The Return

Two announcements to make today. One, the VMT Blog is once again in active status. It has been a long while since the last post, and we apologize for that, but now the time has come to get serious about this medium. We'll be posting on a regular basis with more of a bent towards the news of the transportation world, be it happenings at the VMT, or things that happen on the mainline, the airways, the highway, or the high seas.

And since we are now in that mode, here is announcement #2. The "Lost Engines of Roanoke" are on their way to freedom from the scrap-yard where they have been ensconced lo these fifty plus years. As some of you know, old #917 was liberated last year, and is now a roadside attraction in Ohio. Steam engines #1118, 1135, and 1151, along with diesels 662 and 663, and two tenders and a flatcar will be coming out by September 30, 2009, to make way for the Carrilion Hospital/Bio-Med Center expansion. The old mill is currently being demolished, and is about 70% down, and as soon as a temporary surface can be put down, work will commence on removing the Lost Engines. In the meantime, we have a couple of photos to share with you taken in the early springtime, before the vegetation takes over.

Giving Twice

‘Tis the season both to shop for Christmas and to make those end-of-the-year charitable contributions. Here is a way you can do both kinds of giving with one stop.

The VMT museum gift shop, Destinations, offers a great selection of special items for the transportation aficionados in your world. In addition, every dollar you spend there helps the museum.

Destinations stocks a delightful variety of gifts: T-shirts, sweatshirts and caps for the grownups and the young’uns. Calendars, mugs and clocks. An electic selection of videos, dvds and cds.

You’ll find puzzles, games and and throws (including one featuring the J611). A variety of toys including colorful, large wooden trucks that children can both assemble and then operate.

There are Christmas decorations and key chains. Badges and playing cards. Prints and posters and postcards. Magnets and maps.

And how could we forget the books? Books with rosters of locomotives and rolling stock. Books of railroad timetables. Coffee-table-sized picture books about trains and other types of transportation. Histories of various railroads in Virginia, the South, and across the U.S. Books that entertain or inform or inspire or all three.

The VMT museum store features products made in the USA. When you purchase one of our Made in USA products, you are helping the museum and helping to keep jobs in America.

Shopping for a child? Think beyond Thomas. We carry a line of beautifully made wooden engines and cars that are totally compatible with Thomas and Brio. Made in the USA and painted with lead-free paint, they are painted to look like real train cars. Children who are thrilled by the trains that rumble through Roanoke can now have the same NS or CSX cars on their home track.

Come on by. Or call the gift shop at 767-4651. Or roll on over to: http://www.vmt.org/destinations_museumshopRev.html You can ord-er items and have them shipped to your address. Make your trip to the VMT gift shop a challenge. See how many people on your Christmas gift list can be taken care of with one stop.

Destinations is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday from 1-5 pm. Come in VMT’s main entrance and turn to the right. You do not have to purchase museum admission just to shop. Of course, if while you're there you find this irresistible urge ....

Collections and Connections

This and that:

The Messimer Collection has had its grand opening. Housed in the front of the museum, near the gift shop, the exhibit displays an abundance of Greyhound bus memorabilia covering three-quarters of a century. The exhibit also includes Trailways items, a full size front of an Abbott Trailways bus and photos of local transit buses provided by the Commonwealth Coach and Trolley Museum of Roanoke.

Located in the same area is a new display celebrating Roanoke’s “other” railroad, the Virginian Railway. Though much smaller than the Norfolk and Western, the Virginian competed neck-and-neck with the N&W hauling West Virginia coal to Norfolk. The two railroads merged in 1959. This area is not finished. We plan to do a formal opening once the storyboards are completed and mounted.

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VMT is in negotiations with two other Virginia museums regarding the N&W locomotives at the Virginia Scrap Iron and Metal Company property. Hopefully the remaining vintage steam locos can be salvaged through a cooperative effort. We’ll keep you posted.

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This week the museum unveils the Jim Hyams serigraph collection. Serigraphs are prints made using the silkscreen process. The result is highly detailed paints of an almost photographic quality. Afterward the screens are destroyed, limiting the print run to a small number, sometimes only one.

