Owens: Railroad nostalgia
Railroads provided the steel thread that stitched a continent together during the 19th and 20th centuries, and the Southern Railroad shops at Spencer, N.C., were among the sewing machines that kept the trains on track.
I wallowed in nostalgia last weekend when I joined more than 3,000 folks in Spencer for “Rail Days” at the North Carolina Transportation Museum.
The museum is on the site of the Southern Railroad’s shops, which bristled with activity back when steam engines instead of jet engines were the prime movers of domestic passengers. It was here that the chuffing, hissing behemoths came for their frequently needed repairs and maintenance. When the growling diesels began rolling down the tracks, they nudged steam engines and the Spencer shops into history. The North Carolina Transportation Museum became the happy heir to the facilities.
Spencer, a little town on the outskirts of Salisbury, some 40 miles northeast of Charlotte, was the ultimate destination of Steve Brodie when he made his tragic ride on Old 97, giving his life in exchange for an enduring ballad.
Nobody wrote a song about W.L. Mowery’s train ride in 1945, but it remains a vivid memory. The World War II veteran rode the railroad triumphantly across a continent after serving with the U.S. Navy in the New Hebrides—the South Pacific island group that became the Republic of Vanuatu in 1980.
When his ship reached San Diego after the Japanese surrender, a troop train was waiting to convey him back to North Carolina. He was at the transportation museum Saturday, adding splashes of conversational color to anyone who would stop and chat with him.
Mowery’s transcontinental ride is a reminder of the role railroads have played in military history since the War Between the States. In that war, railroads were used by both sides for the rapid deployment of troops. The Confederate submarine Hunley was moved by rail from Mobile to Charleston, where it made its historic attack on the USS Housatonic, a Yankee sloop of war. Both sides also used them to convey the wounded to hospitals. During World War I, the U.S. Army developed specialized hospital cars. The museum allows you to walk through a World War II hospital car that contains 36 bunks and a kitchen.
Troop trains chuffed through many a war movie as young men waved to their sweethearts through coach windows. I remember as a child the song kids sang as they danced in a circle: “The Charleston Train came rolling in, goodbye my lover goodbye; all loaded down with soldier men, goodbye my lover goodbye.”
The museum grounds were well populated with railroad lovers. I made my way down the line of chili stands, sampling the offerings of the chili cook-off, then topped off my lunch with a hot dog under a shady pavilion. Oscar and Nada Jade Hill of Asheboro, N.C., spotted my notepad and figured I was a reporter, so they began telling me about their son’s caboose.
Virgil Hill, I learned, bought a caboose after the railroads lopped that colorful little car off the ends of their trains. He moved into it until he was ready to build a home. Then he removed the wheels, hoisted it onto a flatbed, and had it towed up the hill to his building site. There he replaced the wheels, installed some tracks, and built a large house around it. The caboose became a part of his home — in effect, a self-contained apartment.
Not as opulent and ornate as the Loretto, a private car built in 1902 for Charles Schwab, who engineered the merger of J. P. Morgan and the Carnegie Company into U.S. Steel. The car is now under restoration at the transportation museum, and director Walter Turner gave me and my daughter, Angie, a personal tour of it.
I also met Owney, a stuffed dog aboard a mail coach, who represents a real mutt who made himself at home on the 19th century railroads. Owney wandered into the post office in Albany, N.Y., back in 1888 and fell asleep on a pile of mailbags. The postal workers let him rest, and he made a habit of curling up on the bags. Then he began to follow the bags into the rail cars and ride with them wherever the train took him. Postal workers across the land began looking after him and fastening tags onto his collar to signify where he had been. Eventually, he followed the bags onto steamships and became a world traveler. He was considered a good-luck charm because no train he rode was ever in a wreck. Too bad he wasn’t with Steve Brodie on Old 97.
The transportation museum also features antique cars, a steam tractor, and a vintage DC-3 Piedmont Airlines passenger plane now being restored. The DC-3 was eventually replaced by other prop-driven planes, and then by the fanjet. Piedmont offers another trip into nostalgia, but the railroad dominates the atmosphere in Spencer.
As Gordon Lightfoot wrote in the ballad, “In the Early Morning Rain”: “You can’t hop a jet plane like you can a freight train.”
There was no early morning rain in Spencer. Just a day full of sunshine and memories of steam engines pulling a nation into its future.
Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson, SC 29625 or email him at [email protected] .
