Category: Railway project

New trains!

The Washington Post has a story about yesterday’s announcement by Amtrak describing the $5 billion worth of new trains that Amtrak is buying. The trains will be named Amtrak Airo, and they’re beautiful.

Yes, the trains will be made in America — Sacramento — though the company is German. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is not mentioned in the story, but I suspect that he, and the Biden administration, had more than a little to do with this.

It was interesting to read some of the comments on this article. Train lovers are pointing out that the United States is still far, far behind other countries in its train infrastructure, not least because of the poor condition of our tracks. In Europe, everybody loves trains, and everybody rides them. In the U.S., liberals have never seen a train they didn’t love, and Republicans have never seen a train they didn’t hate. I wonder: Don’t Republicans ever travel abroad and ride the trains?

The recent railway strike that almost happened helped expose just how much fixing our railway system needs, both for freight and for passengers. About 30 years of successive Democratic transportation secretaries might do it.

Railway project #2


The tracks cross a road before starting up a ridge along Prillaman Switch Road near Ferrum, Virginia. It’s possible that this little place was once a regular train stop. The passenger train between Roanoke and Winston-Salem was called “the Punkin Vine.” Its last run was on Feb. 18, 1961. Click here for high-resolution version.

Using Google Earth’s satellite images, I followed the Norfolk Southern train route from Belews Creek, North Carolina, northward into Virginia, looking for photogenic spots. In the satellite images, I saw a trestle bridge just south of Ferrum, Virginia. That’s about an hour-and-a-half drive north from the abbey, if you take the backroads.

I would have to say that the drive was somewhat depressing. I had expected the backroads to be a picturesque mixture of hills, forest, and farmland. But because my route kept fairly close to the railway, what I saw instead was mostly decayed industry and the falling-apart old houses of the people who worked in those industries. Once upon a time, living near a railway meant jobs. Now it means unemployment, decayed infrastructure, poverty, and Trump voters. There were shockingly few farms. Apparently people didn’t farm much if they worked in the old industries. Instead, they worked for wages and bought most of their food in little country stores. There also were quite a few of what I call nasty little churches. They are independent churches, falling apart just like the houses, of fundamentalist denominations such as “Holiness.”

A county or two to the west of the railway, rural Virginia is much more beautiful. Now I know.

The trestle is just south of Ferrum on Prillaman Switch Road. The railway is following a ridge at that point. The trestle bridges a small stream. The stream was almost roaring with snowmelt on the March day that I was there. To get from stream level up to railway level required climbing a steep and rather treacherous bank. I climbed the bank with my digital camera, but the film camera and its tripod are just too heavy for such a climb. These are all digital photos.

At some point I’m going to time these expeditions to catch a coal train on the tracks.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

The fate of the caboose

Back in 2014, I posted photos of a caboose that was for sale. At the time the caboose was located in a private park near Madison, North Carolina. Last year, the town of Stuart, Virginia, bought the caboose and moved it to Stuart.

I’d have to say that I was pretty disappointed when I drove by to check out the caboose a few days ago. It’s now parked in a falling-apart old industrial neighborhood near the Mayo River. The caboose looks ill-at-ease and a little embarrassed to be where it is. The restoration work has been so-so. In fact, no work has been done on the interior at all.

The residents of the abbey actually briefly considered buying the caboose and renovating it as a B&B. The price of the caboose was reasonable, but the catch was the cost and hassle of moving it. Apparently the only effective way of moving something so heavy is with an industrial crane. So the cost of moving the caboose would have been greater than the cost of the caboose itself.

Still, I can’t help but think that the caboose would have been much happier here, tucked up into the woods above the orchard, nicely landscaped. There’s already water, electricity, and a septic tank connection at that spot, because that’s where I parked my camping trailer while I was building the house.

Oh well. Maybe a tiny house someday.

Railway project #1


Click here for high-resolution version

Here’s my down payment on the railway project that I described in the previous post. I used Google Earth to find the spot where the railway line crosses the Dan River north of Walnut Cove, North Carolina. That spot is about 12 miles from the abbey. I was delighted to see from the Google Earth satellite image that the bridge is a truss bridge, with short trestles on the approaches. Truss bridges were very common from the late 19th Century up until the 1930s or so. I suspect this bridge dates from the 1930s.

The photo above is a digital photo taken with my Nikon camera. I had the film camera with me, but getting to the bridge required parking the Jeep and hiking more than two miles in and out. I don’t have a backpack for the film camera yet, so it was too awkward and heavy to carry. I plan to go back and shoot this spot later with the film camera.

Below is the Google Earth satellite image of the bridge.