The collection is being displayed at VMT in conjunction with the Roanoke Arts Festival and will remain there through the end of the year. The transportation-related serigraphs were produced by some of the premier artists in the genre.

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Soon we will feature a locomotive cab inside our building. Norfolk Southern donated the cab after converting an SD-40 diesel electric into a “calf,” a unit that cannot be operated solo but is lashed together with other locomotives to provide additional power. The six-axle SD40 was manufactured by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division beginning in 1966 and became the best-selling locomotive of all time.

The cab should be in place early in 2009. It will allow visitors to experience the inside of a diesel loco. In the future we hope to add a locomotive simulator to our collection.

Ridin' the Rails, part 2

On a train you experience the contrasts between the grubby and the grand, the seamy and the sublime.

To ride the rails is to understand the meaning of “the other side of the tracks.” You see the backsides of houses and businesses: junked cars, dilapidated buildings, tarpaper shacks, debris-strewn yards. (The graffiti is outstanding, however). And in these post-modern railroading years, you pass railroad depots in all stages of disrepair. Even some of the stations where Amtrak stops look like sets for a Stephen King movie.

On the other hand, to take the train is also to see grandeur from vantage points the automobile cannot provide: the untamed woodlands and rapids-laced streams of West Virginia, the sprawling cornfields and wheatfields of the Midwest, the raw majesty of the towering Rockies. The surgical cut made by the railroad right-of-way inserts the traveler shoulder-to-shoulder with the surrounding landscape. You feel like you could almost reach your hand out the window and touch that scampering deer or shake hands with the farmer on his tractor.

The train itself is a study in contrasts. Amtrak uses the names of glorious streamliner routes of the past such as The Crescent, The Empire Builder, and The Hiawatha. In reality, Amtrak service is more freightliner than streamliner, a Greyhound with flanged wheels. The facilities are adequate, the food is mediocre, and the staff ranges from gracious to grouchy. All this is not surprising, given the paucity of federal support for passenger railroading.

On one leg of my trip, the snack bar menu posted on the wall had cancellations and price changes scribbled in ink. As I sat waiting for a breakfast table, I heard a woman behind me exclaiming to her traveling companions, “In the brochure it all looked so nice.”

In addition, trains run habitually behind schedule. My eagerly awaited visit to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is scuttled due to the hours we sit waiting behind a broken-down freight train on a single track main line in southern Indiana. Even without such mishaps, passenger trains often run infuriatingly late because of the heavy freight traffic on the lines Amtrak leases from railroads such as CSX and Union Pacific. It’s more cost effective, a conductor tells me, for those roads to keep their lucrative freight traffic on schedule and to pay Amtrak the contractual penalties for the delays.

Nevertheless, it’s still a lark to take the train. I love the size and power of those diesels. The rocking and lurching of the coaches. The excitement of racing past grade crossings with their flashing gates and lines of cars. The sights of wide-eyed children running toward the tracks and construction workers laying down their tools to wave.

All of this reminds me why a place like VMT is so important. The railroad is wound tightly into the strands of America’s DNA. At levels deeper perhaps than we sometimes understand, trains still lure us, charm us, and speak to our hearts. You cannot really understand this nation until you understand its history with trains.

In the last couple years, congressional funding for Amtrak has become more generous. Given the concerns about global warming and fossil fuels, perhaps some of the more fascinating chapters of America’s rail history have yet to be written—a dream both grand and sublime.

Ridin' the Rails, part one

I anxiously drive north from Roanoke on a gorgeous autumn afternoon. My train is scheduled to depart Clifton Forge at 4:08 and I can’t afford to miss it—the next one won’t come for two more days. I whip into the CSX parking lot and hurry with my luggage to the makeshift waiting area.

I needn’t have worried; the train is running 30 minutes late. After all, this is Amtrak. The half-dozen waiting passengers have plenty of time to gab, and we do. It’s my first reminder today of how different train travel is.

We talk of freight cars and end-of-train devices and reminisce about previous rail journeys. You seldom find airline passengers engaging total strangers in conversation like this. Besides, what can you tell about a previous airline journey: how much turbulence you encountered or how stirringly the flight attendant gave the mind-numbing safety recitation?

