Join the discussion on the following article:
Louisville & Nashville: Still reliable after all these years
Yep. Unfortunately I don’t have all those memories, although I do have some. I remember standing and looking out a window at my babysitter’s house of a long line of stream locomotives coupled together heading north through Shepherdsville, KY for Louisville. I assume from the article above it would have been around 1957 when I was 4 years old.
When I was at home, I could see and hear rail traffic on the main line farther north at Brooks, KY.
When I went off to college I lived near the mainline south of Corbin in Williamsburg, Ky. I spent a lot of time, rather than studying, standing on or sitting under a foot bridge watching the coal trains going by. One time near that foot bridge an engine derailed in a pouring rain and at night. I drove my pickup to a parking lot across from the derailment, watched all the bobbing hard hats walking around and could hear the radios squawking. I know there was a crane at Corbin, but that was north and at that point in Williamsburg there were single tracks. So the wet crew were stacking up wood blocks and having the second engine gingerly pull back on the derailed loco. The wheel would slide off the blocks, past the rail, and the cussing would start. Didn’t need a radio to hear that. After watching several repeated performances, I went back to the dorm and went to bed.
Next morning the train was gone and there was a big pile of split wooden blocks at the siding.
Now I live 40 miles south of Nashville and occasionally go up to Radnor yard and watch cars being humped. Then there’s the Nashville Star and Tennessee Central RR museum, and the shops and museum at Chattanooga and miniature live steam at Columbia. I don’t have a lot of neat memories like others, but I do have current experience all around.