My mother and I had moved into a house in Dominion Hills in April 1947.
                I was graduated from Washington-Lee High School in June 1957.  Within
                the following month I was working on the tracks out of Bluemont Junction
                under Roger Fox, the foreman for that division of the W&OD, only five blocks
                from our house on Lebanon Street.

                I had been trying unsuccessfully to find local employment somewhere in the
                Washington area following graduation.  One particularly hot afternoon in July
                about 4:00 I was walking home over the tracks at the base of Wilson Boulevard
                when I noticed a group of men unloading track equipment from a gang car
                into the work shed.  On a lark, I walked up to Mr Fox and asked him for a job
                working track.  Without any other word, he asked, “Can you do hard work?”
                “Yes,” I replied.  “Be here tomorrow morning at 7:00.”

                He was right; the work was exhausting, especially in mid-summer.  You may
                find it hard to believe, but my youthful background was as a classically trained
                trombonist, which was my life goal.  Nevertheless, I kept up with Mr Fox and his
                crew for the next two years.  Our turf was from Potomac Yards to shortly beyond
                Falls Church.  On special occasions – usually big derailings, which were not
                infrequent on grossly deteriorated ties unable to support hoppers, weighing
                70 tons, loaded with crushed gravel at Trap Rock -- we worked over the entire
                line all the way to Purcellville.

                The whole W&OD crew was never very large.  Roger Fox, Willie Nickens,
                Gene Shutts (brother of Randolph, a W&OD brakeman), William Barber,
                Dolf Cunningham, Douglas Lee and all the others . . .  I remember them fondly
                for some very specific reasons.  They taught me how to work cooperatively with
                men.  Three, then four, men in a circle in turn driving home one spike while
                the others heckled and cheered with their eyes glued to the second hands
                of their clocks.  Sounds easy?  They taught me, by example, how to help the
                weaker among us.  When someone came to work on Monday morning drunk,
                that part of the load he couldn’t handle was taken up by the others, with
                constant ribbing (without humiliation) of the slacker.  He got his chance to
                return the insults elsewhere the following Monday!  They truly were a
                good-natured bunch to work with.

                Sometime in my second year I began working brakeman, often on night runs to
                Potomac Yards and then home to the shed in Rosslyn.  But I also stayed on the
                tracks to the end of my time on the W&OD.

                Well, after two years, I decided the time had come to move on.  I left the
                W&OD in September 1959 to continue my studies as a classical trombonist.
                That took me to Baltimore to study for three years (with the bass trombonist
                of The Philadelphia Orchestra), then to New York.  I was a charter member
                of The American Symphony Orchestra (Carnegie Hall) founded by Leopold
                Stokowski in 1962.  The following year I enrolled in The Juilliard School of
                Music (Bachelor of Music ’67; Master of Science ’68).  Postgraduate studies
                followed at Columbia University; also, five years with The Metropolitan Opera
                Orchestra, with many other interesting experiences in music over the
                following decades.

                My two years with the W&OD and its crews remain vivid memories.  I still have
                my brass switch lock key, stamped “W&OD,” a five-volume set of The Science
                of Railways (Cropley Phillips Co., Chicago, 1913) by Marshall Monroe Kirkman
                (1842-1921) I had bought in the late 1950s, a freight logbook dated May 1956
                (with the signatures of H.E. Cunningham, F.H. Cunningham, D.N. Cunningham,
                A.D. Shutts, H.L. Ritchie, E.E. Chidester, D.C. Mahoney, V.O. Haines, R. Shutts,
                D. See, B. Jet, Laintzy, C.O. Crossman, C.E. Leppe, W.W. Cole, and Lawrence E.
                Cunningham), my two pocket watches (Waltham and Westclox), three unused
                antique business envelopes printed for the W&OD, some of my pay stubs, and
                my lantern.  I suppose that some day these mementos will go to the W&OD
                Museum in Bluemont Junction.

                I’m writing an autobiography within a much larger family history, which will include
                a great deal more information than I’ve written here about the W&OD during
                the 1950s.  Visits to Arlington several times yearly give me many chances to
                visit sites closely tied to the local history of the W&OD.

                For persons interested in the history of the W&OD, there is an unusual
                collection of maps of Arlington and rare newspaper reports about the railroad,
                especially its last five or so years of existence, held in the Washingtoniana
                Division and The Washington Star Collection of the Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial
                Library, 901 G Street N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001,
                <http://www.dclibrary.org/washingtoniana/>.  The telephone number of the
                Division is (202) 727-1213.  There also are maps and related materials about
                the W&OD in different eras of its history in the collections of The Library
                of Congress in Washington, <http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/gmpage.html>.