These people are the first of many I will encounter on my trip to St. Louis. Many of them are not riding the train just to get somewhere but to get there by rail. Whether they prefer the meandering pace and unique panoramas or seek a slice of nostalgic Americana, how they get there is almost as important to them as the destination itself.

Some pretend the golden age of American streamliners still exists and they have boarded the posh Broadway Limited or the gleaming Silver Meteor. Others relish the chance to see the countryside from a different perspective, glimpsing towns and fields and mountains from angles you can’t reach by car. The serious rail buffs among us are delighted to watch train operations at point blank range—rail yards, sidings, spurs and the “business” side of industries.

In the diner I meet an 81-year-old lady, who obviously doesn’t lack for money and who can barely walk. She has had joint replacement surgery on her knee and needs it on her hips. Yet she is determined to have what she calls her “last hurrah,” one final glorious train trip. In Chicago she will board the Empire Builder for Seattle, then roll down to Sacramento on the Coast Starlight, and finally reach Reno via the California Zephyr. She doesn’t sound nearly as excited about her two weeks in Reno as she does about the process of getting there.

Back in my coach I converse with my seatmate, who is from Wyoming. The county. In West Virginia. She regales me with tales of growing up as one of 15 children of a coal miner and moonshiner and of her 20 years as a long haul truck driver. She is headed for Kansas to see her first great grandchild.

And my destination? I am traveling to St. Louis by way of Chicago to spend a week with my daughter and son-in-law. For me also the ride is half the fun. I haven’t been on a passenger train since my trek from Richmond to Orlando years ago. Too cheap to reserve a sleeping berth, I will ride in my coach seat all night long. My body will get too little sleep and my clothes will get too many wrinkles. By the time I reach the windy city, I will have been aboard for 19 straight hours.

And I will not care, for I am riding the train.

Streamlining Into the Past

The year was 1934. Tough times for trains. Tough times for everyone. In the heart of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 25%. American railroads had laid off about one million people, 40% of its work force,

Even before the stock market crash of ’29, railroads had been hurting due to the rise of the automobile. Car registrations increased almost tenfold in ten years. Passenger and freight revenue both shrank. The Depression just deepened the wound.

Then came the Burlington Zephyr. Along with the Union Pacific’s M-10,000, which actually made its debut two months earlier with a nationwide tour, the Zephyr helped revolutionize train travel and industrial design. That spring the gleaming stainless steel passenger train set a new nonstop distance record for trains, traveling a thousand miles from Denver to Chicago in 13 hours, a blistering average speed of 77.5 mph.

The era of streamliners and diesel-electric locomotives had arrived. Even steam got streamed. Many steam passenger locomotives added sleek new hoods, including the prestigious New York Central’s 20th Century Limited and the Pennsy’s Broadway Limited. The Norfolk and Western’s beautiful J series locomotives joined the parade. By the late 1930s the ten fastest trains in the world operated in America.

It was a short celebration, however. Not even the sleek new equipment could stop the demise of American passenger travel. How ironic that the automobile, which drove the railroads out of business, now costs so much to operate that the nation is yearning to ride the tracks again. Will it ever become more than talk, here in Roanoke and elsewhere? We will see. It’s a beautiful image, however: new coaches filled with people rolling right by our VMT, the J-611, and the ghosts of passengers past.

That original Zephyr train made Chicago its destination one final time. After 26 years and over three million miles of service, it entered its retirement home at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

Next week I will relive the original historic 1934 trip and it will take me only 20 minutes. At the sprawling museum I will board the revered train for a tour and computer-simulated ride. The train won’t actually go anywhere, of course, except back in time.

My real train ride will also take me into the past as I roll through the mountains of West Virginia and the plains of the Midwest. I will relive the days of the streamliners while riding their heir, Amtrak, the stepchild of the divorce between America and its longtime great love, still valiantly chugging along in a country that has forgotten its transportation roots.

During that journey, including the hours of layover in Chicago on my way to visit family in Missouri, I will experience railroading past and present, large and small. The Museum of Science and Industry also houses The Great Train Story, an HO-scale layout that includes about 58 scale miles of trackage, depicting the train journey from Chicago to Seattle.

