves released to history and relegated to memory, the location exuded a rich past, which I eagerly listened to as I awaited the Naugatuck Railroad’s 2:00 p.m. departure.  Paradoxically, the silence was the loudest speaker.

Originally part of the Farmington Proprietor’s 1684 purchase of Mattatuck Plantation, Thomaston itself had achieved independence in 1739 as the “Northbury Parish,” uniting with the Waterbury Parish in 1780 to form Watertown, but separating almost as quickly and becoming “Plymouth Hollow.”

Seth Thomas, of timepiece fame, settled in the village in 1813.  Expansion intermittently earned it the unofficial name of “Thomas Town” until it was permanently changed to the present “Thomaston” in 1875 to honor the very man who had largely been responsible for its existence.

His factories, now numbering many, churned out watches and mantel and tower clocks, and he was responsible for the Naugatuck Railroad’s routing through town in order for him to be able to link it with the ever-expanding brass center in Waterbury.

Chartered in 1845, the Naugatuck Railroad itself was created to connect Bridgeport in the south with Winsted in the north on Naugatuck River-paralleling track, its initial construction commencing three years later, in April, with service from the just-completed New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad junction to Seymour subsequently inaugurated on May 15, 1849.  Extensions to Waterbury followed on June 11 and Winsted on September 24.

The former line, simply designated the “New Haven,” carried more passengers than freight on a route system which, at its peak, encompassed most of New England, stretching from New York to Providence and Boston, and it eventually acquired several other, smaller companies, including the Maine Central and the Boston and Maine.  The Naugatuck Railroad was one of them.  Initially leasing it on May 24, 1887, it altogether absorbed it 19 years later, in 1906, but passenger service was discontinued on more than half the line, from Waterbury to Torrington and Winsted, in 1958, and five years later the track was completely abandoned between these two cities.

Because of the weakening New England industrial base during the 1960s, which reduced demand for rail services, the New Haven Railroad was forced into a merger with Penn Central in 1969, but further deterioration, due to freight customer loss and track disrepair, resulted in its own bankruptcy.  The line north of Waterbury had, by this time, been renamed “Torrington Secondary Track,” after its destination.

Incorporated into the government-created and –sponsored Conrail, the former Penn Central had operated the Waterbury Branch until the Connecticut Department of Transportation had purchased the line between Devon and Torrington in 1982, leasing the track to the Boston and Maine Railroad for its own freight service north of Waterbury.  Victim, like so many previous operators, to declining demand and revenue, it discontinued operations in 1995, after it itself had become part of the Guilford Rail System.

On June 7 of that year, the Railroad Museum of New England obtained a state charter for a wholly-owned operating subsidiary designated “Naugatuck Railroad” after the original, 1845 enterprise, leasing track from the Connecticut Department of Transportation.

Outlining its mission, it states, “the Railroad Museum of New England, Inc., is a not-for-profit educational and historical organization founded in January 1968.  Its mission is to establish an interpretive facility where the story of the region’s railroad heritage can be effectively told.  We have an extensive collection of New England rolling stock, including locomotives of all types, passenger cars, freight cars, and cabooses.  We have New England railroad artifacts dating from the 1840s to the present—everything from tickets to signal towers.”

Its Naugatuck Railroad subsidiary, having turned its first wheel in September of 1996, operates historic excursion trains from Thomaston to Waterville throughout the year, including a myriad of seasonal- and holiday-appropriate rides and periodic steam engine runs.

Center of its activities is the Thomaston Station.  Replacing the original, smaller, wooden depot located on the other side of the track, the 2,424-square-foot, wooden frame and brick building, with interior plaster walls and ceilings, had been constructed in 1881 by the first Naugatuck Railroad and currently occupies a 1.11-acre site on East Main Street.

After the last passenger train had departed in 1958, it had been used for several purposes: as a freight agent’s office until 1968, as a storage location for the Plume and Atwood Brass Mill, and as a small engine repair shop in the early 1990s.  But a vandal-set fire in 1993, spreading from an inside corner and raging up the attic stairs, destroyed the roof.

Monetary donations from the Thomaston Savings Bank permitted roof, chimney, and upper masonry repairs to commence in 1997, followed by interior cleaning, and the installation of a ticket window, gift shop counter, and exhibit panels took place two years later, while a second grant, made in 2001, enabled a new canopy deck to be installed and the original platform canopies to be restored.

A 600-foot-long display track, located behind the building, had been lowered and reconstructed, and today cradled a stationary freight train “pulled” by New Haven diesel locomotives 6690 and 6691, which were attached to a collection of box and tank cars and the prerequisite red caboose numbered C-507.  Posing on the spur line, it stood across from the station’s “Baggage Room” door.

The depot, to serve as the cornerstone of an ultimate, 1950s, working railroad station, will be joined by an extended, paved, and lighted platform; an operating control tower; hand-operated crossing gates; a crossing tender’s shanty; a mail crane; a water shed for steam engine servicing; and a hand-operated freight derrick.

The earlier, 1200 noon run, a three-coach collection pulled by diesel locomotive 2203 which somehow reflected the season with its orange and brown livery, screeched to a stop in front of the station at 1330 beneath a gray ceiling and deposited a menagerie of Halloween-costumed kids who promptly stormed the depot door to collect their pumpkins.

Replenished with a second, considerably-costumed group, the train vocally assaulted the silence with its high-shrilled whistle and released its brakes, inching past the station building and the side track-supported freight train as soon as its car couplings had tensed into weight-pulling movement, plunging into the autumnal forest in a southerly direction.

The hills sprouted bursts of burnt orange, glowing gold, auburn, and brown.  Protestingly screeching as its wheels adhered to the track’s curves, the short chain of vintage coaches paralleled the almost-black reflective surface of the Naugatuck River, which was periodically highlighted by tiny, silver-sizzled rapids.

Carving out the valley of the same name, the waterway, the largest in Connecticut and a sub-basin of the Housatonic River, spans 39 miles from Norfolk to Derby, passing through the two counties of New Haven and Litchfield and 12 towns in the process.  Originally used by the American Indians for sustenance and subsequently serving the English after their own settlement along it, it had facilitated post-Industrial Revolution production in the form of hydropower.  Coupled with its paralleling tracks, it had enabled both manufacture and transportation of raw materials and finished products, such as vulcanized rubber, naugahide, brass, and metal clock parts.  Today, after considerable revitalization, it provides recreation, fishing, and nature-related activities.

Approaching the south end of town, where the valley narrowed, the train moved under the Reynold’s Bridge, a concrete arch structure carrying Waterbury Road and constructed in the early-1920s.  One of the few remaining bridges after the Great Flood of 1955, it marked the location of the small, no-longer existent station of the same name.

Trundling past the WHYCo Factory, the three coaches continued in their southerly direction, momentarily traversing the switch which led to the east side lead track to the new Thomaston Shop.  The culmination of seven years of planning and construction, the five-track rail yard and 11,700-square-foot restoration building replaced the previous, 20-foot-long, deck girder bridge facility atop the former power canal one mile from Waterville where proper inspection of a four-axle locomotive had required up to six hours to complete.  Tree and bush clearing at the new, two-acre site along the Naugatuck Railroad’s main line began in 1998, followed by prerequisite rock blasting and crushing, drainage, and grading.  A 1,000-foot-long roadbed serves as the lead track to the area, built, as is the remainder of the yard’s track and switches, of 107-pound rails.  The 65- by 180-foot shop, accessed by four 18-foot-high by 14-foot-wide main doors, is insulated, heated, and lighted for indoor, all-weather use, and two, 131-pound rail tracks run through it.  A 60-foot-long, 48-inch-deep inspection pit facilitates under-car inspection and maintenance.

The concrete abutment at the north end of the Thomaston Shop indicates the location of the former Waterbury-Thomaston trolley line, which had crossed both the railroad and the river.

The Jericho Bridge, marking the spot where the flood had significantly altered the landscape, provided river-crossing access into Watertown.

Continuing to bore its way through a virtual tunnel of leaf-clinging trees and bare, skeletal, white and gray limbs, the diesel engine pulled its coaches toward Waterville, momentarily rustling the crunchy, mosaic blankets representing the collected “flesh” of the once foliage-rich trees now lying beside the track in post-life surrender.  Like an oil-black mirror, the river reflected the season’s colorful denouement.

The track, reconfigured because of the flood damage, crossed Frost Bridge Road, arcing into a sharp s-curve before entering the town of Waterville over the Chase Bridge.

Threading its way through the Naugatuck Railroad’s Chase Yard, comprised of a motley collection of steam engines and coaches, the train clacked past the sprawling, former Chase Metal Works factory complex at a snail’s pace, south of which was Waterville Station.

The town itself, as evidenced by its large brass mills, had once been sustained by this industry, and was today a sub-section of greater Waterbury itself.

Ceasing motion, the train terminated its southerly, outbound journey, the locomotive disconnecting and passing its coaches on the Huntington Avenue siding before recoupling itself to the former end car.

My own coach, number 4980, had been built in 1924 by Canadian Car Foundry for Canadian National Railways and was typical of the type used for long-distance travel, inclusive of that on New England services operated by Central Vermont and Grand Trunk Railways.  Converted in 1969, it served Montreal commuter routes until it had been retired in 1991, at which time it had been acquired by Thomas V. Brown and donated to the Railroad Museum of New England.

Inching away from its southern terminus, my living history excursion train recrossed the town of Waterville, moving past the Chase Metal Works Factory and the coaches lining the rail yard.

The silver rails ahead seemed to slice through the dense forest.  The hills, as if torched, flamed orange, gold, and chestnut, the restored cars resettling into rhythmic, lateral rocks as their wheels screamed at every curve and track imperfection.

The Thomaston Station, soon moving by on the left side, quickly yielded to the red brick Plume and Atwood factory across the road.

Tracing its roots to the brass mill the Thomas Manufacturing Company had organized in 1854 to roll metal for clock movements, it had been known as “Holmes, Booth, and Atwood” when this concern had purchased it in 1869, adopting the “Plume and Atwood” name two years later.  Incorporated in 1880, it had produced a comprehensive line of lamps, lamp trimmings, gas burners, and brass lamp parts, becoming one of the railroad’s major freight customers for more than a century—the railroad itself thus complementing and facilitating Thomaston’s very purpose.  It had been the center of Plume and Atwood’s Waterbury-relocated manufacturing division and main office.

Dorset-Rex had acquired the plant in the late-1950s, but the Hurricane Diane flood had severely damaged its tooling, equipment, and buildings.

Climbing a considerable grade, the diesel engine pulled its cars between some tall rock faces, following the left-curving track past green pine and conifer to the face of Thomaston Dam, plying the eight miles of rail between Thomaston and Litchfield laid as a result of the flood.  Part of a network of flood control dams constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Naugatuck Valley Basin, the million project, completed in 1960, had been integral to the town’s recovery after six inches of rain had caused the river to overflow and its banks to collapse.  The dam itself prevented further downstream damage.

The first train to ply the new route had been a 28-car-long freight service operated by the New Haven Railroad and pulled by Alco RS-3 diesel locomotives 561 and 533, destined for Torrington and Winsted.

Pushed by its engine, my own train slowly negotiated the track past the rock faces; the abandoned, Plume and Atwood Brass Mill; and over the road crossing in the reverse direction, ceasing motion with a gentle screech from its brakes in front of the Thomaston Station and ending its 20-mile excursion.

Descending the three steps to the platform, the adults emerged from their scenic and historic ride.  Descending the same steps, the Halloween-costumed kids emerged from theirs.

More Railroad Museums Articles

No city is more synonymous with the Pennsylvania Railroad than Altoona. Located at the base of Brush Mountain, in Logan and Pleasant valleys, it is the state’s tenth most-populous one after Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Erie, Reading, Scranton, Bethlehem, Lancaster, and Harrisburg. But it was that very mountain which first inhibited, and then sparked, its growth.

Blanketed by hard-wood forests and traversed by the spine of the Appalachian Mountain range—which stretches from Newfoundland to Alabama and serves as the Eastern Continental Divide—Pennsylvania posed an obstacle to both westward population expansion and trade with its own Allegheny ridge section of them thrust as high as 4,000 feet toward the sky. Trans-state travel, by rudimentary tracks and trails left by wild animals and Native Americans, over the imposing peaks, required three weeks to complete—under the best of conditions.

British colonists, etching out a few clearings for farms in the 18thcentury, constituted the area’s first modern settlers, while early industrialists harnessed its minerals through coal and iron furnaces. Yet their products could only be transported by wagons to Pittsburgh, considered the gateway to the west, over these crude trails.

The first remedial effort to ease this transportation barrier was made in 1823 when John Stevens was granted a state charter to construct a dual-section railroad, the first from Philadelphia to Columbia and the second from Columbia to Pittsburgh. But the idealized, east-west rail link evaporated with its promised capital.

New impetus for the connection, however, occurred when trade, hitherto brisk in Philadelphia, was siphoned off to the Erie Canal route, completed in 1825, and legislature, attempting to reverse its effects, authorized construction of a state-owned Main Line Canal linking Philadelphia with Pittsburgh for the first time by means of the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Opening on March 18, 1834, it employed an inter-modal system in which canal boats would ply waterways to the Hollidaysburg Canal Basin in the east before being transferred on to flatbed rail cars and then transported across the 36.65-mile Allegheny Ridge section, pulled by cables and stationary steam engines. Refloated in the Johnstown Canal Basin in the west, they would then complete their journey to Pittsburgh via water.

Although it reduced the trans-Pennsylvania trip to four days over the rudimentary, trail-plied Conestoga wagon method, the system was still less-than-optimal, arduous to negotiate, and subjected to the occasional mishap. What was needed was a single-mode, continuous-track link, the obstacle to which, of course, was the mountainous terrain.

Its spark, once again, was lit by competition. Indeed, destined already for Pittsburgh, at least in construction form, was track to be used by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, stretching 178 miles from Cumberland, Maryland, and approaching it from the southeast.

Fearing a second loss to its lucrative trade with the west, Philadelphia advocated a Pennsylvania-indigenous lifeline across the state in the form of a rapid, efficient, single-mode rail link. Surprisingly, the Pennsylvania State Assembly, concurring with the need, authorized both the extension of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s track to Pittsburgh and the charter of a state-reflective line named the “Pennsylvania Railroad,” which was to construct a 249-mile extension of the existing Philadelphia-Harrisburg track, consequently competing with the Main Line Canal and Allegheny Portage Railroad interchange system.

First movement of the indigenous, intra-state line, no further than an inch, was the one imprinted on paper in the form of Governor Francis R. Skunk’s signature on April 13, 1846, changing vision into law, and such overwhelming support had been received for the new railroad, that the Baltimore and Ohio charter was revoked the following year.

