TRAIN WHISTLES

I remember when I was about six, my first grade teacher, Miss Long, took us on a field trip. It wasn’t a distant one. Just from the Centennial Primary School to downtown Wapakoneta a few blocks away. I recall its being a bright blue day, crisp and cold, since we went first thing in the morning.

Wapakoneta train station, built in 1917

We gathered around the teacher like a gaggle of goslings, our breath visible in the morning air. We were on the cobbled platform of the old brick freight depot, on the west side of the Baltimore and Ohio rail line. I don’t know if, as usual, I wasn’t paying attention or what, but I remember asking myself what we were doing there, even if it was exciting and fun to be playing hooky from the classroom.

Then the teacher said, “All right, children, here comes the train.”

We heard the shrill whoop of a steam whistle in the distance, the tracks trembled, and then there was the chug-chug-chug of a steam locomotive, and more whoops of the whistle. We all squealed as the steam engine, pulling a freight formation behind it, hissed vapor that enveloped us on the platform. The train came to a stop at the depot and stood there huffing and sighing like some large, powerful animal that was taking a breather before chugging on. We could smell the coal burning hot in the fire box, and we could see the tender loaded with more mineral fuel behind the engine. Smoke, like our own breath, billowed into the clear morning air from the locomotive’s stack.

Reading Railroad #602 - Painting by Fred Schuster

We were too young to realize the historical significance of the event. We were witnessing the last stop of a steam locomotive in our town, and one of the last regularly scheduled steam freight services on the B&O line.

My home town of Wapakoneta is definitely a train town. Besides spurs that go to the site of the old stock yard and the now defunct cheese, canning, churn and handle factories, there is a main line that runs right through the center of town. When I was young there were still coal yards along the tracks.

When I was still a primary schooler, we lived for three years near a siding. It was at the end of our street, South Pine, on the east side of Wapakoneta. I had friends in the neighborhood who were as curious as I was. Both their mothers and mine had forbidden us to hang out on what was known as the “right of way”, a sort of grassy easement near the rail spur. They told us “dirty old bums” hung out there and, if we didn’t want our throats cut, we’d best steer clear.

Hobos riding the rails

Of course, we went anyway. We even had a treehouse down there. And the thought of its being a dangerous, threatening place, made it all the more attractive. We never saw any of the rail hobos our mothers told us about, but we did once discover unsavory evidence that someone had spent the night in our treehouse.

What we actually most liked to do was to pretend we were hobos, with just the clothes on our backs and riding the rails to exciting destinations. Occasionally, we would climb up into some boxcar left standing on the siding. We would pretend we were hiding out, being careful not to be seen by a railroad detective, made infamous by The Grit (a national newspaper targeting a rural readership), for tossing bums off of moving trains after beating the bejesus out of them.

There was only one time we did that with adult permission—although not that of the B&O Railroad. Centennial School was just down the alley from my house and the teacher took us all on a little hike down the road to the easement. It was for our primary school “Hobo Picnic”. It was a day when we all had to dress up, as best we could, like tiny rail bums and carry our lunch in a bandana tied to a stick over our shoulders. The teacher thought it would be more authentic if she took us down by the tracks, and, incredibly, she gave us all permission to climb up into a boxcar standing alone there on the rails.   It had been left with the doors wide open. It was empty except, at the far end, for a stack of still wet hides, probably, we figured, from the nearby stockyard. I still remember their raw, rank odor.

Old Wapak station in use prior to 1917

It was hard to live in Wapakoneta and not have trains in your blood. I mean, there were, and still are, townspeople irritated by the constant delays that having level-crossings all across town signifies. If you’re driving east-west from one end of town to the other, chances are good you’ll have to wait for a mile-long freight train to lumber through. But many of us who grew up in a train town found the passing of each rail convoy to be a satisfying if minor daily event. Many of us still love the click and the clank of wheels meeting the track, the jerking clunk of the couplings as the locomotive slows and accelerates, the rumble you can feel in your chest from the heavy formation rolling down the tracks, each loaded boxcar with a gross weight of a quarter-million pounds.

Another factor that made railroads special for us was that we lived just down the line from one of the world’s most renowned locomotive manufacturing operations, Baldwin Lima Hamilton. It wasn’t called that until it merged in 1951 with another famed locomotive-maker, the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. Before that, it had been known as the Lima Locomotive Works, named for its home base, the industrial city of Lima, Ohio, my father’s home town, located up the track fifteen miles north of Wapakoneta.

The Baldwin locomotive firm had been a railroading pioneer, founded in 1825. That was when locomotives were being built by hand, a time when there wasn’t even machinery to manufacture the huge cylinders that train engines required, and they had to be turned and bored by hand. The company was named for its founder, Matthias Baldwin, who was originally a talented gold and silversmith but with an obsessive interest in machinery and practical mechanics.

In the early days of his firm, Baldwin partnered with a talented machinist called David Mason. This was the beginning of the Baldwin Machine Company. But it didn’t become the Baldwin Locomotive Works until, after experimenting with steam-driven machinery for several years, Baldwin and Mason, in 1832, put together their first successful steam locomotive, which they called Old Ironsides, an engine they sold to a Philadelphia rail line that, until then, had been purchasing from a steam locomotive manufacturer in England.  

The Old Patagonian Express - La Trochita

I recall once, many years ago, waxing nationalistic on this subject, when I was watching a documentary in Argentina, where I live. It was about the Patagonian Trocha Angosta, a narrow-gauge train that once linked numerous remote destinations in the wilds of the Patagonian region—with a section of the rail link still operating today, but mostly as a tourist attraction, although some local residents still use it to get from point A to point B.

