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Sad Sam
excellent
Great story…nostalgia rules!!
Powerful story–reminds me of my kindergarten days in the early 1970s in Woodstock, Virginia. I was always the last kid to leave the school playground at the end of the day, never wanting to walk home until either I was forced to or I heard the whistle from the daily southbound Southern Railway freight working its way up the Shenandoah Valley–at which point I’d sprint to the station, which still utilized a semaphore signal, to see what it was rolling through with.
A few years later, I spent so much time walking home from school and generally hanging out along the line near there that I became friends with the crews working it, and they started inviting me up into the cab, giving me rides, and even teaching me to drive the locomotive. I have vivid memories of working the sidings near Mt. Jackson in #5053, a GP38-2 that’s still in service!
After the Norfolk Southern merger, the line I grew up on became largely redundant–the parallel N&W Shenandoah Line absorbed much of its traffic–and, with the closing of various industries over the years, parts of it have since been idled completely; through trains are no more. When I visit the area, I still find my eye following the tracks that parallel the highway through much of the Valley, hoping to see a train that my brain knows won’t ever be coming…