Following election of the first board of directors, comprised of President Samuel Vaughn Merrick and Chief Engineer John Edgar Thomson, on March 30, 1847, surveys revealed three potential routes, the most feasible of which was the westerly one from Harrisburg through Logan’s Narrows to Sugar Gap Run and then to Robinson’s Summit (which would later be named “Altoona”), following the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers before gaining 800 feet of elevation over the Allegheny Mountains and terminating in Pittsburgh.

But the Allegheny Portage Railroad could only surmount the imposing peaks by means of its ten inclined planes. How, then, could the Pennsylvania Railroad do so without them? And, while both were seen as competitors, in reality, they initially complemented one another.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s eastern section, consisting of 173 miles of track from Lancaster to Duncansville, opened in September of 1850, connecting the following month with the Allegheny Portage system, while the western section, from Pittsburgh to Johnstown, was completed on December 10, 1852. The Allegheny Portage, having already walked in the Pennsylvania’s shoes with its intermediate, and laboriously-slow, mountain vaulting water-and-rail interchange, only temporarily served as its link, since it attempted to design an all-track route.

The problem lay, literally, in laying track, which would have to climb the mountain’s rock face to surmount its 1,216-foot summit through a tunnel with existing locomotive capability, yet avoid the stationary engine-inclined plane system. The required grade would have been prohibitive.

The solution was a long, double loop of track, which assumed a more gradual, locomotive-capable elevation gain, reducing a ten-percent grade (or a rise of ten feet for every 100 feet of distance) to a more docile 1.8 percent.

Touted along the north side of the valley, the line arced to the left, over a manmade embankment, to Kittanning Point, where it formed, after necessary rock wall chiseling, the now-famous, half-mile-long Horseshoe Curve, its gradual rise indicated by its west side elevation, which is 122 feet higher than its east.

Declared operational on February 15, 1854, it reduced the four-day journey between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh by the Allegheny Portage Railroad to only 15 hours by its Pennsylvania counterpart, and caused a rapid passenger and freight loss to it, forcing the dual-mode interchange system to concede defeat. Although it had employed hybrid technology of infantile development, it nevertheless succeeded in surmounting the topographical obstacle and served as one of the necessary steps in man’s technological climb.

More importantly, the Horseshoe Curve, symbolic of the triumph of the state’s very Allegheny Mountains to east-west travel, sparked a secondary rise—from the virgin land—of the city needed to maintain it and the railroad which had given birth to it. That city was Altoona.

Altoona Shop Complex:

Located at the foot of the Alleghenies, Altoona sprouted from the 224-acre David Robinson farm whose strategic location, 235 miles west of Philadelphia and 116 miles east of Pittsburgh, was optimal from which to dispatch additional locomotive power to aid the climb over the increasing grade. In conjunction with these train reconfigurations was the need for both engine and unpowered rolling stock maintenance and repair.

The deed of transfer, signed on April 24, 1849 after the ,000 purchase price had been paid, provided the necessary land for the first railroad shops. As the heart of the Allegheny Mountains, nourished by the area’s coal, iron, lumber, and water resources, the town pumped life into the area.

Based upon the original plans devised in 1849, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona Complex included a machine shop, an engine house, and an erecting shop, to which were added an eight-stall and –track roundhouse and a long structure housing a locomotive repair shop, a foundry, a blacksmith, a machine shop, a woodwork shop, and a painting shop, enabling it to maintain its first, single-track connection with Pittsburgh by means of sections of the New Portage Railroad in 1850. Progressive capability enabled it to perform the three primary functions of car production, locomotive part manufacture, and repair.

But insatiable demand required ever-increasing capacity. By 1855, its existing facilities had been expanded and a 26-stall engine house had been built.

The city’s own growth paralleled that of the railroad complex’s, increasing from 2,000 in 1854 to 3,591 in 860 and eclipsing the 10,000-level a decade later, at which time a full ten percent of its population had been employed by the railroad shops. They had intermittently burgeoned into a mini-metropolis of their own, with a car shop, a tin shop, a carpenter shop, a car repair shop, a boiler shop, a roundhouse, an engine repair shop, a paint shop, and an iron and brass foundry. Administrative offices were located throughout the city.

Acquisition of the Main Line of Public Works in 1857 and the closure of the New Portage Railroad only served to increase rail transport demand, requiring commensurate capacity increases in the Altoona Complex.

Civil War-necessitated demand of rail cars to transport Union Force munitions and soldiers further rendered the Pennsylvania Railroad’s facilities integral to the effort, sparking yet another series of expansions in 1862.

But the unending demand, exerting its effects against the boundaries of its original, 1850 Altoona Machine Shops Complex, coupled with the increasing size of locomotives, prompted it to consider a secondary engine production and repair location. The engines themselves, hitherto weighing under 30 tons and built up of smaller sections, could be manually moved and assembled with the aid of basic blocks, jacks, and swing cranes, but their increasing capability, reflected by their sheer size, required greater clearances and power cranes to move, neither of which could be accommodated within the original compound.

The Consolidation engine, for instance, weighed 48 tons, but was succeeded by the 57.3-ton Class R type of 1885.

The new site, in the eastern section of the city, was reflected by the facility’s very name—the Juniata Shops—which were constructed between September of 1888 and 1890, and offered a full array of functions: a blacksmith shop; a paint shop; a boiler shop; electric, hydraulic, and gas houses; a paint structure; storerooms; a hydraulic transfer table, and an office. A longitudinal assembly line, in a boiler-blacksmith-machine-erecting shop configuration, facilitated increased locomotive production, which standardly began with the flanging, punching, construction, and riveting of its boiler in its appropriate shop before being moved, in completed form, to the erecting location. Frames and forgings, having been transferred from the blacksmith to the machine shop, were now united with the cylinders and castings, positioned at the center of the building, while the boiler was joined with its matching parts in the erecting shop.

Final assembly, progressing from individual parts at the building’s west end to a completed unit at its east, usually required a week.

Like its Altoona counterpart, the Juniata Complex expanded in response to the demand exerted on it. Enlarged erecting, blacksmith, machine, and boiler shops, for example, were built between 1902 and 1903, and a second blacksmith shop and altogether new storehouse were subsequently added.

At the end of World War I, a second machine shop took its place within the sprawling facility and it was initially used for locomotive tender construction and repair.

By 1926, the Juniata Locomotive Shop consisted of two blacksmith shops, a boiler shop, two machine shops, a tank shop, and an erecting and machine shop, enabling it to repair four locomotives per day and produce 12 altogether new ones per month. A fire, occurring on December 27, 1931 and incapacitating the original Altoona Complex, resulted in the transfer of all locomotive work to Juniata seven years later.

Two historical events increased activity to a fever pitch: during World War I, tanks let out an unceasing plea for armor plat strengthening, while the complex’s transition from the traditional steam engine to the more advanced diesel-electric type necessitated internal reconfigurations. Because of its increased reliability, however, it also signaled the reduction of personnel by 1957, since it required fewer repairs and overhauls.

The Altoona Works, peeking with 122 buildings and 218 acres of yards spanning three miles, employed 20,000—4,000 of whom worked in the yards and 16,000 of whom were in the shops—and produced 6,873 locomotives, becoming the world’s largest such railroad shop complex. Altoona’s population hovered at the 90,000-mark.

Once subdivided into five locations, it performed locomotive repair and production in the Altoona Machine Shops, themselves comprised of 36 departments and running from 12thto 16thstreets. The Altoona Car Shops, located in the southern portion of the city, both built and repaired passenger, parlor, sleeping, and mail coaches. The Juniata Shops fielded the full range of current locomotive propulsion types: steam, electric, gas electric, and diesel electric.

At 395 feet in diameter, with a 75-foot turntable, the East Altoona Engine House, its fourth location, was the world’s largest, featuring 50 stalls. The hub of locomotive servicing, it handled between 325 and 350 per day, including the T-1 Class, the last and largest steam engine built in Altoona after a 110-foot turntable had been installed in 1942. The nearby East Altoona Coal Dock, a 135-foot-high concrete structure based by a steel-frame and replenished by 35 daily hopper cars, supplied steam engines employed on the Pittsburgh and Middle divisions with its 1,250-ton capacity.

The South Altoona Foundries, the fifth of the complex’s facilities, produced wheels for both locomotives and cars.

The post-World War II decline in train travel, sparked by an increase in automobile popularity, saw the progressive replacement of the railways with highways, beginning a period of Altoona Shop facility and employee retrenchment.

The short-lived merger between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central, which formed Penn Central on February 1, 1968 and initiated a .5 million modernization program, just as quickly plunged into the tunnel of bankruptcy two years later, on June 21, emerging as Conrail after Congress passed the Regional Rail Reorganization Act of 1973 to study the precarious Penn Central situation. The recommended, and adopted, solution was the formation of the privately-owned Consolidated Rail Corporation, or “Conrail,” from similarly-blighted companies, including the Penn Central, the Erie Lackawanna, the Central of New Jersey, the LeHigh Valley, the Lehigh and Hudson River, and the Reading railroads, and, in the event, it selected the Juniata Locomotive Shops as its principle repair facility, of which it assumed managerial control.

After a 1983 modernization program, it was able to offer a full menu of production, repair, overhaul, and maintenance services of engine governors, alternators, power assemblies, fans, generators, and blower motors, as well as manufacture of state-of-the-art EMD and General Electric locomotives for BNSF, CSX, and Norfolk Southern, the latter of which ultimately acquired Conrail’s Pennsylvania route system and, indirectly, its Juniata Shop Complex.

Still fielding some 60 to 80 daily trains, including the easterly and westerly “Pennsylvania” runs to New York and Pittsburgh operated by Amtrak, Altoona, located at the foot of the Allegheny front and in close proximity to the Horseshoe Curve, capitalized on its topographical obstacles, making an invaluable contribution to both the country’s transportation infrastructure and the Industrial Revolution, through the Pennsylvania Railroad and its shop complex, in an ultimate obstacle-into-opportunity transformation.

An Allegheny Mountain tourist hub, the “Railroad City” of Altoona shares its past with present visitors through its Railroaders Memorial Museum and Horseshoe Curve sights.

Railroaders Memorial Museum:

Located in the 1882 Master Mechanics Building, formerly used by the Pennsylvania Railroad as a testing lab, “the Railroaders Memorial Museum,” according to its self-proclaimed purpose, “is dedicated to revealing, interpreting, commemorating, and celebrating the significant contributions of railroaders and their families to American life and industry,” chronicling the history of the railroad without which Altoona would not have existed.

Sprouting form a seed first planted in 1967, when the Altoona Railway Museum Club was formed, it was officially incorporated as the “Railroaders Memorial Museum” five years later. Its eventual five-acre parcel of land, once occupied by the Penn Central Railroad Shop Complex and sold by the Altoona Redevelopment Authority to Center Associates, was acquired in 1993, along with the former Masters Mechanics facility, and the museum, having already had its grand opening on September 21, 1980, celebrated a second such event 18 years later, on April 25, 1998, with these additions.

Entering the interactive museum’s time portal, which transports the visitor back to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 1950s pinnacle-of-operations period by means of recreated scenes, store fronts, interiors, voices, and sounds, he finds himself at a railroad station alive with hissing steam and ear-piercing train whistles, about to board a full-sized replica of a K-4 locomotive displaying number 1361.

The reason for the town’s very existence is explained in the “Why in the World Altoona?” exhibit. Pittsburgh needed a rail connection with the eastern part of the state, it explains, and the fledgling Pennsylvania Railroad fiercely competed with the already-established Baltimore and Ohio for the right to build it. Eventually winning, it linked Pittsburgh in the west with its mirror-image metropolis in the east, Philadelphia. But mounting the Alleghenies was an almost impossible climb. A spot of wilderness, chosen by Chief Engineer Thomson, developed into the base camp, which supported the feat and was designated “Altoona,” ultimately evolving into the railroad capital of the world. Trains were designed, constructed, tested, and repaired here. Its people would change the face of America and prove indispensable in its protection, from the Civil War to World War II.

Like so many chapters of technological development, Altoona, its people, and the Pennsylvania Railroad played an important role in America’s rise as a nation.

Additional insight about the area’s railroad roots can be gleaned from two films, “Altoona at Work: An Era of Steam” and “Birth of a Curve,” shown in the first floor Norfolk Southern Theater.

The second floor “Railroad Work” and “A City of Railroaders” exhibits bring early-Altoona back to life by means of its storefront and neighborhood recreations, such as Dutch Hill and Little Italy, and even features an extensive Pennsylvania Railroad model train layout.

“The Pennsy was the ‘engine’ of Altoona’s growth,” it explains. “But the company did not build the city that made up ‘the rest of the train.’” Although it founded, laid out, and aided it, it elected not to own and construct the city beyond the actual shops. Nevertheless, the company’s power and influence coursed through its arteries. Its many neighborhoods were the result of railroaders reinvesting their savings to build houses, which, in turn, provided income-supplementing rents.

The visitor can temporarily step into their shoes. At the Newstand, which was formerly located at the 12thStreet Bridge, a boy, “standing” behind it in holograph form and bordered by magazines for sale, relates tales about old Altoona. In Kelly’s Bar, which was once located at the threshold to one of the many railroad shops, you can also eavesdrop on the talk of the town.

Several residents shared insights through the philosophies they left behind. Sally Price, for example—a Pennsylvania Railroad clerk—proclaimed, “A dirty city was good because it meant that people had work. We always considered it gold dust, not coal dust. That’s what made America run.”

In May of 1936, Fortune magazine reported, “Think of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a nation at war. The men who move these trains are soldiers on duty, day and night.”

And the far-reaching value of the railroad’s track network, which ultimately spread throughout the northeast like a spider’s web, was captured by this compact gem: “Travel is the nation’s university.”

There was no more appropriate name for a railroad than that which reflected the very state it conquered and connected with the rest of the country.

The museum’s third floor exhibits, which offer a children’s focus, include “Railroaders as American Heroes,” “The World’s Fair,” “How to Run a Railroad,” “A Report to the Shareholders,” “The Test Labs,” and “The End of an Era.”

Outside, the museum invites the visitor to “stand at the center of what was once the greatest railroad shop complex in the world—the Altoona Works of the Pennsylvania Railroad.” Established in 1850, along with the town, the shops eventually sprouted across 218 acres and occupied 122 buildings. Containing 88 acres under roof, they held 4,500 machine tools and 94 overhead cranes. Four distinct groups of buildings emerged.