I will ride. And look. And remember. And dream.

Regarding Henry

Two weeks ago my wife and I headed for Florida to take our daughter to college. As if 863 miles of driving weren’t enough, we got to travel through tropical storm Fay. After moving Anna into the dorm, we headed north just in time to navigate through Fay again. Ah, the women in my life ….

This blog isn’t really about a Fay, however, but a Flagler. Henry Morrison Flagler. American entrepreneur. Partner with John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil. Perhaps the most important figure in the development of Florida’s east coast for tourism. Owner of the Florida East Coast Railway which, in an amazing feat of railroad engineering, he extended all the way to Key West.

In Florida you find Flagler’s name everywhere: schools, streets, buildings, museums, hospitals, even a county and a beach. The main address for our daughter’s school is 901 S. Flagler Dr., which her dorm room overlooks. With her roommate she has already gone “hot-tubbing” nearby at The Breakers, the renowned beachfront hotel the man built at Palm Beach in 1896.

(When I tell Anna how proud I am that she picked a school with a railroad man’s name in the address, she just rolls her eyes.)

It’s no wonder Floridians toast Henry Flagler’s name. He built resort hotels and provided the means for northern tourists to reach them. He constructed roads, bridges, canals, public utilities and newspapers. He encouraged fruit farming and settlement along the railway line. His gifts helped build schools, churches and hospitals.

Even after a hurricane put the “over-the-seas” railroad out of business in 1935, Its bridges and roadbed became the foundation for car and truck traffic through the Keys.

Driving back toward Virginia, I thought about Henry Flagler (when the weather didn’t demand my full interest). I also thought about Roanoke. Florida before Flagler and Big Lick before the N&W were similar: largely unknown, undeveloped, and unappreciated. (Miami wasn’t even incorporated until Henry got his hand on it.)

And I thought about the differences today in the two areas’ attitudes. In Florida, Flagler is celebrated ubiquitously. In Roanoke, the railroad heritage is seen by so many as a quaint and insignificant factor, a historical footnote with little relevance for the present.

When the news broke several months ago of VMT’s financial troubles, much of the public reaction was not “We must do something” but “They ought to do something” or—worse—“Who cares whether they do anything.”

The Roanoke Times’ coverage epitomized the view that museum leadership needs to get its act together before expecting anyone else to lend a hand. Largely ignored in articles and editorials were courageous efforts VMT personnel already had put forth or the significant extenuating circumstances. And little was said of the need for the community as a whole to own this rail heritage as a core part of our identity.

Public and private donors will give tens of millions of dollars to build and promote an art museum that, regardless of its real or imagined benefits, is still a generic attraction that would seem as much at home in dozens of other cities. On the other hand, much of our community seems unconcerned about an organization which preserves and interprets Roanoke’s historic legacy and which is intrinsically linked to a group of other attractions (Norfolk Southern operations, the East End Shops, Hotel Roanoke, the O. Winston Link Museum, the Rail Walk, restored N&W buildings, etc.)

No community can live in the past. Few places thrive, however, when they ignore it.

Someone recently wrote to criticize VMT’s apparent lack of interest in salvaging the remaining Virginia Scrap Iron & Metal yard locomotives. The comments reminded me that even some of the wonderful people who do care about the museum’s future are unaware of how difficult our situation remains. Saving those locos is a wonderful goal and we appreciate so much those who leading the charge. It’s hard for us to raise money ourselves for new acquisitions, however, when we are struggling to meet an operating budget that has been cut to the bone.

Citizens of this region have a choice. We can own and celebrate our rich transportation heritage or we can treat it with apathy and neglect. Florida and Henry Flagler show us which path is the wise one.
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A footnote: I collect songs about trains. I recommend three songs for you who like music and are interested in Flagler’s achievements. Last Train to Paradise by Chris Foster and Oh Henry! by Chris Kahl cover the building of the FEC Railway across the Florida Keys, and Hurricane by Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen describes the railroad’s destruction by the category five Labor Day hurricane of 1935. All three songs are available at various download sites.