Hank, I Can't Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow

Although I was born in the California desert (Boron, CA - look it up), my earliest memories are of steam locomotives struggling up the hill between Carnegie and Crafton, Pennsylvania where we lived after leaving the West Coast. The sound of the steam whistle and the staccato exhaust were foreign and frightening to me, especially at three o'clock in the morning. The railroad behind our house was a great mystery, a place of strange noises made by strange beasts at all hours of the day and night.

We lived on the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Panhandle Division between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, so named because it transected the panhandle region of West Virginia. Interestingly enough, that line had many commuter trains until the late 1940s. Most people rode the train to and from the outlying towns and the city. Conrail abandoned the Panhandle main line in the mid-80's. Now the local government is converting it to a private right-of-way for buses. I find it ironic that the bus, which effectively put an end to rail-based commuter service (commuter trains and streetcars) in Pittsburgh, will now use the old railroad and streetcar right-of-ways to avoid the congestion on the streets.

My initial fright over the railroad in our backyard ended when our next door neighbor, George Llewellyn, who worked for the Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railroad at the Rook roundhouse not far from us, explained to me all about steam engines and why they made so much noise. Soon, I began looking forward to hearing them, knowing that some kindly engineer or fireman was in the cab, someone who would smile and wave back at me. The steam whistle echoing up the valley became my security blanket, a sign that everything was right in the world, and that even in the dead of night, in pouring rain or blowing snow, there was a friendly soul out there. And I became a railfan.

Since those first formative years, we always lived near railroads. There were trains wherever we journeyed. They were near my relative's houses, they were near my schools, we rode next to, under, or over them on our Sunday drives. I didn't even notice when the railroads stopped using steam engines and switched to diesels. It was still a train, and the engineers still waved at you. Besides, diesels were more mysterious. There were no secrets on steam engines, everything that made the engine go was there in plain sight. But diesels were different. You couldn't see the things that made them run. The engines were concealed under car bodies and the traction motors were hidden between the wheels, even the engineer's cab was completely enclosed.

Today, I live near a city that was created by the railroads. In 1837, the state of Georgia chartered the Western & Atlantic Railroad (which still exists and is still owned by the state) to operate between the Chattahoochee and Tennessee rivers. The northern terminus was Ross' Landing, which later became known as Chattanooga. The southern terminus was defined as "some point not exceeding eight miles" from the southeastern bank of the Hooch, as we Atlantans refer to it. Surveyor Stephen Long marked the southern terminus when he drove a stake into the ground in the Georgia wilderness and pronounced the site a good place for "a tavern, a blacksmith's shop, a general store and nothing else." The southern end of the W&A became known as Terminus, but in 1843 it was renamed Marthasville in honor of the governor's daughter. In 1845, J. Edgar Thompson, the chief engineer for the Georgia Railroad and later the Pennsylvania Railroad, who built the famous Horseshoe Curve, named the town Atlanta.

Atlanta thrived as a railroad town until the Great War of Northern Aggression when General William Tecumseh Sherman did a bit of urban renewal in the city. After the retreating Confederates blew up 81 box cars full of explosives and created the fire made famous in Gone with the Wind, Sherman and his Bluecoats piled up every railroad car, wagon, and anything they couldn't take with them in Union Depot and burned it. Atlanta became a wasteland, but it rose phoenix-like from the ashes. Five years later, Henry Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, said, "I want to say to General Sherman, who is considered an able man in all parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man with fire, that from the ashes he left us in 1864, we have raised a brave and beautiful city."

I can't even hear a train whistle from my current home. And my daily commute doesn't take me anywhere near a railroad. If it weren't for my weekly "fixes" up on the old Blue Ridge Scenic Railway every weekend, I'd be going cold turkey. I miss the sound of a locomotive horn in the night. I need that feeling of security I used to have when we lived near the railroad. The sound of SUVs, Mercedes, and Volvos pulling away from the stop sign in front of my house (when they don't run it) just doesn't do it for me. I need to move closer to the railroad. I need that security.

This past weekend, Alice and I spent seven hours riding behind a steam locomotive on the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad. We went from Dillsboro to Andrews, NC on the former Southern Railroad Murphy Branch. The Murphy Branch once connected to the Blue Ridge Scenic track at a placed aptly called Murphy Junction. They've torn up the rails and torn down the bridges between Murphy Junction and Murphy, or we could have connected the BRS to the GSMR and offered a tourist trip unparalleled in the eastern U.S. But our trip up the Nantahala River Gorge was still impressive, in spite of the wall-to-wall rafters and kayakers on the river. Listening to and watching that old 2-8-0 Consolidation struggling up the 6 percent grade to Topton brought back many childhood memories and, yes, a feeling of security.

Bob Ciminel is a free-lance writer living in the Atlanta area. Bob is originally from Pittsburgh, but married a southern belle and has lived in the South for the past twenty years. Bob's e-mail address is [email protected].