The shops met the Pennsylvania Railroad’s ever-growing need to build, test, repair, and rebuild a vast fleet. In the eight-decade period from 1866 to 1946, some 6,873 steam, diesel-electric, and electric locomotives were produced here, along with thousands of standard–and the world’s first all-steel–cars, of which 16,415 for freight alone emerged from its doors between 1921 and 1940.

Today, you can inspect several types of Pennsylvania Railroad cars, inclusive of a Class N5 cabin car/caboose (number 477577), a Class X29L steel boxcar (number 2136), an express refrigerator car (number 2561), and a Class D78F dining car (number 4468). At 81 feet in length, this “Altoona-built restaurant on wheels” accommodated 36 at formally set tables, but a later reconfiguration reduced this number to 32, along with another ten seated in a lounge section. In 1941, the Pennsylvania Railroad served 3.9 million meals.

Horseshoe Curve National Historic Landmark:

An innovative engineering approach to conquering the Allegheny Mountains and thus provide a trans-Pennsylvania, continuous-track, east-west rail link between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the Horseshoe Curve replaced the inclined-plane hurdle employed by the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Located 5.9 miles from the Railroaders Memorial Museum, it is included in its admission price.

With its increasing popularity as a train-viewing area, Kattanning Point, site of the curve, was developed into a telegraph and sightseeing station in 1855, while a reservoir, built in the middle of it, provided water to the ever-growing city of Altoona.

Demand for rail transport, generated by the equally growing country’s need for factory-produced commodities, soon necessitated increased train frequencies, which, in tun, required additional track to accommodate. The Horseshoe Curve, opening with a single line, was quadrupled by the very end of the 19thcentury, receiving a second track in 1898, a third in 1899, and a fourth in 1900, the latter two of which could only be laid after additional clearance was provided with removal of part of the rock face–all the while accomplished while trains continued to ply the inside of the curve.

Accessed for the first time by a macadam road in 1932, Kattanning Point sprouted a small stone guest lodge at its base eight years later, but it was relegated to a gift shop and visitor center, since that very road was symbolic of what had gradually gnawed away at the track’s original purpose. This actual station was subsequently demolished.

By 1957, operation of the park was transferred from the Pennsylvania Railroad to the city of Altoona, and a decade later, Horseshoe Curve was designated a National Historic Landmark.

The semi-circular curve—an industrial link to the west, a topographical triumph, and a catalyst to growth—represents, in essence, an act of perfection, designed by and for the railroad which gave birth to the very town where its locomotives and rail cars were manufactured so that its Horseshoe Curve could connect it with the rest of the country—a single need, sparking multiple byproducts, to serve each other, none of which could have been possible without the other, in an ultimate earthly expression of “creation.”

Two plaques attest to these facts. The first, reflecting its status as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, states, “Horseshoe Curve was designed and built under the direction of Pennsylvania Railroad Chief Engineer, and later company president, J. Edgar Thomson. When it opened, (it) was 366 meters across, 1,310 meters long, and had a 1.8-percent grade.”

The second states, “Horseshoe Curve has been placed on the National Register of Historic Railroad Landmarks—1854-2004. First railroad to cross the Allegheny Mountains between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh with a maximum grade of 1.87 percent, was engineered by J. Edgar Thomson 150 years ago.”

The museum, across from the gift shop, features exhibits entitled “Building the Curve,” “Maintenance,” and the “Changing Face of the Curve,” as well as an area relief map and a small video room where the film “Birth of the Curve” can be viewed, if it was missed at the Railroaders Memorial Museum. It is also the departure point of the 12-passenger funicular, which ascends to the summit of the ridge and the Horseshoe Curve viewing area. Alternatively, the area can be reached by climbing the 194 steps.

A picnic table-dotted park, whose centerpiece is Pennsylvania Railroad diesel locomotive number 7048, enables the visitor to view the frequent trains rounding the three tracks which currently comprise the Horseshoe Curve in front of him or the Kattanning Reservoir behind, which appears like a blue gem shimmering amidst the verdant hills. A train-viewing schedule, available in the Visitor Center’s gift shop, lists frequencies, approximate passing times, and passenger- or freight-comprised operations, and is augmented by the loud speaker-broadcast transmissions from the actual trains. Dual-locomotive-pulled Norfolk Southern freight trains, emitting protesting screeches as they round the massive curve on the furthest, shale rock-hugging track from the viewer, are common sights.

A plaque lists the curve as being 2,375 feet long and having a nine-degree, 15-minute curve, a 220-degree central angle, a 1,594-foot east end elevation, and a 91-foot-per-mile grade.

A board, positioned in front of the track and entitled “Over the Hill,” describes “how railroads surmounted the spine of the Alleghenies between Altoona and Johnstown.”

The state-owned Allegheny Portage Railroad, of course, was the first to do so, its eastern terminus located just west of Hollidaysburg and its “first of ten,” so designated because it was the first of its ten inclined planes. Duncansville served as the original connecting point between it and the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose initial mainline had been routed through Altoona until the Horseshoe Curve opened in 1854.

Concurrent with its design had been the building of the continuous-track New Portage Railroad, which eliminated the awkward inclined-plane method of travel. Purchasing it in 1857, the Pennsylvania Railroad failed to use it until 1904, when increased freight transport demand necessitated a reliever route, but abandoned it a second time in 1981.

Area tracks had also been used by the S. E. Baker Railroad and, later, by the Glen White Coal and Lumber Company.

Today, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s mainline, originating in New York and routed through Philadelphia and Harrisburg, arcs through the Horseshoe Curve before negotiating numerous, but lesser ones, including the McGinleys, McCanns, AG, Greenough, Brandimarte, Allegrippus, Cold, Bennington, and Salpino curves. Continuing through the Allegheny and New Portage tunnels, it proceeds to Pittsburgh and the west—the goal envisioned more than a century and a half ago.

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1. Asheville 

                Western North Carolina is topographically the most diverse part of the state and therefore offers one of the richest travel experiences.  Asheville, some 125 miles from Charlotte, is the area’s gateway.

                Located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, at the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers, it had been settled in 1794 by John Barton, who had originally named it “Morristown” after Robert Morris, a financier of the American Revolution, but it had been later changed to honor Governor Samuel Ashe.  With the 1880 arrival of the Western North Carolina Railroad, it had developed as a livestock and tobacco market, and is today the economic and recreational center for western North Carolina and a tourism base for the area’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Cherokee Indian culture.

                Second only to Miami in art deco architecture, Asheville offers several interesting sights.

                The Basilica of St. Lawrence, for example—jointly developed by Spanish architect Rafael Gustavia and Richard Sharp Smith—is a Spanish Renaissance design in brick and tile with a self-supporting dome and Catalan-style vaulting.  It had been completed in 1908.

                The early life of Thomas Wolfe, Asheville’s famous novelist, can be gleaned from a tour of the 29-room Queen Anne-style house in which he had grown up.  It is now a designated state historic site.

                Nucleus of the arts, Asheville is the cultivation point of painters, sculptures, and potters, who perfect their crafts in the Riverside Arts District.

                Asheville’s—and all of North Carolina’s—most famous and most visited sight, however, is Biltmore Estate.  Designed by Richard Morris Hunt and landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted (of New York’s Central Park fame), the 255-room, French Renaissance chateau, having required a five-year construction period during the height of the Gilded Age and some 1,000 workers, had been the result of George Washington Vanderbilt’s trips to the area in the early-1880s and his decision to have a summer residence, reminiscent of the chateaux’s lining France’s Loire Valley, built there.  It is today the US’s largest private residence and is still partly used for that purpose by Vanderbilt descendants.

                The Vanderbilts, one of the country’s wealthiest and most prominent families headed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, had amassed their wealth through railroads, corporations, and philanthropic activities.  Passing the torch to the second generation, headed by William Henry Vanderbilt, he had been able to perpetuate his success, while William Henry himself had fathered the third generation, having four sons.  George Washington Vanderbilt, one of them, had been the least active in developing the family’s business.

Opening Biltmore House on Christmas Eve in 1895, he had engaged in scientific farming, stock breeding, and forestry, and brought his bride, Edith Stuyvessant Dresser, there, three years later.  His only daughter, Cornelia, had been born in the house in 1900, and thirty years later, it had been opened to the public.

The massive house, accessible by both escorted and unescorted tours, offers a glimpse into this century-old, opulent lifestyle.  The entrance hall, portal to this era, had been the same access point used by the Vanderbilts and their guests and leads round the glass-roofed winter garden.  Perhaps the most grandiose room on the ground floor is the banquet hall.  Stretching seven stories to the wooden ceiling, it features huge tables, three massive fireplaces, Flemish tapestries from the 1500s, and a 1916 Skinner pipe organ mounted on its own loft.  It had been the location of the estate’s parties, galas, and affairs.

The private sitting and bedrooms of George and Edith Vanderbilt are located on the second floor, although, of particular note, is the Louis XV bedroom, location of Cornelia’s birth and the subsequent birth of her own two sons.

Most of the servants’ bedrooms are located on the fourth floor.

The house’s basement, location of additional servant bedrooms, features several kitchens and pantries and the recreational facilities, inclusive of a gymnasium, a 70,000-gallon indoor swimming pool, and one of the country’s first private residence bowling alleys.

Sitting on 8,000 acres of land, Biltmore Estate features several other facilities of interest.

Fronted by a grass esplanade inspired by the gardens of the 17th-century Chateau de Vaux-le-Viconte in Melun, France, it features Italian, shrub, walled, spring, and azalea gardens, and a full conservatory.

Self-guided tours of the Biltmore Winery can be made, followed by a visit to the extensive wine and delicacy gift shop, while the nearby River Bend Farm, once the center of the estate’s farming community, is comprised of a barn, a farmyard, and the Kitchen Garden, where its “field-to-table” program items are grown, before being used in the dishes served in all of its restaurants.  Aside from this produce and its wines, the dairy division of Biltmore produces its own ice cream.

Adjacent to the Biltmore Estate entrance is historic Biltmore Village.  Also co-designed by building architect Richard M. Hunt and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and constructed between 1897 and 1905, it had been intended as a picturesque residential prelude to Biltmore Estate itself with a fan-shaped layout leading to the church, the railroad depot, and the estate’s entrance, its focal points.  Its cottages had first been occupied in 1900.

Today, it offers the quaint atmosphere of an English country village with tree-lined streets, brick sidewalks, period architecture, some ten restaurants and tearooms, and 30 shops and galleries.  In 1989, it had been declared an historic area and local historical district.

Aside from Biltmore Estate, the Grove Park Inn, overlooking the city, is another opulent building listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  The ruggedly beautiful, 512-room hotel, made of boulders hewn from the nearby Sunset Mountains, opened in 1913 and features massive stone fireplaces, four dining rooms, indoor waterfalls, a 40,000-square-foot spa, and beautiful views.  It has hosted an endless list of prominent people, from politicians to movie stars.

Two small, but interesting museums are located on its ground, and their buildings can be directly traced to the Vanderbilts.  Mrs. Vanderbilt, particularly, had been very interested in homespun fabrics, and ultimately established Biltmore Industries, a craft education program, which had later been sold to Fred Seely, son-in-law of Edwin W. Grove, himself architect and manager of the Grove Park Inn.  Its weaving activities had been relocated to the small buildings currently on its grounds, whereafter it had achieved worldwide recognition for its hand-loomed fabrics.

In 1953, Henry Blomberg purchased the business from the Seely family and continued it until 1980.  The daughters and sons-in-law of Blomberg, who had died 11 years later, restored the six English cottages and their surrounding landscapes, and created the two museums.

The first of these, the North Carolina Homespun Museum, had been opened to depict the history of Biltmore Industries originally founded on Biltmore Estate, but relocated to the present site in 1917, and exhibits examples of handiwork by North Carolina natives.  America’s heritage of handiwork, which is now more than 200 years old, still thrives in the southern Appalachian Mountains.  The museum itself displays a four-harness loom and examples of homespun fabric.

The second museum, the Estes-Winn Antique Car Museum, once housed 40 looms, but currently displays four horse-drawn vehicles and 19 automobiles, including a 1913 Ford Model “T,” a 1926 Cadillac, a 1929 Ford Model “A” with a rumble seat, a 1940 Packard “120” Coupe, and a 1959 Edsel, all in still-running, pristine condition.

The Grovewood Gallery, housed in a 1917 English Cottage next to the two museums, sells handmade furniture, ceramics, jewelry, glass, and artwork. 

2. Chimney Rock Park 

A popular day trip from Asheville is that to Chimney Rock Park.  Located 25 miles away via winding, scenic Route 74-A, it had had its origins in 1900 when Dr. Lucius Morse, a physician from St. Louis in search of a better climate, had been entranced by its wall of stone and had envisioned a park incorporating it.  Purchasing 64 acres of Chimney Rock Mountain two years later, he had taken the initial step toward that goal, but had elected to build an elevator inside it so that all could access its summit.

In 2007, the state of North Carolina had purchased the park from the Morse family, which had continued to own and administer it since its 1902 acquisition.

The 198-foot-long tunnel, leading from the parking lot to the elevator, had been created by blasting through 509-million-year-old rock designed “Henderson Gneiss,” which had formed as magma deep within the earth and had crystallized as igneous rock called “granite.”  During the later formation of the Appalachian Mountains, it had metamorphosed into its present Gneiss form.

The 30-second elevator ride, which ascends 26 stories, could only be constructed after proper surveying had been conducted from its top and a 258-foot-high hoistway, requiring eight tons of dynamite and an 18-month construction period, had been drilled and blasted.

Completed on December 23, 1948, it had been North Carolina’s tallest elevator at the time, and today still uses its original, 3,500-pound capacity, stainless steel car, which ascends at 500 feet-per-minute.

A wooden bridge, 258 feet above the parking lot and spanning a water-carved gully, connects the Sky Lounge and Gift Shop, terminus of the elevator, with Chimney Rock, whose views, afforded by its 2,280-foot elevation, encompass 75 miles over Hickory Nut Gorge.

A recent visit, on a slightly cloudy day, had revealed multiple shades of green velvet-appearing, wave-like mountains based by the silver, reflective surface of Lake Lure.

Five hiking trails, varying between a half to one-and-a-half miles, and between “easy” and “strenuous” in gauge, afford equally beautiful vistas.

Hickory Falls, 404 feet in length, had provided the site for the filming of “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Firestarter,” and “A Breed Apart.”

Chimney Rock Park is a National Heritage Site. 

3. Cherokee 

Cherokee, located 50 miles from Asheville, can either serve as a day trip destination or an overnight location.  An introduction to the highly developed Cherokee culture, it offers an opportunity for Las Vegas-style gaming and is the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As a people, the Cherokee had called these southeastern mountains home for some 11,000 years and they are one of the few Native Americans to have continued to occupy their original territory, designated the “Qualla Boundary,” a 100-square-mile sovereign nation.  Several significant sights within this area enable the visitor to learn about their history, traditions, art, and culture.

