The Long Shadow of Departed Trains

There are, really, two Texases. There is Dallas and Houston and Austin and their satellites, cities large in size and reputation, and vibrant enough to have attracted what feels like half of the other forty-nine states. Then there is the other half: Small towns, removed from the major highways and  too far away from large cities to host a commuting population.

Trees have taken root in the abandoned T&P turntable pit at Bonham, Texas.

Bonham, Texas, is part of the other Texas. It has not been revitalized by population migration during the recession, and too few people pass through to inspire the people that do reside there to spruce things up for visitor’s benefits. Most of the buildings are like the sun-blanched train station sitting just north of the town square: Dusty, overgrown, but evocative of a more solvent and more elegant era.

The Bonham Station sign, faded from the sun.

The old station is substantial in construction,  built out of red brick, and has multiple platforms and a tower. The first time I saw it, I wondered why a typical clapboard station wouldn’t suffice.  I made the mistake of judging Bonham by its current state.  A bit of Internet searching and a few tips from friends provided more insight into the size of the building. Until very recently, cotton was one of the biggest industries in East-Central Texas, and one of the largest cotton mills in United States was located in Bonham.

Once a busy transit hub, the station now houses the Fannin County Museum of History.

Bonham, in fact,  saw so much traffic during the first half of the twentieth century that the Texas & Pacific established a division point there and built a large roundhouse about half a mile away west of the station. The ruins of a turntable pit, engine stalls, and a few other unidentified structures are still visible on Google Earth. 

Nature is reclaiming this site with all haste -- this mature tree grows between the casings of two turntable pits.

I arrive to explore the ruins on a sunny  late-summer morning, and see that there has been no attempt to revitalize the old station since my last visit. The paint has faded to a deep pink color, and the nearby tracks have rusted dark brown. The entire area is conspicuously silent. There is not as much noise from industry and road traffic as I would have expected. I have to invest quite a bit of effort to imagine that any trains ever came here at all, let alone that Bonham once pulsed to their thundering drumbeat.

These two half-buried rails are the only metal evidence that the roundhouse once stood here.

I approach the field behind the station with camera in hand. The grass is riddled with concrete, ready evidence that something had once stood here, but most of the pieces are smaller than the size of my fist. No other buildings have been over the T&P ruins since the roundhouse was razed sometime in the 1950s, and  I wonder why the T&P managers decided to have this building destroyed instead of abandoning it to a slow decay.

The turntable pit sits a few dozen yards north of the tracks, overshadowed by generous oak trees. The thickness of their trunks is sobering: The grounds have been abandoned long enough that they have had time to grow from saplings to mature trees nine inches, even a full foot in diameter.  Smaller saplings have taken root in the dirt that has collected in the bottom of the turntable pit,  and give the depression a thin camouflage from afar. The cross bridge and inner track have both disappeared: There is so little to connect this hole in the ground to its original purpose that I wonder if I might have overlooked its purpose if I had happened upon it by chance.

After I finish photographing the turntable pit, I notice a man approaching from a nearby warehouse owned by the City of Bonham. I brace for a confrontation: His expression and body language indicate suspicion.  He turns friendly when I tell him that I only want to photograph the ruins, though, and seems to have some general concern for my safety. He warns me that there is a sinkhole near the tracks, and advises me to be wary of the wildlife. The weather is favorable for snakes, and wild pigs are endemic in this part of Texas.

I assure him that I will be properly cautious, and he seems satisfied. As he turns to leave, he pauses for a few seconds with his hands rested on his hips, looking out over the turntable pit and the rest of the ruins. I can sense his imagination working, trying to envision this area as more than a concrete-littered field, to picture it as the heart of Bonham’s industry.

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he finally says.

I agree that it is. His voice has that leaden tone that people tend to get when their talk about erstwhile trains is a eulogy for losses closer to the heart and harder to put into words. We agree that there should be more here to memorialize the T&P’s presence.

Google Earth shows scars of the engine stalls located north and west of the turntable pit. This is the best guide I’ve found to Bonham roundhouse’s floorplan, as the few surviving photographs don’t show the entire grounds. I head in this direction and discover that the white lines visible on the map aren’t walls, as I had hoped, but the concrete pits underneath the engine stalls. They are all filled in with dirt, at this point, and nature has made an effort to cover their remains with creeping plants.

There are no more rails bolted down on top of the concrete slabs, but I’ve got a good eye for distances and I can reckon that the edges of the pits are the standard 4‘ 8.5“ apart. Isolated like this, though, the track space seems too small for full sized railroad equipment,  too close together for half a dozed late-model T&P engines within this small area.

I begin to feel a powerful need to find something something metal,  some sort of object that incontrovertibly proves that the railroad had a presence in this area. I want a pile of spikes, discarded brake shoes, a broken knuckle. I want a rusted but meaningful link to the past. After about forty five minutes of looking, though,  I have found nothing except for two discarded lengths of rail poking out from the soil and a worn-down mound of ash. 

I reluctantly conclude that it’s time to walk away. I am dogged by the feeling that I might have found some object that speaks to the history of the area if I had widened my search area or been a bit more diligent about looking under knots of vegetation, but it’s better to endure that than to keep searching and conclude that what little I found is, indeed, all that is left of the T&P.

The thing about railroads--about all industries, really--is that once we construct them and set them in motion, we enjoy an illusion that they will stay animated. Sunbaked towns like Bonham, forgotten in the other Texas, and abandoned pre-merger, steam-era ruins all over the country speak to the reality: We can create industries that literally change the face of the earth, but we cannot make them self-sustaining. Applied science is apathetic to its own survival. Nature is assiduous in reclaiming what people have discarded. I’ve come here long after this severed part of the nervous system has ceased to quiver.

The thing that makes these ruins more than just sad, that underlines the sight of them with a gripping anxiety, is knowing that there are many other places at risk of falling into this kind of unnatural stillness. While I am here,  some of my colleagues are busy covering the last Norfolk Southern trains routed through the Princeton-Deep Water District in West Virginia, and CSX has likewise announced its intentions to cut back on coal service in the state. 

It runs against our instincts to look at towns like Bonham and accept that the factors contributing to its decline were too numerous to address, or that the economic activity in the town simply came to the end of its course.  To accept that is also to admit that we are helpless to formulate a remedy for other towns threatened by economic stagnation.

What can be taken away from the ruins of the old Bonham roundhouse, though, is just how much influence the presence of an active railroad can have on whether an area thrives or dies. Its presence can make the difference between an area collapsing, between it keeping a hold on a place in the modern world or becoming a testimonial of a world that was. Take the trains away, and stillness and rust become a creeping epidemic.   Leave them there--at least leave the possibility that they might come back--and there is always hope of renewal.