Winter in Western North Carolina, where I grew up, isn’t bad. The nights don’t get frightfully cold, and the days are still decently long even in the dead of winter. But as a kid, they seemed unmercifully slow, and the coming of spring and summer were most welcomed. I associated both of those seasons with the smell of the first grass cut on a Saturday, the planting of a garden, the budding of tree leaves high on the mountain tops, and, of course, the return of favorite steam locomotives to operation.
Today, the longest day of the year, heralded the season of church league softball games going to 10 p.m., late nights at the drive-in movies, and an annual outing on the date of summer solstice with my pal, Jim King, to follow Southern Railway’s freight from Bryson City west on the fabled Murphy Branch.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the two-unit local handled less than a dozen cars, but steep grades and excessive curves meant two GP38-2s for power. The train left Bryson at 5 p.m. and arrived at Murphy, in the far western part of North Carolina and the Eastern time zone, about 9:30 p.m. if you were lucky, covering 50 miles of some of the most rugged and beautiful scenery in the east. At any other time of the year, you risked shadows from the mountains and early twilight. But on this day, the evening sun was long and lingering.
One of the best spots to photograph the train was the Valley River basin, just west of Andrews, N.C., where mountains ringed one of the few pieces of straight and level track anywhere around these parts. The photo above of westbound train No. 47 was made at that location 36 years ago to this day. The sun, even on this day, was fading fast. As we made our way west with the train, we kept wondering if we’d make Murphy in the daylight. A time or two, we caught it in dusk, but I don’t recall ever seeing it in blazing daylight. But I am glad we tried.
A few years after this, Norfolk Southern came along, the branch changed operating patterns to have the local overnight in Andrews. The evening run from Bryson to Murphy went away. A few years after that the branch was sold, and part of it is now Great Smoky Mountains Railroad and another part slumbers as part of the state rail division rail bank. They keep it sprayed and cut. Still, no trains venture way out west on the Andrews-Murphy end.
But not so long ago, there was a train to watch and photograph, and enjoy — especially on the longest day of the year.
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