Once a thriving wild west frontier line, La Trochita, as it is fondly known—and better known to Americans as The Old Patagonian Express, since the 1979 best-selling travel book of the same title by Paul Theroux—employed a score of narrow-gauge steam engines, powered by coal from the Río Turbio mines of southern Patagonia back then, but today converted to fuel oil. Anyway, in this particular documentary, they explained that the little stretch of La Trochita that is still in operation is served by seven steam engines that are still operable. When asked about the make of the locomotives, a commentator said they were all Henschells and Baldwins, which he described as “English”.

Well now, at the time, I didn’t yet know that Henschell engines were German, but I sure as heck knew that Baldwins were American. And like a good native son from a Midwestern train town, I didn’t hesitate to get hold of the TV channel airing the program and give them a piece of my mind.

Baldwin's "Old Ironsides" - 1832

The Baldwin Locomotive Works struggled in the firm’s earliest years, living project to project for American railway companies. It went through especially difficult times following the panic of 1837, a US financial crisis that sparked a major depression that would stretch on into the mid-eighteen forties. For more than a decade after that, BLW would, to a large extent, live off of steam stock production for railways in the Southern states that were using the rails to an increasing degree to move their agricultural production.

The secession of states below the Mason-Dixon line over the burning question of American slavery practices seemed once again to spell hard times for the Philadelphia steam engine builder. But those concerns turned out to be short-lived. When the Civil War broke out, the Union military began moving troops, supplies and ordnance increasingly by rail, and steam engine production burgeoned as a result.

Baldwin would remain a powerful player in US railroading from then on, until the advent of diesel locomotives. Baldwin had difficulty making the transition from steam to diesel, which led to its post-World War II merger with the Lima Locomotive Works (by then known as Lima-Hamilton, after a previous merger with a machine-building firm based in Hamilton, Ohio).         

Lima Loco's Shay geared locomotive

Long before the merger with Baldwin, however, Lima Loco, as it was colloquially known, was already famous worldwide, for building some of the world’s finest steam locomotives. Founded in 1869, the firm was known, prior to 1878, as the Lima Machine Works.  But it was in that year that industrialist James Alley contracted Lima Machine to construct an innovative geared steam locomotive, specially designed by Ephraim Shay for the lumber industry.

The first Shay engine was completed in 1880 and became an instant hit throughout the US logging sector.  Over the next decade, Lima Loco would turn out some three hundred such steam engines. The Shay locomotives were low-speed, high-traction steam engines designed to pull heavy loads through mountainous terrain. But by the twentieth century, Lima Locomotive had largely covered that market, and was already turning to “super-power” steam technology.

Shay "Dixiana" logging train

This was a homegrown concept developed by Lima mechanical engineer William Woodward. His development concentrated on maximizing the locomotive’s prime capability—namely the generation and use of steam power. This so vastly increased the power and efficiency of Lima’s steam engines that the New York Central railway ended up buying more than three hundred of the Woodward-technology locomotives. While Lima’s production had earlier concentrated on pulling-capacity, the new locomotives of the nineteen-twenties were built for speed, and it was during that time, when my father was a boy growing up in that town, that Lima Loco became internationally renowned for building some of the world’s fastest steam engines. The maximum expression of this new breed of locomotive was the Berkshire 2-8-4, a powerful iron workhorse with a top speed of seventy miles per hour.

The Berkshire 2-8-4 super-power steam locomotive

In hindsight, the Lima Loco was, quintessentially, a steam locomotive builder, and it was superb at what it did. It was proud of that history and sought to hold onto to it, remaining ever loyal to steam. Seeing the writing on the wall, it was the new partner, Hamilton, that pushed to make the switch to diesel technology. Between 1949 (the year I was born) and 1951, Lima-Hamilton constructed just one hundred seventy-four diesels, making it the smallest diesel builder in the US.  Using Hamilton engine technology, more than three-quarters of the diesel locomotives that Lima-Hamilton built were thousand-horsepower switchers for use in America’s train yards. A rare few are apparently still in service today.

Lima Locomotive Works factory floor

But it was too little too late, and the 1951 merger with Baldwin could do nothing to save it. The firm simply couldn’t compete with big diesel-electric locomotive builders like Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), Alco, and General Electric Infrastructure (GE). Sadly, in 1956, LBH closed its locomotive operations.

Despite this rich railroading history, what I remember most about growing up in a rural train town like Wapakoneta are the train whistles. Someplace in the back of my mind, from the time of my earliest years, I can still hear the shrill steam whistles. And from my early childhood, I can remember wanting to be at the tracks when the trains passed to see whether they were being pulled by a steam or diesel locomotive.

Lima Loco diesel, still operating freight runs in 2016

I was reminded of this when I was stationed in Germany for more than a year with the Army. I traveled a great deal by train at the time, and it wasn’t unusual then, in the early 1970s, for the German railroads to still use steam for switching and freight operations. It was exciting to see those heavy-breathing steam locomotives chug through, steaming, smoking and pulling with all their might.

But the most vivid memory I have of growing up in a train town is of the mourning doppler howl of the powerful diesels passing through, pulling seemingly never-ending formations of boxcars, flatcars and tankers. It always seemed especially poignant at night, lying in my bed in my parents’ home, and hearing it in the distance, as if in a dream. Or sitting after dark with my friend Mark on the roof of the shelter house in the park, smoking pilfered cigarettes and fantasizing about being on the lam, destination unknown. It was the background tune for our casual discussions of stories like Hemingway’s Nick Adams series or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Now when I go back to Wapakoneta for visits, I stay in a tiny house known as the Moonflower Inn. One of the things I love about the place is that it is close enough to the tracks for me to hear the train whistles at night. It’s nostalgic yet comforting, like being back in my warm bed at my family home.

Indeed, wherever I travel, no matter how far, the sound of a diesel locomotive horn is always sure to carry me away, to take me back home to Wapakoneta.