The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, for instance—depicting its 11,000-year history—commences with their own beginning in the area’s mountains, before detailing their struggle for early survival amidst harsh climate and huge, now-extinct animals, such as the mastodon.  Their later, sedentary lifestyle, centered round agriculture, had enabled them to refine their culture and enjoy increased leisure time.

After the Europeans had arrived and claimed their land, the Eastern Band of Cherokees had been forcibly exiled to Oklahoma in 1838 in an historic movement known as the “Trail of Tears.”  Some, however, had been detoured and remained, ultimately preserving their customs and re-establishing the sovereign nation of today.

This culture can also be experienced in the nearby Oconaluftee Indian Village, which depicts mountain life in 1759.  Amid the subtle, but ever-present wafts of smoke, traditionally dressed Cherokee demonstrate beadwork, pottery, finger weaving, basketry, weaponry, animal trapping, canoe burning, and wood and stone carving.  A warrior house, waddle and daube houses, the village council house, and cabins from 1790 and 1800 surround the Village Square, where performances are periodically given.

The village is characteristic of the 64 towns spread over 40,000 square miles during this time.

A more extensive performance, entitled “Unto these Hills,” takes place during the summer months at the outdoor Mountainside Theater, and portrays the European arrival and Trail of Tears chapters in its history.  Since its July 1, 1950 debut, it has played continuously, during which time more than five million have experienced it.

Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Hotel, a 576-room complex in two, 15-story towers, thresholds the town and features 3,300 games in an 80,000-square-foot casino, five restaurants, and name entertainment in a 1,500-seat pavilion.  It is adorned with the largest collection of Eastern Cherokee contemporary art. 

4. Bryson City

Bryson City, located ten miles from Cherokee, is another mountainside community which serves as a gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains with their diverse, outdoor activities, including hiking, fishing, horseback riding, white water rafting, camping, and climbing.

Incorporated in 1887, and named after Colonel Thadeus Dillard Bryson, it is located on the Tucksagee River and had been linked to the outside world for the first time when the rail line between Asheville and Murphy had been completed.  Along with the Nantahala and Little Tennessee Rivers, the Tucksagee River itself had formed nearby Fontana Lake, while the small town, with a population of 1,400, had been laid out in accordance with the ancient trails and roads of the Cherokee.

Its most major attraction is the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad.  Tracing its origins to the Murphy Branch Line completed in 1891, it had been intended as the first leg of an eventual rail connection between Asheville and the Midwest; nevertheless, it had exposed the isolated North Carolina communities to the rest of the world for the first time, introducing hitherto unknown lifestyles and ideas to them.

During the 1900s, the railroad had operated up to ten daily trains from Alabama and Georgia to the western North Carolina Mountains and hauled materials, equipment, and workers instrumental in the construction of Fontana Dam.

After the line had been obviated by road travel, the Southern Railway had discontinued passenger service in 1948, and the Andrews-Murphy stretch had been altogether closed by Norfolk Southern in the 1980s.

The tracks, purchased by the state of North Carolina, had provided the foundation for the current Great Smoky Mountains Railroad intended for tourism and sightseeing purposes, after a group of investors had sketched out a plan for it in 1988.  Engines and coaches had subsequently been acquired from several US rail lines and extensively refurbished.

In 1999, the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad had been purchased by American Heritage Railways, which operates sister lines in Colorado and Texas, and in 2007, the North Carolina branch had carried some 200,000 passengers.

All trains depart from the Bryson City depot.  Of the two primary itineraries, the first is a 32-mile, eastbound, round-trip “Tucksagee River” excursion to Dillsboro, while the second is a 44-mile, westbound, round-trip “Nantahala Gorge” run, with price depending upon one of four car types: open car, coach, Crown Coach, or Club Car, the latter of which includes train attendant service, drinks, and snacks.  There are also railroad and rafting packages, dinner trains, and several theme trips, depending upon season.

The Fryemont Inn, in wooded surroundings overlooking the town, is on the National Register of Historic Places and offers either overnight accommodations or an opportunity for excellent dining, even for non-guests.

Constructed in 1923, it features a bark-covered exterior; a rocking chair-lined, outdoor porch; a wooden lobby with a huge stone fireplace; chestnut-paneled guest rooms; and a dining room with a peaked, wooden roof supported by tree trunk beams, a second large fireplace, and polished, hardwood floors.

5. Great Smoky Mountains National Park

                 The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, receiving some ten million annual visitors, is the most popular park in America.

                The Great Smoky Mountains themselves, formed almost a billion years ago, had been created when the ancient sea had flooded what is presently the eastern United States, submerging a mountain range.  Sea-deposited layers, exerting progressively greater weight upon each other, ultimately compressed the material into metamorphic rock, while a secondary layer of limestone, itself comprised of fossilized marine animals and shells, provided an upper covering some 300 million years ago.

                Fifty million years later, the collision between the North American and African continents resulted in tectonic plate shifting and the older, metamorphic rock tilted upward, sliding over the limestone and creating the Appalachian Mountains.

                Massive boulders, the result of ice age freezing and thawing cycles, gradually appeared, while erosive, water sculpting forces shaped the mountain’s rounded peaks over the millennia.

                The area had first been populated when Paleolithic hunters and gatherers had crossed the frozen Bering Strait and then migrated down and across North America.  A dissenting branch of the Iroquois Indians, later designated Cherokee, had arrived here from New England 11,000 years ago, and in 1540, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, ventured into the mountains, discovering a sophisticated Cherokee culture and religion.  The Ulster-Scots, escaping repression in Belfast, Ireland, had also settled here because of the North Carolina Mountains’ resemblance to the Scottish Highlands.

                Rural life can be gleaned at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Cherokee, and its adjacent Mountain Farm Museum, which had been created to preserve the cultural heritage of the Great Smoky Mountains at the turn of the 20th century.

                Several original, relocated structures depict this era.

                The Davis house, for instance, had been moved from the Indian Creek area, north of Bryson City.  Completed in 1900 after a two-year construction period, it is made of split, chestnut logs and is divided into three rooms, including a living room with a fireplace and a piano and a kitchen with a hearth and a heavy block table.

                The meathouse, relocated from Little Cataloochee, North Carolina, had always been positioned closest to the main house for convenience and security and preserved one of the most important food sources during this period.  Although it could have theoretically housed several types of meat, pork, which had been standardly butchered during the autumn because of its characteristically lower temperatures, had been the predominant type and had usually been salted or smoked to protect it against bacteria and insects.

                Chickens, stored in the chicken house, had provided both meat and eggs, and their feathers had been used for pillows and mattresses.

                Apples, equally stored in earth and stone wall-insulated apple houses, had been a staple of rural, mountain farm diets and were eaten raw or used to make cider, vinegar, apple sauce, apple butter, and pies.  Heartier winter apples had been stored in ground-level bins, while the more delicate summer variety had been stored above them.

                Corn, the most important, multi-purpose crop, had been used for cornmeal, livestock feed (as leaves), kindling for fires (as cobs), and stuffing material for chairs, mattresses, and rugs (as shucks).  The corncrib, the storage location, had protected it from weather and animals.

                In the sorghum mill and furnace, sorghum cane had been converted to molasses, which had then been used for syrup and in cooking.

                Hogs, the main source of meat on mountain farms, had also been formed the basis for lard and soup.  Excess meat had been sold for profit.

                The barn, the only structure original to the site, had housed livestock in the stable and feed, hoes, plows, and wagons in the loft above it.

                The blacksmith shop, complete with a forge, an anvil, and a bellows, had been relocated here from Cades Cove, North Carolina, and had been used for ironwork forging and repair of existing tools.

                The springhouse, purposefully located near a stream in order to provide a source of drinking water, had also protected food from animals, and cooled and preserved it by means of rock-line channels or elevated wooden troughs through which it had flowed.

                The entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park is just beyond the Mountain Farm Museum.  Established in 1934 to protect the remainder of the Appalachian Forest, which had been severely depleted due to fires and rampant logging, the park itself, covering 500,000 acres, had been the 21st in the national system and the first to have been assembled from private land.  Sixty percent of it is located in North Carolina and 40 percent is located in Tennessee.  It features 800 miles of hiking trails, 700 miles of rivers and streams, and 200,000 acres of virgin forest.  Its lower section of the Appalachian Mountains, the oldest in the world, are characterized by densely-forested, curving peaks once described as “blue, like smoke” by the Cherokee.

                The Appalachian Trail, which stretches 2,174 miles from Maine to Georgia, runs along the crest of the Smoky Mountains and marks the North Carolina-Tennessee state line.  There are three visitor centers: Oconaluftee in the former state and Sugarlands and Cades Cove in the latter.  US Route 441, alternatively designed “Newfound Gap Road,” provides internal automobile access and crosses the Appalachian Trail midway through the park.  The hiking trails, however, provide the best connection with nature and lead to 1,008 developed campsites and 100 primitive ones.

                The park is comprised of five classifications of forest, depending upon elevation: “Spruce-Fir,” “Northern Hardwood,” “Cove Hardwood,” “Hemlock,” and “Pine-and-Oak.”  It contains 60 species of mammals, 200 of birds, and 1,500 flowering plants.

                I had recorded the following observations during a recent, late-May drive through Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

                Clouds, hovering lower than the mountain peaks and nestled in their valleys, seemed to sheath the green-carpeted facades before rising like smoke tendrils, as if the entire mountain had been smoldering.  The winding, ascending road through Great Smoky Mountains National Park seemed mired in thin mist.  The multiple peaks, standing one behind the other and assuming dark blue, gray, and forest green profiles, appeared like ever-unfolding waves frozen at their upward-cycle apogees.  The dense trees, providing tunnel-like walls on either side of the road with their extended limbs, formed canopies where they met in mutual handshakes, exuding an artist’s palette of greens: dark for fraser fir and light for oak–a green blur periodically interspersed by the brown shale rocks which appeared like vertical monoliths and from which these live tree sentinels grew, although I do not quite know how.  Tiny trickles of water, gravity-induced downward over auburn and charcoal-hued rock and glinted by the afternoon sun, appeared like thin veins of liquid silver.

                Atop Clingman’s Dome, the highest peak in Great Smoky Mountains National Park at 6,643 feet, the air is thin and cool and the only view to be had is down, to the almost green-velvet facades of the rolling peaks, as if one had been rendered the high and exalted one of North Carolina and of all of the Appalachian Mountains which thread their way down the eastern portion of the United states.  With this view comes the realization that the Rocky Mountains in the west, although higher, have a reflection in the Great Smoky Mountains in the east.  And with this view comes the realization that it is not the relative size of the reflection, but that we reflect at all…

5. Conclusion

            Western North Carolina’s topographical diversity offers a rich travel experience encompassing the art deco city of Asheville and its opulent Biltmore Estate, the geological sculpture of Chimney Rock, the introduction to the highly-developed culture of the Cherokee, the beautiful vistas afforded by a journey with the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, and the pristine, almost-ethereal experience of visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

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Article by Pushpitha Wijesinghe

The exceptional McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park is ideally positioned in the centre of Scottsdale, Arizona. Envisioned by Guy Stillman, the park has become one of the regions most popular and extraordinary tourist attractions.

At the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, visitors can enjoy a one of a kind ride on the Paradise and Pacific Railroad. However a memorable train ride is not all that this impressive park has on offer.

The person responsible for the creation of the park was Guy Stillman who was the son of Anne and Fowler McCormick. He offered his 5/12 Paradise and Pacific Railroad masterpiece in 1971 to the city. Even though many prospective buyers came forward to purchase this railroad, Stillman wished it to remain in Scottsdale.

The funding for the park came in way of the Scottsdale Railroad and Mechanical Society that was founded by Stillman and a few others. The park was also funded by the Federal Government and the city of Scottsdale.

Opened as a public recreation park in 1975, McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park is spread across thirty acres. Each year approximately 600,000 people visit this park which is also the city’s most visited and most popular.
The McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park is complete with many interesting attractions such as Charros Carousel, railroad clubs, shops, concerts, picnic and birthday reservations, playground and even a museum.
The first attraction of the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park was the Paradise and Pacific Railroad which is a replica of a Colorado narrow gauge railroad. During weekdays visitors can enjoy rides every half an hour and on weekends rides are more frequent. The Scottsdale Charro Carousel which is also a popular attraction at the park is skilfully carved and is loved by kids of all ages.
Visitors who wish to enjoy a day at the McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park can do so by staying at a nearby Scottsdale Resort. For example, Millennium Resort Scottsdale McCormick Ranch is a superb accommodation choice that offers home like comforts for any type of traveller.

I

Misty clouds, rising from the dark green faces of the Great Smoky Mountains during the morning, appeared like smoke tendrils. The twelve-car train, wearing the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad’s tuscan red and Rio Grande gold livery and pulled by an EMD GP-9 diesel locomotive, vibrated and clanged its bell atop the gravel-imbedded rails next to the gray, wooden Bryson City depot, as it prepared for its imminent, 44-mile, round-trip departure to Nantahala Gorge. Passengers, many of whom had dislodged from buses, inundated the tiny portico waiting area, lulled into a North Carolina mood by a guitar-strumming trio. I would make the journey in the MacNeill Club Car, number 536, today, attached to generator car 6118 and trailed by Silver Meteor dining car 8015. That journey, inextricably tired to these western North Carolina mountains, could trace its origins to the mid-1800s.

Although the ruggedly beautiful area had been rich in natural resources, such as timber, fertile soil, and minerals, the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains, peeking at 6,000 feet, had rendered it isolated and inaccessible, with a rough, wagon-plied route its only connection with the rest of the state. After considerable efforts to persuade the state legislature of North Carolina to rectify this deficiency, it had agreed to subsidize the construction of track between Salisbury and Asheville in 1855, to be used by the Western North Carolina Railroad.

A smooth development period, spanning six years, had been thwarted in 1861 by the Civil War, at which time some 70 miles of rail had yet to be laid, but momentum had ultimately been regained 16 years later, when convict labor had been employed for the first time. Five hundred tracklayers had been subdivided into 150-men camps, each of which had been led by a captain, a foreman, and several guards.

An erroneous route survey, revealing that existing topography had been unsuitable for track, had required another decade to properly determine, and had been exacerbated by crude, hand tool usage and primitive rock removal methods, the rocks themselves expanded by fire-created heat and cracked after drenchings with cold water.

