Me experiencing the delight of the Christmas Train Garden (ca. 1945)
My little boy’s patience has worn thin. It may still be dark outside, but my mind can’t be contained. What did Santa leave? How did he do the Christmas Garden? I’ve got to know! With popping eyes, I run into the living room. My parents, sleepy eyed, saying, “Only the Christmas Stocking, Frank!” “Okay,” I reply. I have to go right by the Christmas Garden to get my Christmas Stocking. How could I not stop and look? A couple of new houses, a RAILROAD GATE (!!) with lights that flash! The stocking is emptied on the rug, its gifts rummaged through. I hear the train whistle (my dad has quietly entered the room and plugged in the transformer) the train is arriving at the depot. “Let me! Please!” I plead.
In the second half of the 1960s, I made a number of trips up the New York Central’s Harlem Division to Chatham, New York. Chatham was at the northern end (western end by timetable) of the Harlem Division, where the Harlem met the main line of the Boston & Albany Railroad. It was well over a hundred miles north of home, so these trips were adventures for a kid in his early teens.
As railfans, we all have that one place we love to go. Whether it’s to shoot trains or to just escape from the day-to-day hustle and bustle of the world, we all have a place that helps us or soothes us in some form or fashion. For me, that place is the diamond in my hometown of Meridian Mississippi. The diamond isn’t just a place for me to shoot trains, but it was always a place for me to go when I needed to clear my head and just relax. It’s my sanctuary, if you will.
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!
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
