I first met George Hiotis in October of 1994 on the station platform at Val-Royal, a suburban neighborhood northwest of the center of Montreal. He and I had separately and independently decided to travel there to see for ourselves the electrification on the former Canadian National Deux-Montagnes commuter line. Four of the boxcab locomotives that we photographed dated back to 1917, built by General Electric; another handful had a foreign pedigree, constructed by English Electric in 1924; and the “modern” three steeplecabs, also GEs, came out of the Erie plant in 1950. On top of the ancient equipment, Val-Royal remained one of the last places in North America where a station agent hooped up orders to every inbound train. It felt like a trip in a time machine.
New Haven express nearing Stamford. Photo Fielding Lewis Bowman
How did you discover trains? I was four, and my grandpa “Pop” enjoyed taking me for walks. Pop’s house in New Rochelle, New York was a walk from a bridge over the New Haven Railroad’s four track electrified main line. Once there, I peered through the fence, intently watching for a headlight in the distance. I was soon able to identify a “local” on the outside track and an express. We went to the bridge as often as I could convince Pop of the need to go, and never left until we saw at least one New Haven train.
In the mid-1960s, the Stockton Terminal & Eastern RR was a small terminal operation in the city of Stockton, California. It snaked in and around packing houses, warehouses and industries. Its new owners had big plans, but they lay in the future.
I spent a day with the crew doing photographs. The day was raw and overcast, threatening rain. It seemed like we had moved a bazillion cars. One more pull, one more shove, and we were done. Quitting time!
Being part of a railway museum (and in charge of the collections/archives) a person comes across some interesting donations, such as this series of photos from retired Canadian Pacific Railway engineer Nick Korchinski from Lethbridge, Alberta.
Crossing the High-Level Viaduct heading east
The donation is photos from his trip taking empty grain hoppers to the last grain elevator holdout on the CPR Stirling subdivision at Orion, Alberta, on a warm fall day in September 1998. Nick takes photos from the cab of a worn GP38-2 as they head south from Lethbridge onto the 85-pound territory of the Stirling subdivision, passing vintage wooden grain elevators, several of which fall from memory within years of his trip.
Background
A little bit of the history of the railway line. The Stirling subdivision originally ran between Lethbridge, Alberta and Manyberries, Alberta. The subdivision was named after the junction point “Stirling”, where the west running Cardston subdivision and south running Coutts subdivision met. Stirling is named after J. A. Stirling, an executive in a company in England that helped finance the Alberta Railway & Coal Company in their expansion southward from Lethbridge toward Great Falls, Montana, in the 1890s. Years later the Stirling subdivision was reorganized to start at Stirling and head east, and the Coutts (now Montana) subdivision was extended to start at Lethbridge and head south towards the US border.
Earlier this week, I received a brief note from our traveling correspondent, Andrew Morang. He is in Austria, and sent a couple of pictures of a local commuter train.
He writes: ” This is the regional train between Kufstein, Austria, and Munich, Germany. The train is operated by Meridian, but I do not know if that is an independent company or part of the Deutsche Bahn system. The rail cars are immaculately clean, quiet, and electrically operated. “
Once, routine was a fact of life on the railroad. Whether by timetable, by train-order or simply by custom, everyone had a general idea of what to expect at any given time of the day or night. So too in Bonsack, Virginia, not ten miles from Roanoke, where a heavy steam-powered coal train will go into the Blue Ridge mountains this evening before nightfall. And even as the station agent is shutting up shop and the sound of crickets fills the air, there is a distant thunder of two articulated steam locomotives beginning their nightly climb away from the Roanoke Valley.
There is certainly history in this place, settled as it was after the Revolutionary War in 1783, and what’s more, its original station was burned to the ground by Union troops in 1864. But at least as important as recorded history is how entwined the Norfolk & Western Railway was with the people and the landscape along its tracks in the middle of the last century.
When I think back sixty-one years to these late-evening scenes, I’m reminded of a time when an emotional connection with the landscape—and by extension, with the railroad that ran through it—seemed fixed and enduring. It’s a feeling never better expressed than in the haunting last bars of Aaron Copland’s musical tone-poem, Appalachian Spring.
Indeed, in the darkening minutes it has taken for this long train to pass, Bonsack and its modest station have been changed into such an elegiac nightfall as Copland created in his music. Silenced crickets have welled up again from the deep shadows, and the sound of the receding train has become the ageless immensity of the Blue Ridge.
History is one thing, and continuity another. In 1958 both were there for the taking in rural Bonsack. If only for the time being.
Robert Field – Text and photographs Copyright 2019