The rails, following Indian trails and cow paths, entailed an 891.5-foot elevation gain with an average two-percent grade, and passed through five tunnels, and the precarious route had hardly been forged with safety. Indeed, on March 11, 1879, the Swannanoa Tunnel, which had been being bored from both ends, had collapsed and instantly crushed 21 workers.

Murphy, already the eastern terminus of the Marietta and North Georgia Railroad, served the same purpose in 1891 when the tracks for the Western North Carolina’s Murphy Branch had been laid, albeit six years later than planned, and traffic interchange between the two had been facilitated when the former had changed its gauge from narrow to standard. The 111 miles from Asheville had, for the first time, been connected by rail.

Despite the delays incurred by its construction, its crude method, topographical obstacles, rough roadbed, and lack of ballast had often caused derailments, a condition partially alleviated with the addition of culverts and abutments.

Rapidly becoming the lifeline to the communities lining it, it carried supplies, agricultural products, and timber, and connected with other, existing shortline railroads, such as the Alarka Valley, the Appalachian, the Carolina and Tennessee Southern, the B&B, the Smoky Mountain, the Ritter Lumber Company, the Sunburst, and the Tuckasegee Southeastern, but it had always been plagued by steep grades, sharp curves, low-capacity locomotives, and inferior maintenance.

Three years after its completion, the Southern Railway took control of it, and, in 1907, it had been reorganized as the “Murphy Division,” with Bryson City serving as its headquarters. Its local businesses and industries, manufacturing pulpwood and pallets and selling propane, had heavily relied on rail transport to support their activities, routinely requiring feed, cross ties, lumber, and sand.

Improved road access, however, gradually replaced the need for the rails. In 1937, for instance, two daily trains had departed Murphy-a freight service at 0600 and a passenger run at 0800-but by 1944, only a single passenger train had plied the line, leaving Murphy at 0715 for Asheville and returning at 1415. Aside from offering increased western North Carolina access, road development had been necessitated by the opening of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Diminishing timber resources, coupled with the completion of the nearby Fontana Dam, had finally resulted in the permanent discontinuation of passenger services on July 16, 1948. Thirty-two years later, in 1980, 2,239 freight car loads had plied the rails, yet by 1987, the number had dwindled to 817. During the last three years, by which time the railroad had been acquired by Norfolk Southern, regularly scheduled service, of no more than five cars, had only been maintained between Waynesville and Andrews, with stops in Murphy only sporadically made.

Maintenance costs, already high because of the 34 bridges connecting Dillsboro with Murphy and the excessive track curvature, had escalated without a commensurate increase in revenue, and in 1984, the Champion Paper Mill, long dependent on the line for its business, had converted its traditional pulpwood product to woodchips, packaged in a cube whose size had precluded its rail transport through the Dillsboro and Rhodo tunnels. Costs to either lower their roadbeds or increase their ceiling heights had been prohibitive, particularly for use by only a single company. As a result, the papermill had been forced to truck its products to Canton and Norfolk Southern, unable to stem its losses, had been forced to abandon the 67 miles of track between Dillsboro and Murphy in 1988.

Although several prospective operators had explored both passenger and freight uses for it, none had been financially self-sustainable, and on July 18 of that year, the North Carolina Department of Transportation had forcibly purchased the track for 0,000 for the intended introduction of a passenger excursion train operated by the newly-established Great Smoky Mountains Railroad.

Its initial equipment, two GP-9 locomotives from Burlington Northern and Union Pacific, along with several converted, open coaches, had been joined by a 1942 Baldwin steam engine originally built for the US Army and two more GP-7 diesels from Chicago and North Western by 1995.

Its present fleet, comprised of open cars, coaches, “Crown” coaches, club cars, dining cars, and cabooses, had been acquired from several railroads and extensively refurbished. Track modifications, whose 80- and 85-pound ratings stipulated 25-mph maximum speeds, have entailed heavier rail and track side lubricator installations on sharp curves, the reinforcement of many trestles, and the redecking of the bridge crossing the Tuckasegee River at Dillsboro.

In 1996, the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad purchased the Dillsboro-Andrews section of track from the state of North Carolina, while the state itself continued to own the remainder of it, from Andrews to Murphy.

Acquired three years later, on December 23, 1999, by American Heritage Railways, the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad became one of three excursion trains owned by the new company, which operates similar ventures in Colorado and Texas.

II

Bryson City, origin of my own Nantahala Gorge excursion, is a mountainside community of 1,400 located on the Tuckasegee River and named after Colonel Thadeus Dillard Bryson. Incorporated in 1887, it had been laid out in accordance with the ancient trails and roads of the Cherokee, who had originally referred to it as “Big Bear Springs,” and today serves as a gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains and is the hub for the railroad. Because of its proximity to the Fontana Dam, it had temporarily burgeoned during its construction period.

The current railroad depot, built during the 1890s, is the only one remaining from the Southern Railway’s operation of the line, although its freight storage portion had since been removed and replaced by an open portico. A one-and-a-half mile long rail yard, of four tracks, had facilitated the town’s many industries, including the Carolina Wood Turning Company, the Carolina Building Supply, the Southern Concrete Company, and a petroleum dealer, while a turntable, a water tank, and a coal chute had been instrumental in the then-present use of steam locomotives. Bryson City is located at mile marker 63 on the track running from Asheville to Murphy.

My train’s complement had included the 1955-manufactured diesel engine, a generator car, the MacNeill club car, the Silver Meteor dining car, the Dixie Flyer dining car, the Conductor’s Café, the Bryson City coach, the Wildwater open car, the Cherokee coach, the Fontana open car, the Crescent Limited coach, and a caboose.

A car coupling-created lurch preceded the train’s initial movement at 1030, as it slowly glided over Everet street-imbedded track, soon mirrored by the stationary, red and gold Great Smoky Mountains Railroad’s chain of coaches cradled by the freight yard, before it plunged through dense, almost tunnel-like foliage at increasing, although still-gentle speeds.

Re-emerging from the dense forest, whose tall, thin trees stood like sentinels guarding the single track, the chain of cars inched away from Bryson City, paralleling the north bank of the Tuckasegee River. The original roadbed, curing to the right at mile 64.5, had been replaced by the present route in 1944 because of dam construction-created flooding.

Traversing a steel truss bridge, which had been constructed in 1898 and spanned 426 feet, the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad crossed the Nantahala River, and thence arced into a 12.1-degree curve, commencing an almost-imperceptible climb up a 1.3-percent grade, before reaching its summit by means of a horseshoe curve to the left. The Alarka Creek, a blue sheen amidst the blur of deep forest green, flashed through the left windows.

The train’s gentle rock, lulling me into relaxed serenity, prompted closer internal inspection of the MacNeill club car in which I rode. The line’s newest addition, it had been built in the 1940s and had previously been designated the “Powhatan Arrow,” operating Norfolk and Western’s service of the same name on its Premier line until 1982, at which time it had been transferred to the merged Norfolk-Southern’s Steam Program. Although it had been refurbished in 1993, it had been subsequently damaged the following year in a collision in Lynchburg, Virginia.

No longer needed after the Steam Program had been discontinued in February of 1995, it had been auctioned and acquired by the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad, renamed in honor of Malcolm and Jean MacNeill for their years of service and dedication, and for their vision of an economically viable western North Carolina scenic railway. It had been inaugurated into this service in mid-1999 on the very Nantahala Gorge run I had currently made after meticulous restoration.

Opulently decorated, it had featured a serving area; single, swivelable, tan-upholstered, opposed easy chairs separated by round tables on one side, and pairs separated by rectangular ones on the other; wood-grained wall paneling; brass lamps above the tables; and thick, red carpeting. Fruit salad, blueberry muffins, and coffee had been served shortly after departure.

The sun, finally managing to tear the billowing white, gray, and silver cloud deck open, revealed patches of blue. The pine green, glass-reflective surface of Fontana Lake, once a fertile valley, flicked through the dense foliage before opening up to a full water body, at mile 72.2. Its very creation had dictated the current railroad’s route.

The Murphy Branch track, having been 8.5 miles longer, but with gentler grades, had followed the north bank of the Tuckasegee River to Bushnell, the small community located at the converging point of the Little Tennessee River and the junction of the Carolina and Tennessee Southern Railway Company’s track. But World War II-necessitated demand for increased electrical power to facilitate production of vital war materials had sparked the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Fontana Dam Project and the Murphy Branch’s track rerouting.

Fontana, a town 1.5 miles from the construction site, had been nucleic to its successful completion and the Carolina and Tennessee Southern’s track, extended 2.84 miles along the Little Tennessee River, had formed the temporary lifeline to it, facilitating material and machinery transport. A timber trestle had been built over Eagle Creek. A four-track rail yard, long enough to support 100 cars on each of its spurs, along with a machine shop, a carpenter shop, a warehouse, and storage areas, had formed the base of the project, and cement-filled boxcars had run from Bryson City to the dam, conveying 8,000 cubic yards of concrete and 15,000 tons of sand and gravel per day.

The war had carried two stipulations: the dam had to be completed within a two-year period and steel could not be allocated for it, requiring relocated or reconstructed bridges and enormous amounts of fill to substitute for otherwise needed trestles.

Three different rivers had formed the bottom of the newly-created Fontana Lake when the resultant reservoir had flooded 24 miles of former Murphy Branch track from Bryson City to Weser, and the dam, at 480 feet, had been the highest in the eastern United States and the fourth-largest in the world when it had been completed in 1944.

The old line, discontinued by the Southern Railway between mileposts 64.5 and 88.2 on September 25 of the previous year, had been replaced by the new one on July 30, 1944.

Eating away the steel girder, concrete stanchion-supported Fontana Lake Bridge, the present Great Smoky Mountains Railroad crossed the evergreen-reflected water.

At milepost 76, orchard remnants, location of the former Southern Railway president’s summerhouse, moved by. Following the azure of Fontana Lake, the diesel locomotive negotiated the 14.2-degree curve to the right at mile 77.8, the relocated line’s sharpest, which could only be safely traversed at five mph.

The Nantahala River, a fluid life force exploding into small fumes of white anger with every rock and boulder obstacle thrown in its path, paralleled the 12-car link.

Lunch, served in the Silver Meteor dining car attached to the MacNeill club car, had included grilled vegetables, portobello mushrooms, and creamy goat cheese on a hero, served with seasoned potato wedges and a side of lettuce and tomato. The two-axle, lightweight car, built in 1940 for Seaboard Airline Railway and restored by the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad in 1994, had featured a forward galley; twelve, four-place, black lacquer tables with upholstered, floral motif-sporting chairs; small, brass lamps; and gray, geometric textured carpeting which had adorned the bottom half of its sidewalls.

The Conductor’s Café, a snack car constructed in 1949 and an alternative eating venue, had been operated as a dormitory on the Atlantic Coast Line Railway and had also seen brief service with Amtrak before being converted to its present configuration in 1997.

Plying the last mile of relocated track, the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad passed Weser Creek Falls and the Nantahala Outdoor Center before crossing the Appalachian Trail at milepost 80, now cradled by steep mountains which formed Nantahala Gorge and impeded all but the high, afternoon sun’s rays from penetrating it. The track, paralleling the river, had been laid close to the mountain’s side with the aid of nothing more than picks and shovels and seemed to bore through cool air and nature’s dense, perennially-green, vegetation-created tunnel.

The caves beyond the coaches’ right windows had once been used by hunters and settlers and had been instrumental during the Cherokee’s exile to Oklahoma in its Trail of Tears period.

Maneuvering through the line’s sharpest curve, of 17 degrees, at milepost 83.2, the train approached Talc Mountain, approaching Nantahala, once the last location of a water tank, a coal chute, and a sand tower for replenishing steam engines, thus necessitating sufficient provision for the 56-mile round-trip to Murphy and back. Today, it had served as my own journey’s terminus.

Diesel locomotive 1751, disconnecting from its 11-car chain, passed it on the Stanley track to its right before reconnecting in front of the caboose and reinitiating motion, now in the opposite direction, after a barely perceptible lurch, destined for the Nantahala Outdoor Center and a one-hour interlude.

Gently lurching and rattling, the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad retraced its path, boring through the forest green walls which reeked not of soot or coal, but instead of dense vegetation.

Amid the rushing of the river, where the tracks briefly doubled, it inched into the Nantahala Outdoor Center. Immediately above the green canopy, tiny specks of blue had rendered the otherwise white and silver cloud blanket an afternoon mosaic. The center itself, starting point for rafting excursions and permanently suffused with the heavy scent of pine, had been comprised of several wooden, rustic cabins housing gift ships and restaurants.

After having been pelted by a fierce, but quick rain shower during its one-hour rest, the diesel locomotive, once again signaling imminent departure with its whistle, released its brakes at 1400 and reinitiated momentum, each car induced into coupling-snagged motion like a chain in mimicked reaction.

The Nantahala River, now paralleling the train on the right side and a reflection of the mountain-covered vegetation, appeared a crystal green mirror. The gentle blue of the sky crested the towering trees.

Traveling in a northwesterly direction, the long chain of cars thread its way through the dense forest toward the almost-blue peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains ahead, their wheels screeching in protest as they adhered to the track’s curvatures.

The cork on the champagne bottle had been popped and cheese and crackers had, in the meantime, been served in the MacNeill club car.

Fontana Lake, draped by green-carpeted hills and dotted with houseboats, once again glided by, now visible through the long, rectangular windows on the left side, as if they had served as large television screens depicting a world from which one had been temporarily disconnected in the self-contained coach.

Following the dense, green mountain valley-cradled tracks, the train once again traversed the steel truss bridge and inched past the railroad yard, crossing Evert Street in Bryson City and snagging its brakes for a final time abreast of the gray depot.

Climbing down from the MacNeill club car, I stepped back on to the gravel and caught glimpse of the last car. Behind it lay a track comprised of light rails laid by convicts through mountainous, river-abundant terrain, having requiring restricted bridges, small tunnels, tight curves, and varying grades. Behind it lay a story of the Murphy Branch, which had provided the lifeline to the Great Smoky Mountains’ isolated communities, facilitating their growth and development, and connecting town to town. And behind it lay the ultimate connection-the one from soul to soul.

Opening the door, I stepped into the Bryson City depot.

TSU [tulsa sapulpa union] heading into tulsa

Construction

The slate underlying what became the town of Monson, Maine had very low ionizable mineral content, and was well suited for manufacture of electric switchboards. Quarrying commenced in the 1860s and slate finishing operations began in 1870. Slate was shaped into sinks, bathtubs, tabletops, chalkboards, roof shingles, and headstones. Transporting these heavy slate products was difficult in any weather, and became nearly impossible when spring thaw turned the roads to slush and mud. The Monson and Athens Railroad Company was chartered 1 November 1882 when the standard-gauge Bangor and Piscatquis Railroad (later part of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad) bypassed Monson by six miles. The railroad was built with 30-pound rail in the summer of 1883, reached Monson on 4 September, and opened for business on 22 October.

