The Death of a Railroad Town: Boyhood Memories

The Death of a Railroad Town: Boyhood Memories by Clifford Amyx As one who grew up in a railroad town it has always seemed tragic to me that America has lost nearly all the great trains. The huge steam locomotives , romantic and nearly terrible in power, are gone, and would now be considered polluters and health hazards. The many passenger trains which brought new and colorful people to the small towns were the principal excitement at Livingston, Kentucky, on the Rockcastle River, where I grew up. Very close to the original "Wilderness Road," and to the traces carved out by 48 Daniel Boone and the bare roads established by the early settlers, Livingston was once the terminus of the L&N Railroad , at the end of the Lebanon Branch, originating in Louisville. As capital was available, the work progressed and the railroad crossed the Rockcastle River in 1881 and went on southward. The road divided at Corbin, some 40 miles south of Livingston, one branch forming the Cumberland Valley division into the coalfields and the other going south across the Tennessee line to Knoxville and Atlanta. It was still later than 1881 that the Kentucky Central Railroad came south to join the L&N at Sinks, on Roundstone Creek, some three miles north of Livingston . Livingston then became the junction of what was later to be three principal divisions of the L&N. During the First World War it was a very busy town and in order to handle the interchange traffic the railroad was double-tracked between Sinks and Livingston as early as 1907. At the time there were double coal tipples at Livingston, three water tanks for engines, yards for making up trains, or shunting cars onto already made up trains, car repair shops, a "roundhouse" for engine repair, a wye for turning engines, two railroad hotels, a six-gable hotel in town and one at the wye-where my family lived for a while. In the railroad station the second floor was devoted to dispatchers' offices and railroad business; there were telegraphers at work around the clock, in three 'tricks." I was fascinated by the telegraph and the business of writing out orders for the trains. My friend, Pat Donnelly, a genial Irishman, would tell me what the wires were "saying," and allow me to scratch out orders before I could write. Near the beginning of World War I, when I was only six or seven, my father bought the home of Senator Bond, across the river, and during my first years at school I accompanied my father across the railroad bridge. The bridge was double-tracked and there was always the danger of getting caught between two trains; but we managed, and before too long I was able to cross by myself. The winter of 1918 was the winter of the so-called Spanish influenza epidemic, and my father, the only physician in town, went for months with very little sleep. My whole family was sick in bed at one time. It was a cold winter and when I was again on the way to school, with winds blowing across the bridge, I felt that I would be frozen to death. At our home across the river I could stand in my front yard, especially in summers, to see the trains halt just before the bridge, and the engine go into town for more coal and water. While the lead engine was there, a helper engine would back up to be coupled to the train, and then when the lead engine came back the two would belch black smoke and hiss white steam until they had a full head of steam and full power. I never felt the slightest fear of these huge engines , as William Ellerly Leonard did when he was young. (He later wrote the history of his trauma in The Locomotive God.) I felt that these engines were alive with power, and trains were an endless excitement to me. When I began to draw pictures, they were almost always of trains and engines. I would lie on the floor drawing trains for hours until the light was so dim I could hardly see. It did not occur to me then...