You never give up on a good locomotive

SPENCER, N.C. – I was late to the party Tuesday. An old friend, Buffalo Creek & Gauley 2-8-0 No. 4, was leaving town, and even though my flight from Milwaukee to Charlotte was on time, by the time I got to the North Carolina Transportation Museum, the boiler had already been loaded onto a truck. I did get to see the cab, flues, and running gear loaded up, but to me the heart of a locomotive is the boiler – it’s the vessel where the locomotive’s soul lives. I came to pay my respects to a locomotive that’s been in my life for many years.

This is a happy ending story. The locomotive, which gained fame as one of the gutsiest performers in regular service steam freight in the early 1960s in the Mountain State, last ran in West Virginia 50 years ago. It’s been wandering ever since, first at tourist railroads in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and at Spencer since 1978. From 1986 to 2001, the engine masqueraded as a Southern Railway Consolidation, and then it entered a long rebuild that was never finished due to the lack of funding.

This locomotive and I go way back. I first saw it as a teen in the 1970s at the defunct Southwest Virginia Scenic Railroad in Hiltons, Va. I was shocked and saddened to see the engine cold and lifeless. The next time I saw No. 4 was in 1986 when a group of Southern Railway retirees banded together to breathe life into the tired engine. That delighted me. I came to work on it too as a volunteer, though I never was much of a mechanic, I enjoyed the work on the locomotive. I recall retubing it in the early 1990s late into the night to meet a deadline by the headlight of an idling switcher and learning to fire it on sweltering July days. The engine had a healthy appetite for coal and truly loved to eat firemen for breakfast.

Many groups that try and fail to rebuild locomotives don’t want to admit defeat and find another organization to finish the job. I am glad that our group did just that. You never give up on a good locomotive. You find it a home – the right home.

When it came time for it to go back to West Virginia and its new owners, the Durbin & Greenbrier Valley Railroad, I hoped that I could be there to see it leave, and coverage of N&W 611’s rebuild allowed me the opportunity. At the end of the day, after the crane had set all of the parts on trucks and the running gear was pushed up a ramp onto a truck I noticed the chalk scratching on the surface where the engine and tender meet. It said, “BC&G No. 4, going home.” Sweet words, indeed, for an old friend.