Initial equipment consisted of two wood-burning locomotives from Hinkley Locomotive Works and two box cars, fourteen flat cars, and a combination from Laconia Car Company. The main line was promptly extended down a five percent grade to the Monson Slate Company approximately one mile beyond the Monson village depot. A car shed for the combination and a two-stall engine house were built near the depot with a passing siding and a turntable. The turntables were a bit small for the locomotives, although they proved useful when a wedge snowplow arrived a few years later. Monson train crews found it much more convenient to run the locomotive in reverse for six miles than to wrestle it around on the turntables.

Early Common Carrier Operations

Four daily round trips were scheduled to meet each of the standard-gauge trains.

The Monson train crew consisted of an engineer, a conductor, and a fireman who doubled as brakeman. The train crew shoveled snow by hand for the first winter, and then fabricated a butterfly pilot plow in 1884. Athens was dropped from the railroad name on 18 February 1885, and the Monson Railroad requested legislative authorization to extend the main line sixteen miles south from Monson Junction for connection with the standard-gauge Sebasticook and Moosehead Railroad (later the Maine Central Railroad Harmony branch.) Legislative approval was granted, but funding was never available for the extension envisioning conversion to standard gauge railroad all the way to Monson. The railroad acquired a wedge snowplow in 1888 to improve reliability of winter service. Both locomotives were converted to burn coal about 1900. A coal transfer shed was built at Monson Junction, and the woodshed at Monson was henceforth used for storage of coal. Portland Slate Company built a new mill on the Monson Main line in 1904, and six new flat cars were built by Laconia Car Company in 1905 to handle loadings from the new shipper. The additional traffic encouraged the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad to build a new freight transfer siding at Monson Junction in 1904.

Monson Slate Company Ownership

Monson Slate Company had been purchasing Monson Railroad stock for several years, and gained control of the railroad in 1908. Conductor Harold Morrill, who had started working for the railroad as fireman in 1884, was promoted to superintendent; but he continued to act as conductor through 1938. Track was extended with 2 miles of 35-pound rail to Eighteen Quarry and Forest Quarry on Monson Pond in the summer and autumn 1909. The Monson combination car carried 11,466 paying passengers in 1912, but superintendent Morrill observed that an automobile garaged in Monson was offering public conveyance and taking approximately 25 paying fares per week from the railroad. Both of the old Hinkley locomotives had serious boiler leaks, cracked cylinders, and/or broken frames since 1905; but they soldiered along until a new Vulcan locomotive arrived on 20 February 1913. Hinkley #2 never ran again, and #1 ran only on the rare occasions Vulcan #3 needed repairs. In 1916, the railroad purchased two used flat cars from Boyd Lumber Company, and built two new spurs on the main line for loading lumber and wood. The railroad also purchased a couple of hand car trailers which could carry broken slate scraps from the quarries for use as ballast along the line. Within a few years, the Monson railroad became the only railroad in Maine with completely rock-ballasted main line.

Arrival of the United States Railroad Administration in 1917 began a series of pointed reminders that Monson Railroad’s oil headlights and link-and-pin couplers no longer met federal safety standards. The railroad kept the link-and-pin couplers for another quarter century of operations; but the oil headlights were removed when damaged by derailments. The locomotives thereafter ran without any headlights. Monson briefly considered a Davenport Locomotive Works 2-6-2 (similar to those being built for United States Army trench railways) before purchasing another Vulcan in 1918. Hinkley locomotive #1 was retired when the second Vulcan locomotive was delivered. Elimination of need for a source of spare Hinkley parts encouraged the innovative shop crew to strip old Hinkley #2 of all exterior fittings and attach a snowplow blade. Although the new snowplow was less likely to ride up on snow drifts, it was more likely to derail; so the old wedge plow remained in service.

Map of Monson Railroad

1928 freight tariff (including transfer charges)

rough quarried slate at per carload

slate roofing at .50 per carload

other slate products at per carload

coal or polishing sand at .88 per carload

cement, hay, potatoes, or petroleum products at per carload

pulpwood at .26 to .60 per cord

birch at .20 per cord

lumber at .76 to per 1000 board feet

explosives at 25 cents per hundred pounds

LCL at ten cents per hundred pounds

Decline of Service

The Monson engine house burned on 3 November 1919. Vulcan locomotives 3 and 4 were damaged, and old Hinkley #1 was considered a total loss. A highway truck handled mail and express shipments for 10 days until engine number 4 was repaired. Engine number 3 returned to service on 20 November, and the engine house was rebuilt in June 1920. Under pressure from the Interstate Commerce Commission, Franklin firebox doors were installed on the locomotives, and an automobile headlight was connected to a six volt storage battery to serve as a headlight. Train service was reduced from four to two round trips per day effective 10 October 1921. The Monson Pond quarry extension was abandoned in 1922. The track crew was laid off in 1933, and the train crew became responsible for right-of-way maintenance and freight transfer at Monson Junction. Locomotive #3 was the only operable engine after 1936. Passengers, mail, and express were carried in a Slate Company highway truck when the locomotive required repairs. Passenger service was discontinued on 1 November 1938.

Monson became the last of Maine’s two-foot gauge railroads in commercial operation when the Bridgton and Saco River Railroad was dismantled in 1941. Infrequent flat car loads of crated slate products moved to Monson Junction until 12 July 1943. On that date Monson Slate Company received permission to use a highway truck for common carrier service. The railroad was dismantled during the winter of 1943-44 and the engine house became a garage for the truck.

Linwood Moody found Monson locomotives #3 and #4 in a Rochester, New York, used equipment yard in 1946. The two steam engines were shipped to the Edaville Railroad for restoration, and are still in operation at the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum in Portland, Maine.

Locomotives

Monson Railroad #3 on loan at Phillips in 2007

Monson Railroad #4 seen at the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum in 2006

Number

Builder

Type

Date

Works number

Notes

1

Hinkley Locomotive Works

0-4-4T

1883

1621

Named H.A.Whiting. Scrapped 1919

2

Hinkley Locomotive Works

0-4-4T

1884

1661

Named G.S.Cushing. Retired 1913, converted to a snowplow in 1918

3

Vulcan Iron Works

0-4-4T

1913

2093

Now based at the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum, currently on loan to the Sandy River and Rangeley Lakes Railroad

4

Vulcan Iron Works

0-4-4T

1918

2780

Now running at the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum

Rolling Stock

Number

Builder

Type

Date

Length

Capacity

1

Laconia Car Company

combination

1883

29 feet

10 passengers

1-2

Laconia Car Company

box cars

1883

26 feet

8 tons

3-16

Laconia Car Company

flat cars

1883

25 feet

8 tons

17-22

Laconia Car Company

flat cars

1905

26 feet

11 tons

23-24

flat cars

1914

28 feet

11 tons

wedge snowplow

1888

24 feet

Notes

Combination car later renumbered #3

Flat cars #3-4 rebuilt into box cars about 1884.

Flat cars #5-8 rebuilt into box cars in 1891. Box car #7 had small windows on one end of the car and one side of the car for use as a work/tool car.

Flat car #9 rebuilt as a snow spreader in 1888.

Flat cars #23-24 purchased from Boyd Harvey Lumber Company in 1916.

^ a b Moody(1959)p.34

^ Moody(1959)p.33

^ Whitney(1989)p.5

^ Jones(1998)p.3

^ Moody(1959)p.37

^ Jones(1998)p.7

^ Whitney(1989)p.10

^ Barney(1986)p.30

^ Jones(1998)p.136

^ Jones(1998)p.20

^ Barney(1986)p.30

^ Jones(1998)p.20

^ Moody(1959)p.36

^ Jones(1998)p.21

^ Whitney(1989)p.10

^ Jones(1998)pp.24-25

^ Jones(1998)p.26

^ Jones(1998)p.29

^ Jones(1998)p.20

^ Jones(1998)pp.31-32

^ Jones(1998)p.35

^ Whitney(1989)p.11

^ Jones(1998)p.37

^ Jones(1998)p.38

^ Whitney(1989)p.11

^ Jones(1998)pp.31-40

^ Jones(1998)p.50

^ Jones(1998)p.37

^ Moody(1959)p.33

^ Jones(1998)p.50

^ Jones(1998)pp.50-53

^ Whitney(1989)pp.36-37

^ Jones(1998)pp.56-57

^ a b c d e f Whitney(1989)p.12

^ Jones(1998)p.69

^ Jones(1998)p.99

^ Jones(1998)p.79

^ Jones(1998)pp.87-88

^ Jones(1998)p.93

^ Jones(1998)p.105

^ Jones(1998)p.9

^ Whitney(1989)p.10

^ Whitney(1989)p.79

^ Barney(1986)p.30

References

Jones, Robert C. (1998). Two Feet to the Quarries: The Monson Railroad. Evergreen Press. ISBN 0-9667264-0-5. 

Barney, Peter S. (1986). The Kennebec Central and Monson Railroads. A&M Publishing. 

Moody, Linwood W. (1959). The Maine Two-Footers. Howell-North. 

Whitney, Roger A. (1989). The Monson Railroad. Robertson Books. 

External links

Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum

Categories: Defunct Maine railroads | Two foot gauge railways | Slate industry | Narrow gauge railroads in the United States

When the sky’s impenetrable misty white and gray quilt, draping the silver Columbia River, had torn apart and revealed an illustrious blue, the daily excursion train from Hood River to Odell, operated by the Mount Hood Railroad, began to accept passengers from its historic depot.

                The Oregon and Washington Railroad and Navigation Company (OWR & NC) Craftsman-style railroad depot itself, constructed in 1911 and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, had replaced the original 1882 Queen Anne-style building and facilitated growth of the town’s thriving fruit, timber, and tourism industries.  The 120-passenger waiting room, considerably larger than most concurrent public facilities, had featured a men’s smoking room and both ladies’ and men’s toilets.  Since 1987, it has served as the Mount Hood Railroad’s headquarters.

                Pulled by the dark red, yellow, and turquoise-painted diesel-electric engine #02, today’s train complement had included open-air car 1056 designated “Lookout Mountain,” snack car 1080, passenger coach 1070 “Katharine,” and caboose 1040.

                An initial jolt, signaling car coupling tension, preceded the almost imperceptible backward glide of the train from the Hood River station, as it inched up the shallowly-inclining track past the dining car rolling stock and over the black, wrought iron Hood River-spanning bridge.  The river, once the location of the Lewis and Clark expedition, appeared a dark green flow of life whose white-exploding rock divisions, characteristic of life’s own necessary path deviations and a person’s protests as a result of them, had been sun-glinted.

                Penetrating denser vegetation, the track paralleled the river whose small rapids metamorphosed the water into turbulent white fury.  The Mt. Hood National Forest formed the density in the distance.

                It is from this forest, in essence, that the Mount Hood Railroad had emanated.  The Lost Lake Lumber Company, whose Columbia and Hood River location had initially provided significant economic and employment contribution to the Hood River community, had begun to decline when log transfer from the forest to the actual sawmill had become increasingly difficult, and an ultimate sale of it seemed the only lucrative exit.  Utah lumberman David Eccles, who had purchased the failing concern, had remedially advocated the construction of a dam, which would have facilitated lumber transport by means of log flotation, but three local businessmen thwarted the effort by quickly obtaining a 99-year lease on the intended site and announced construction of their own 35-foot, power-generating facility.

                Eccles, who had equally used short-line logging railroads to transfer lumber to his other sawmills, circumvented the countermove by relocating the mill 16 miles up river and laying track to connect the two sites by rail.

                Construction of an east side route, which would channel the pending railroad through area fruit orchards, would ensure its viability as both a passenger and freight line, and the 150-strong workforce, living in six, strategically-positioned camps, drove the first stake in April of 1905.  Seven months later, in November, the first locomotive had traveled as far as the Hood River Bridge, and by February of the following year, the Japanese track-laying crew had extended the line as far as Odell, destination of today’s excursion train, 8.5 miles from its origin.  Dee, location of the new sawmill, had been reached one month later, although the eventual 22-mile stretch to Parkdale, gateway to Mt. Hood, had only been opened to the public in 1910.

                The present diesel-electric engine had been the ultimate in design technology to have plied these rails, the first two locomotives having been 37-year-old, Union Pacific-acquired Baldwin Consolidation 2-8-0 units which had been retired in 1916 and 1917, respectively, and had been intermittently replaced by two similarly second-hand powerplants until the first newly-acquired Baldwin 2-8-2 had arrived.

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                Reducing speed and still moving in a backward direction, the Mount Hood train operating the May 2008 run approached the dual-tracked switchback, which would ultimately allow it to pull its meager chain of cars in a forward direction.  One of only five remaining US switchbacks, it had originated as a turntable.  Because the initial steam engines had to trail their steam emissions behind them over their cab boxes and therefore always had to pull their cars in a forward direction, the turntable had facilitated this earlier technology until the 1950 diesel engine replacements had obviated its need.  The original, 13-car switchback had been expanded to encompass 18 cars with the Union Pacific’s 1968 acquisition of the railroad.

                Backing on to the single spur, and clearing the switchback “fork,” engine 02, now poised to commence its climb in a forward, car-pulling direction, reinitiated movement, penetrating the dense lodgepole pine of the Hood River Valley.

                Approaching Highway 35, the train followed the 14-degree-curved track, the line’s sharpest, traversing the wooden railroad trestle and paralleling Whiskey Creek, once the location of applejack production.  Moving in a southerly direction, it ate a considerably steep gradient.

                The concession car, featuring an arched ceiling with periodic light fixtures; old fashioned, wallpaper-adorned wooden sidewalls; brass lamps; and two- and four-seat wooden tables, sported a center snack bar and counter.  My purchased continental breakfast on the 10:00 a.m. run included hot cinnamon rolls dipped in vanilla frosting and cranberry juice.

                During the ten-year period between 1906 and 1916, the current tracks had supported intermodel service when conventional rail cars had been linked to a White-designed rail-bus whose original wheels and tires had been retrofitted with flanged steel units to accept the rails.  After the acquisition of a second, newly purchased sightseeing vehicle, the railroad had operated four daily round-trips between Hood River and Parkdale.  The succeeding, 30-passenger Mack jitney, with an upholstered, Pullman-resembling interior, had provided 13 years of service until its 1935 fire destruction at Summit Station.  Extensive refurbishment ultimately earned it a place on the National Historic Register.

                Threading its way through peach and cherry orchards, the present-day, four-car train moved past carpeted hills whose bases had been woven with brown and green tapestries proudly guarded on either of their sides by tall, dark green needle pine sentinels.

