SPENCER, N.C. – Imagine that Elvis came to live with you. He is putting his career back on track and needs to get up to speed, and it takes him a year. He’s his old self again, ready for the main stage, but before he goes, A. You pack a lunch and wish him well. B. Take him to the bus station. Or C. ask him to sing a concert in your living room for a few friends, and then you’ll pack a lunch and take him to his bus. The answer, of course, is C. You’re no idiot. You want to hear Elvis sing.
That’s exactly what happened Thursday when Norfolk & Western 4-8-4 No. 611 operated on site at the North Carolina Transportation Museum, pulling two unique consists, poking its nose into the roundhouse, and acting very much like the celebrity that it is. No. 611 has been here for the last year, getting its 1,472-day inspection, getting a new rear tube sheet, and lots of work to awaken it from a 20-year slumber. It’s going back home to the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, Va., Saturday on the point of a VIP homecoming special that arrives between 2 and 4 p.m.
But first, there was the opportunity to do things with No. 611 that you just can’t do once it leaves Spencer. So on Thursday, for 152 folks who paid $250 each, we spent a day with Elvis, er, 611. I’ve been a volunteer at the North Carolina Museum for 29 years, and I was happy to coordinate Thursday’s Fired up Photo Charter event.
What made it interesting?
First, we nosed into the roundhouse under steam with No. 611. Bay No. 13 in the 37-stall Bob Julian roundhouse is pretty much as it was in the steam era with Southern Railway, so it was the perfect place to have No. 611 go – obviously the largest steam locomotive to ever enter these halls as Southern’s big power were 2-10-2s and 4-8-2s. No. 611 even left a smudge over the doorway as if to say “611 was here.” Incidentally, the reason we didn’t pull No. 611 into the building further is that the crew coaled the engine the day before and had it stacked so tall that we couldn’t go inside without scraping coal off the top of the bunker.
Second, we were able to put together a short freight train to replicate the last year or so of Class J service in 1958-1959 when Norfolk & Western CEO Stuart Saunders was desperate to rid his railroad of steam power. He took the elegant and powerful Class J locomotives and cast them down to hauling local freights. For the morning, No. 611 was back in this service. In the same vein, we also temporarily relettered the museum’s Atlantic Coast Line E3, No. 501, as N&W to replicate one of the leased passenger diesels the N&W used to kill steam.
Third, we were able to take the museum’s N&W heavyweight combine, No. 1506, and put it onto a short, all-Tuscan red passenger consist for runbys. No canteen. One N&W-lettered coach, No. 539 from Tennessee’s Watauga Valley NRHS chapter, right behind the combine, and a few more of NS excursion cars and you had a miniature N&W passenger train of the 1950s. The runbys weren’t fast – this is museum trackage, not main line-- but they were enough to give us a taste of what once was.
We capped off the day with a few night photos to end an amazing day that will never be repeated. And no, I cannot resist saying that it was a day that was all about a hunka-hunka burnin’ love.
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