                Periodically piercing the late-morning with its metallic, hair-raising whistle, the vintage train lumbered through the town of Pine Grove, now 5.6 miles from Hood River at a 608-foot elevation, lurching and clanking on its longitudinal axis.  The sky, barely marred by a few cotton puffs, had transformed into an intense blue.

                The smooth, inverted, bowl-shaped Van Horn Butte, beyond Pine Grove, had been one of the small volcanic vents from which lava had flowed to form Mt. Hood, forcing the Columbia River to move to its present more northerly location in the Hood River Valley.  Mt. Hood itself, wearing its silky, glistening white shawl of snow, loomed in front of the locomotive.

Views from the cupola of the caboose, which trailed the three passenger cars, revealed their locomotive-mimicked, spring-loaded reactions, as if they had comprised a long, iron tail, penetrating the sometimes thick pine and orchard vegetation on the single track toward the snow-draped mountain silhouette.  The air, although crystal clear, exuded the aroma of distantly burning firewood.

New Creek, which had been used to power the Hood River Valley’s first sawmill and served in that capacity for a quarter of a century, passed under the track.

Mohr, 6.8 miles from Hood River, had been named after the family which had planted the area’s first orchard.

Pursuing the single track, which presently multiplied into three, the Mount Hood train crept into Lentz Station, which had originally been called “Sherman Spur,” and disconnected its diesel engine.  Moving past the now motionless cars on the side line, it reattached itself behind the caboose.  So configured, it would push the train the final mile to Odell, its destination.

Gently prodded forward, the dark green coaches almost imperceptibly inched over the silver rails horizontally supported by the dry, wooden crossbeams, passing the track switch and reintegrating themselves on the single spur.  Re-establishing speed, the train clanked past the wood-scented lumber yard in the crystal, pine-laced Pacific Northwest air toward the multiply-shaded green tapestry covering the mountains ahead and Odell, the end of today’s run and once almost the end of the line’s track.

When the Diamond Fruit Growers had centralized their operation in Odell, eliminating the Dee-to-Parkdale stretch of track, the Union Pacific Railroad had estimated that it could garner a 0,000 profit in exchange for its smelted steel, a decision consistent with its 1986-1987 strategy of divesting itself of 87 of its feeder line railroads.  But Hood River County saw the move as nothing short of a loss due to the railroad’s inability to continue to make its economic contribution.

A newly created rail company, the Mount Hood Railroad, had been touted as the Union Pacific’s successor and shares were purchased by the fruit and lumber companies lining its route, which had significant stakes in its continued operation.  Bus transfer from Parkdale, its terminus, had equally facilitated passenger travel to Timberline Lodge, a National Historic Landmark, thus enabling the railroad to link two of Oregon’s most major tourist attractions: Mount Hood and the Columbia River Gorge.

The Union Pacific acquisition, however, carried one stipulation with it: the local Hood River Group, eager to retain service at the end of the line from Dee to Parkdale, would either have to buy the entire 22-mile track from Hood River or forfeit the opportunity to retain the railroad’s economic contribution to the valley.

After significant effort, agreement, and capital, the purchase transaction had been consummated on November 2, 1947, and the Mount Hood Railroad, the very concern on which I rode today, had been born.

Rotating its wheels with ever-decreasing power, engine 02 nudged its short, historic passenger coach chain into Odell parallel to the concrete strip serving as its platform at 11:15 a.m., now 8.5 miles from its origin at a 712-foot elevation, and screeched its brakes only yards short of the main road-imbedded track.

Named after William S. Odell, who had settled here in 1861 after traveling from California, the current, single-street town, featuring a small supermarket, church, and gas station, had initially served as a gathering place for Native Americans and had later been used as a Hudson’s Bay Company trail between the Dalles and Ft. Vancouver.

Descending the three steps from coach 1070 to the street-level, I looked back at the short train of open and enclosed cars and cabooses which had transported me from the Columbia River today and somehow knew that the journey had represented its more than a century of geographical journeys and rail line evolutions.  The tracks, having been operated by the Oregon and Washington Railroad and Navigation Company, the Union Pacific Railroad, and the present Mount Hood Railroad, had transported lumber, freight, passengers, and tourists.  The line had been short, but its history had been long.  Like life, it would continue, as long as a purpose had been found for it.  Unlike life, it had been able to determine what that purpose had been.

Walking from the platform toward the tiny town of Odell, above whose surrounding pine tree tops the majestic, snow-covered peak of Mt. Hood triumphantly rose, I disappeared into the train-deposited crowd.

With upwards of 30 shortline operations between North & South Carolina, there is never any shortage of interesting sights to be had for those looking beyond the Class One happenings. Here, from June 2007, you will see personal faves Carolina Southern (CALA), Aberdeen Carolina & Western (ACWR), Lancaster & Chester (LC) & South Carolina Central (SCRF). Highlights include a heavy L&C grain train on Richburg Hill…and the legendary track conditions of the CALA.

I

Morning mist, like a transparent sheath, rose from the green-carpeted Cheat Mountain in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest on that Memorial Day weekend, but the hot sun quickly intercepted it during its gentle ascent, leaving a flawlessly blue sky.

Like a pocket of history, somehow frozen in time, the town of Cass, accessed via curving, mountain-hugging roads and a short, Greenbrier River-traversing bridge, sported its railroad depot, historic buildings, and dual tracks, all cradled by a valley in Back Allegheny Mountain.  The tracks themselves, stretching toward and disappearing into a dense forest, were the very reason for the town and its railroad and also the reason why neither disappeared into history.

Densely covered with virgin forests during the late-19th century, West Virginia ubiquitously sprouted oak, hickory, pine, walnut, and chestnut at its lower elevations and hemlock, spruce, maple, and birch at its higher ones, providing rich lumber resources, with its eight- to nine-foot diameter trees, for the houses, stores, churches, and schools demanded by the state’s increasing population.

Logging, once dependent upon rivers to power sawmills, evolved into a significant industry with the concurrent development of the steam engine and the circular saw, a combination which permitted location anywhere the operation required it, independent of external water power.

Trees were traditionally felled, cut into manageably sized logs, propelled down slopes by means of wooden skids to streams, and transported to mills on log rafts.

Because of the inherent imprecision and danger of the manual skidding method, the Lidgerwood Company of New York designed the first steam-powered skidder, which constituted another logging industry advancement.  First used in West Virginia in 1904, the device, featuring a mile of 1 7/8-inch thick cable which extended up to 2,600 feet, was either mounted directly on the ground or atop a rail-provisioned flat car, gripping the log and transferring it from forest to stream in a secure, controlled manner.  It significantly increased the capability of the horse-drawn method it often replaced.

Water-born logging rafts, as equally imprecise because of rock, boulder, branch, and rapids obstructions during the summer and ice in the winter, were eventually replaced with steam-operated loaders and logging railroads.

Large band saws, substituting for the earlier, circular device, converted timber into lumber more rapidly, precisely, and efficiently, eliminating needless waste, and had an average daily capability of 125,000 board-feet.

By the late-19th century, West Virginia had become one of the country’s largest lumber producers, more than one hundred railroads transporting raw timber to mills for cutting and processing before being shipped for sale as a finished product.  Peaking in 1909, the industry cut some 1,473 million board feet of lumber per year.

One of the most major logging operations had been the West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company.  Founded in 1899 when John G. Luke acquired more than 67,000 acres of red spruce in West Virginia, it was a subsidiary of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company located in Covington, Virginia.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, foreseeing a need for freight and lumber transportation, hastened its own plans to extend its track into northern Pocahontas County, incorporating a subsidiary designated the “Greenbrier Railway Company” in 1897 and commencing roadbed and track construction two years later.  The line reached the area that December.  Threshold to virgin forests, it was uniquely positioned to carry timber to the Covington sawmill and also to connect with the Coal and Iron Railway, which itself was later amalgamated into the Western Maryland Railway.

Although it provided a vital link, it did not penetrate the mountain-clinging forests themselves, nor did it possess the proper locomotive equipment to do so.  Logging railroad track, by necessity, exhibited several unique characteristics.  Mountain forests usually dictated both sharp curves, which could equal 35 degrees, and steep grades, which required switchbacks to surmount, while track needed to be portable, moved after each area was cut and depleted.  Resultantly, it was usually built up of short, skinned logs directly laid on the bare earth, without the benefit of prepared roadbeds, and the rails themselves were then spiked to them.  Rail weight, ranging between 50 and 75 pounds per yard, was more than sufficient.

Although these temporary, impromptu tracks fulfilled the immediate need before being moved to the next location, they were ill-suited to conventional, rod-type locomotives with their rigid frames and fixed driving axles.  Often falling victim to imperfections, they slipped and frequently derailed.  What was needed was an engine with numerous, small drive wheels, ideally ranging between eight and 16, which could deliver low-speed traction, continuous contact, positive power, and effective braking, yet exhibit considerable flexibility.

Ephraim Shay, a Michigan logger who was well acquainted with such obstacles, designed the first articulated locomotive for logging purposes in 1874.  Its driving force was subdivided into the cylinders-connecting rods and the driving wheels mounted on pivoting trucks, the side-mounted cylinders themselves counterbalanced by an offset boiler, while the tender truck’s own driving axles both contributed to this force and added to the locomotive’s adhesion weight.  The geared steam engine, replacing the conventional locomotive’s rod-driving propulsion system, was equally easy to maintain and repair with its entirely exposed parts.

The first such Shay, patented and constructed by the Lima Machine Works of Lima, Ohio, in 1880, featured slide vales, a vertical boiler, and eight drivers.

Later, progressively larger examples sported three right-side mounted vertical cylinders counterbalanced by a left side boiler, which itself provided clearance for the cylinders, and a small water tender-connected coal bunker located immediately behind the cab.  Since the engine was seldom far from either a coal or water supply, its relatively small capacity proved sufficient.

Cylinder pistons, by means of bevel gears, enabled each truck to independently negotiate the rail’s imperfections and their small, 36-inch drive wheels provided the needed adhesion and traction.  Yet, since all wheels were interconnected either by line shafts or axles, single-wheel slippages were impossible.

The Shay locomotive, enjoying a 2,771-production run between 1880 and 1945, proved to be the most ideally-suited and numerically most popular powerplant for logging operations, whether specifically in West Virginia, where more than 400 were employed, or elsewhere.  It also had limited application for steep-grade, heavy-load lines and industrial switching.

The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company’s first locomotive was a two-truck, 42-ton Shay.

The first pulpwood shipment to the Covington, Virginia, paper mill, hauled by the Greenbrier Railway Company, was made on January 28, 1901, but what was needed for more immediate processing and independent operation was a strategically located sawmill.  This became operational the following year.

In order to support the massive workforce required for a rapidly expanding logging enterprise, a company town, designated “Cass” after West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company Vice President Joseph P. Cass, arose from a small farming community and wagon road river crossing previously called “Leatherbark Ford.”

Carefully planned and revolving round the sawmill itself, the incorporated town, with an official major and council, was located on one side of the Greenbrier River and boasted of a 2,000-strong population, sustained by houses, schools, stores, offices, churches, and civic and social organizations.  It quickly blossomed into one of West Virginia’s largest boom towns.

Its three-story Pocahontas Supply Company store, constructed in 1902 and partially rebuilt 16 years later after fire had consumed its upper floor, sold everything from food to appliances to furniture and was the nucleus of the town.  It had also served as the site of the US Post Office and the lumber company’s offices.

The smaller shop next to it housed Nethkin’s Meat Market.

Residents used wooden boardwalks to negotiate the area by foot.

Contrasted with the brothels and hotels located on the town’s east side, which was alternatively dubbed “East Cass” or “Dirty Street,” the dual-structure comprising the Cass Hotel was frequented by businessmen, workers in good standing, and respected visitors.

The elite, in general, lived in the town’s Big Bug Hill section.

The mayor’s office, replacing a temporarily employed boxcar for incarcerations, ironically housed the more permanent jail on its first floor and the mayoral headquarters on its second.

Between 1901 and 1920, the railroad had constituted Cass’s only access.

Propelled by its small Shay locomotive, the West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company commenced logging railroad operations in January of 1901, pulling red spruce-piled flat cars over an initial eight miles of off-line track in order to supply the Covington paper mill with pulpwood until Cass’s own mill had been completed the following year.  By 1908, the operation had sustained dramatic growth, with logging trains running both day and night, supported by 200 draft horses and 1,000 men and supplying the mill with hemlock and spruce bark.  Forty-four daily cars hauled raw material and finished products from Cass.

After subsidiary West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company had been acquired by and amalgamated into parent Pulp and Paper, and the operation had entered its second life phase, the railroad had been rechartered as the Greenbrier, Cheat, and Elk, opening a main line into the Elk River Watershed in order to log a 2,000-foot-long by 100-foot-deep area designated the “Big Cut,” then the largest and most costly engineering project ever undertaken by an eastern logging company.  Comprised of 82 miles of main and 40 additional miles of spur line track at its peak, it enjoyed 21 years of common-carrier operations.

A typical logging operation entailed cutting the designated trees, skidding them down the slope to the tracks, and loading them, as log limbs, on to the flatbed cars, cradled between vertical, side-forming and –mounted wooden stakes, which formed pockets.  After being transported to the mill, they were unloaded in to the mill pond, at which time pike-provisioned men channeled them on to jack slips—inclined, cleated, conveyor belt-like chains—for travel into the actual mill’s sawing room.  The finished product, assuming the form of cut board, was then dried and reloaded on to standard-gauge trains pulled by traditional rod locomotives for distribution to the company or lumber yard which had ordered them.

The mill, equipped with 11 miles of steam pipes, cut more than 125,000 board feet of lumber per shift and dried 360,000 per run, there having been two 11-hour shifts per day, scheduled six days per week, resulting in 1.5 million board feet per week and 35 million per year.

The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, having grown into one of West Virginia’s largest logging enterprises, was continually subjected to expansion, as evidenced by its statistics: the Greenbrier, Cheat, and Elk Railroad had operated over 66 miles of track by 1917 and over 101 miles four years later, when the workforce had exceeded 1,500.

But, by the time World War II had raged, the forests surrounding Cass had been depleted, despite still-prevalent hardwood and second-growth trees below Bald Knob.  The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, unable to justify the economic viability of extending its track into the timber span, sold the operation to F. Edwin Mower, head of the Charleston-based Mower Lumber Company.  Demand for southern yellow pine, traditionally used for paper production, had already precipitated a decline and 68,000 acres had been sold to the US Forest Service in 1936.  The remainder had been acquired by Mower.  The West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company thus entered the third phase of its life, albeit under a new name.

Laying 12 miles of short branch track off the Cabin Fork Line to Bald Knob, the Mower Lumber Company was able to continue harnessing the precious wood resource.  But with only 65,000 acres remaining by 1960, a handful of still-unharvested hardwood patches, and deteriorating rolling stock and machinery, it only operated three weekly trains pulled by an equal number of Shay locomotives, and finally ceased operations on June 30 of that year.  Victim, like most of the other logging railroad enterprises to forest depletion and new, automated mill processing methods, it retreated into the history books, leaving less than half-a-dozen concerns in West Virginia.  Its track, mills, machinery, engines, and cars almost went with it.

The Midwest Raleigh Steel Corporation, to which the operation’s components had been sold, began dismantling its track, with the intention of having it completely removed before the onset of winter, while the locomotives, rolling stock, and logging equipment would be junked.  Walworth Farms, a landholding company, acquired its wooded property.

Russel C. Baum, a Pennsylvania rail fan who coincidentally spent a three-day vacation in Marlinton, West Virginia, during this time, witnessed the painstaking dismemberment process, but immediately foresaw the historical and tourist value of the railroad.

Commencing a campaign to save it and pleading his case in Charleston’s Capitol Building, he was able to obtain a temporary injunction which dictated suspension of the dismantling process, and a committee, formed for the purpose of investigating its tourism potential, ultimately recommended that the state acquire its roadbed, rolling stock, and 40 acres on Back Allegheny Mountain for 0,000.  It would then be operated by the Department of Natural Resources.  On June 15, 1963, the operation entered its fourth life phase when the Cass Scenic Railroad was born.

Pulled by Shay locomotive #4, the first passenger-carrying excursion train left Cass and the railroad carried 23,106 during its first year of operations.  That number has increased every year since.  Restoring the line to fully operational status, it opened the second portion, to Bald Knob, on May 25, 1968, to the excursion train, its tracks having now carried both logs and passengers.

On the same date, Cass Scenic Railroad State Park, which includes almost 100 buildings in the town itself, was added to the National Register of Historic Places, and today, as a unit of the West Virginia Park System, is the site of the nation’s longest-running tourist railway, the geared steam locomotive, the mill town, the locomotive repair shop, the Cass Company store, the Last Run Restaurant, and the Shay Railroad Shop.

The Cass Mill, having been owned by the West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company between 1902 and 1910, the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company between 1910 and 1942, and the Mower Lumber Company between 1942 and 1960, had been comprised of the drying kilns, the boiler house, the powerhouse, the sawmill itself, the millpond, and the storage area for finished lumber, all located between the tracks and the Greenbrier River.  Reconstruction occurred from 1922 to 1923 because of fire, the reason for its final demise during the 1980s.

II

Belching thick, black smoke from its stack and clanging its bell, Shay locomotive #6 pulled its still-empty cars to the Cass depot on the left of the two main tracks 30 minutes before its 1100 departure to Bald Knob on that late-May morning, a four-and-a-half hour, 22-mile round trip journey.

The cars themselves consisted of six wooden, converted logging cars with paneless windows, a roof, and side-facing bench seats, painted green with red window trim, and a single wooden, enclosed coach with forward- and aft-facing, booth-like seats, designated “Leatherbark Creek.”

The depot next to which they stood, constructed here in 1901 to serve the just-completed Greenbrier Division of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, was modified in 1923 to accommodate an increasing volume of freight and passengers, but the present wooden, white-painted structure was rebuilt in 1979, four years after fire had claimed the original one.

The 162-ton, Class C-150 Shay locomotive #6, originally constructed for the Western Maryland Railway and the largest of its type, had been shipped to Elkins, West Virginia, on May 14, 1945 for service on the nine-percent graded Chaffee Branch.  The three-truck engine, with 48-inch drivers, a 17-inch bore, and an 18-inch stroke, was then donated to the Baltimore and Ohio Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, after four years, and was subsequently exchanged for a Cass Scenic Railroad Porter 0-4-0 after another 26.  Other locomotives in its inventory include the 93-ton Shay #2, the 80-ton Shay #4, the 90-ton Shay #5, and the 103-ton Shay #11.  A 70-ton Shay #9 and 100-ton Heisler #6, although not currently operational, round out the fleet.

Emitting an ear-shattering whistle and releasing a volcanic eruption of billowing, blinding black smoke, the Shay #6, assuming a pusher-configuration, bit into the rails and prodded its cars into abrupt motion, steam pressure pulsing its pistons which then rotated its crankshaft, and this, in turn, rotated the all-driver wheels through reduction gear.  Plying the tracks acquired by the state park in 1978 after the Chesapeake and Ohio’s Greenbrier Division had operated its last freight service on them, the train moved past the water tank, which had been shared with the C&O, but is presently a replica which had been installed in 2005.  It also marked the spot, at the junction switch, where the logging railroad actually began.

The deadline, cradling several locomotives, was the service area for coaling, sanding, and repairing.

Crossing Back Mountain Road, the train trundled near the original, 1901 track, which had been on a cribbing through the wet bottomland of Leatherbark Creek, and the bridges which had traversed it had been little more than wood stringers until they had been replaced by steel structures in 1959.  West Virginia’s highest stream, the creek itself flowed from a point below Bald Knob.

Rumbling and vibrating with every track joint traverse, the chain of cars commenced a four-percent graded ascent through a cool, almost sun-obstructing forest of tall spruce, hemlock, white pine, and red spruce trees, the raw timber which constituted the very reason for the railroad’s creation.  Most had now been third-cut vegetation, with the patches receiving the most sunlight having been the first to regrow.

In order to avoid an excessive amount of circumventing track and gain the maximum amount of elevation in the minimum amount of distance, the logging railroad installed two switchbacks, the lower of which was reached at mile 2.3.  Ceasing motion beyond the actual v-configured rails before releasing a soot-reeking geyser from its stack and assaulting the forest’s solitude with a billowing stream of coal cinders, the Shay locomotive, puffing and panting, lurched its cars in a pulling mode, filling its lungs with every chugging breath as the crankshaft provided the vital connection between the vertical pistons and the rotating wheels.  Settling into a rhythmic, albeit explosive, forest-echoing chug, the mass re-established motion.

Initiating a 22-degree curve on a 3.65-percent grade, the Bald Knob run arced into the 158-degree circle characterizing Gum Curve at mile 2.6.  The sun-illuminated clearing, comprised of rolling, velvet-green pastures, revealed the equally green waves of the highlands off the left side.

At mile 3.1, the train’s seven cars, bombarded with lung-choking steam and smoke, moved past Limestone Cut, the track’s roadbed having been created after limestone rock itself had been hand-cut with the aid of picks, shovels, black powder, and horse-drawn pans.

Once again immersed in dense, dark forest, the railroad maneuvered through an arrest-reinitiated motion sequence as it spewed black plumes to the towering treetops and negotiated the upper switchback, the locomotive assuming its pusher-configuration.

Mountains, varying in color with distance, seemed to roll and crest, like ocean waves, dividing the line between Virginia and West Virginia.  Those closest to the train appeared green while those furthest from it appeared dark-blue to gray.

Commencing a 0.2-mile, s-curve at a 7.1-percent grade, the train crossed the access road to Whittaker and surmounted a plateau, a sanctuary-exuding meadow in the middle of a steep forest flanked on either side by densely treed mountains.  Having climbed from 2,452 feet at Cass to a current 3,250 at Whittaker Station, the Shay engine breathed a sigh and suspended its journey at 1145.

Aside from the views of Cheat Mountain and the snackbar facilities, the station itself afforded the opportunity to experience the Mountain State Railroad and Logging Association’s reconstructed logger’s camp.

Originally the site of a Hungarian railroad laborer’s camp during the turn-of-the-century, the present reconstruction, depicting a later set-up from about 1946, featured three tracks on which railroad cars, equipment, and miners shanties were positioned, the latter built using measurements from actual structures near Bald Knob.

Although such camps were usually isolated, spartan, and offered little more than a suspension between work shifts to facilitate washing, eating, and sleeping until the person could return to the main logging town, such as Cass, they were an integral part of West Virginia railroad logging from the late-1800s to 1960.  Because the activity had constituted the predominant growth industry during this period, and because timber companies needed significant numbers of immigrant workers to meet their operational requirements, they usually contracted large city-located labor agents to screen and hire them.  Typically, they encompassed people from Italy, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Poland.  The camps, crude and crowded, employed kerosene lamps for light and coal or wood for heat.  Food, in copious quantities, was vital to worker productivity.

The Whittaker camp’s four-wheel logging caboose, constructed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1883, was usually attached at the end of logging trains and accommodated by brakemen and management-level personnel so that they could inspect remote sites.  Later employed in Swandale, Clay County, it was finally acquired by the Cass Scenic Railroad.

The camp’s several shanties, which utilized less-than-premium lumber and were transported from area to area after it had been depleted of trees, exemplified the structure’s size and internal facilities relative to position importance.  The wood shanty was tiny.  The filer’s shanty contained a larger window to provide maximum light for saw sharpening.  And the desk-provisioned surveyor/cruiser shanty was housed by the men who determined which timber should be cut and how it should be removed from the mountain.

The kitchen and dining car, sporting a long,, bench-lined, internal table for eating, and the abundant portions served on it, were tantamount to sustaining logging operations, since the human bodies were the primary “machines” involved in the operational chain, over and above the mechanical ones, and therefore had to be properly “fueled.”  There had been little else to which loggers would look forward during their nocturnal downtimes.

Sleeping in spartan surroundings, as evidenced by the lobby/bunk car, was the standard until the worker could return to home and family in the company town.  A stove provided warmth and a method by which wet clothes could be dried throughout the night.

The diesel-powered log loader, usually riding car-fastened rails and thus capable of both independent and collective movement with the remainder of the train, facilitated log transfer from ground to rolling stock.  The camp’s example was capable of handling tree-length specimens.

The steam-driven Lidgerwood log skidder, operated by a three-man crew and built by the Meadow River Lumber Company in 1944, had been employed for some two decades, and facilitated log delivery from the cutting source to the actual railroad by means of an aerial cable.

Snoozing during its 15-minute interlude, the black Shay locomotive exhaled white streams of breath through its vertical piston nostrils, the high-pressure steam discharged from the cylinders itself eradicating its piston chambers of condensation.  The restful state, however, was soon shattered by its subsequently released, atmosphere-piercing whistle, its sound waves reverberating off of the surrounding slopes and beckoning the passengers back to the cars for the continuing journey.

Re-boring its way through the deep, dense wood forest, whose foliage slowly moved by like a green mosaic within an arm’s length of the windowless coaches, the train trundled over the culvert at Whittaker Run, the sharper curve of the old grade visible on the track’s low side.

Clinging to Leatherbark Gorge, the rails briefly threaded their way through Austin Meadows, on whose slope farm fields once grew, and thence over Gobbler’s Knob.

A skidder set, located on a 225-foot siding on the uphill side of the train at mile 5.4, had occupied the site between 1940 and 1941, its 3,000-foot cable transferring logs at a 500-foot height over the creek from the far mountainside.

Climbing a 5.4- to six-percent grade at mile 6.0, the string of cars passed an overlook whose view took in Leatherbark Creek Valley, located below the lower switchback and from which smoke, created by the 1200 Whittaker train, now rose.  At the present elevation, spruce trees had become ubiquitous.

The logging spur leading to Camp 5, which had been hollowed in 1911, moved off the side at mile 6.2.

The tracks, forking a half-mile further into the journey, led to Old Spruce on the left and Bald Knob on the right, the former following the main line which connected with tracks destined for the Cheat and Elk River drainages at the abandoned mill town of Spruce.  Located at a 3,940-foot elevation on the Shavers Fork of the Cheat River, the bark-peeling pulpwood mill- and railroad shop-equipped town was considered the “highest and coldest…in the east.”

Arcing to the right of the two, the train entered the logging spur, and the last to have been laid by the Mower Lumber Company, so that it could access the highest-elevation timber.  It served as the threshold to Bald Knob.

Operations, ceasing in 1960, never permitted use of the railroad grade located on the high side and destined for the head of Leatherbark Creek.

Arresting its travel on the eight-percent graded track at the Oats Creek water tank, the engine was intravenously-fed 4,000 gallons of the life-providing liquid by means of a steam-driven siphon and portable hose extending from an old mill boiler which continually collected creek water run-off.  The 6,000-gallon tank, located directly over the engine’s driver wheels, ensured both increased traction and greater rail adhesion.

Somehow emulating a polluting factory, the Shay locomotive once again released a black, vertical plume as it propelled the train over the seven-percent grade of Johnson Run, at mile 8.2, past the Snowshoe ski resort overlook, now entrenched in third-cut hemlock, ash, white pine, and red spruce tree sentinels.

The wye, at mile 9.1, had led to a one-mile-long spur off to the left which had been equipped with five skidder sets and a camp train between 1950 and 1951, but had since been reduced to a fraction of this length.

Clanking, lurching, swaying, and screaming with protests at every turn, and releasing its own periodic explosion of steam, the train moved round the Big Run watershed, at a 1.5-percent downgrade, the track having been laid from Shavers Fork in 1910 when skidding had still been accomplished by means of horse power.

Moving through the ten-mile marker, it traversed the logging road crossing, initiating its final, mile-long approach to the mountain’s summit on a nine-percent grade.  A small clearing indicated imminent arrival.

Passing the left-arcing logging railroad grade, the train ceased motion for a final time at mile 11.0 in the cooler, more rarefied air at 4,750-foot Bald Knob, the highest point reached east of the Rocky Mountains by a non-cog railroad and the third-highest in the state of West Virginia.

The billous black, 162-ton Shay locomotive, having voraciously consumed mini-mountains of coal and unquenchably gulped water by the thousand gallons, instantaneously ceased its persistent chug, belch, hiss, screech, clang, and shrill at 1320, leaving silence—and the breathtaking view of the gentle, dark green, blue, and gray, wave-resembling ridges rolling into one another almost 5,000 feet above the surface from the eastern edge of the Allegheny Highland, as viewed from the scenic overlook platform. 

Eleven miles ahead lay the mountains marking the Virginia border, but only a few yards behind, cradled by the terminating track, was the Shay #6 locomotive, its coal tender, and its seven vacant cars.  Its forest- and five sense-assaulting technology, although now crude and primitive, had been instrumental in West Virginia logging railroad history, once removing the raw, vitally-needed timber to build the country’s towns and sustain their people, but today returned them to the mountain forest where they could witness its feats.

Enticed back to the train 40 minutes later for the 11-mile journey back to Cass, the passengers, numbering in the hundreds, owed it a silent salute.

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