Steam Locomotives

The St. Louis Steam Gathering

The three of us had been to shoot trains on it once before, and we decided that we would start our chase of the Cotton Belt Star there. The train was en route to the convention, having left Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the day before with restored steam engine #819 pulling the train.

A fair sized crowd was gathering about the time we pulled up. I took note of one of the faces in the crowd; Jim Boyd, then the editor of Railfan & Railroad magazine. More and more people arrived as the train’s scheduled departure from Scott City, Missouri, neared, until the area seemed littered with bodies, cameras, tripods and parked cars.

Departure time came and went, and loud conversations quieted as people listened for the first sign of #819’s distant whistle. Nothing. A barge passed on the river, sounding for the world like an approaching freight train.

Then suddenly, there it was. A faint, melodic sound of a baritone chime whistle. Conversations ceased. Louder, the distant whistle was heard again; followed by the appearance of a light haze of smoke over the trees on the Missouri side of the river. Momentarily the black front of the locomotive rounded the curve on the approach to the bridge, the shimmering glow of the headlight the Cyclops’s eye.

Now on the bridge #819’s engineer blew several times on the whistle, more for the benefit of members of a track gang working on the other track than for the crowd of fans waiting at the end of the bridge. Another series of blasts on the whistle and the engine emerged from the steel truss work of the bridge, taking it easy in compliance with the speed limit over the bridge.

As the rear of the train passed, the mad dash began. The crowd of railfans dashed for their cars. Camera gear was thrown into trunks and back seats. Cars that weren’t facing out to begin with jockeyed for position to get out. The three of us crossed back over the track to Rob’s waiting car and joined the pack.

Now the idea on a chase like this is to leap frog the train as many times as you can to get as many shots in as many locations as possible. The speed limit for a passenger train up the Chester Subdivision of the Union Pacific is seventy miles per hour. We were well behind the train, which by the time we got back to route 3 and turned north was rapidly accelerating to its maximum speed. It was off to the races.

And a race it was. Suddenly Illinois Route 3 became the track for a true stock car race. No fancy cars, pit crews or crew bosses radioing from a center stand. No, rather this race consisted of around thirty off the shelf cars, trucks and vans racing north at eighty miles per hour. Might as well have been a NASCAR race as cars jockeyed for position and passed one another. A few at the front trying to get alongside the locomotive to get the coveted pacing footage on their video cameras while the rest of us tried passing them to get ahead of the train.

Northbound we went. At McClure, the train was just a cloud of smoke in the distance. To this day I kind of pity the little old lady south of Reynoldsville, driving along at 45 miles an hour only to find herself being overtaken by the Indy 500. By Reynoldsville we could see the rear of the train. The pace slowed as the lead cars caught the locomotive and slowed to match its speed. By Ware we had caught the rear of the train, and we were just behind the locomotive by Wolf Lake.

For the last fifteen miles or so the road had paralleled the track, and we only made headway a few cars at a time as cars at the front of the pack passed the pace vehicles blocking the way. Just north of Wolf Lake the track and highway diverge. It was back to the races. 80 miles an hour we ran, headed for Gorham. I kept an eye for smoke behind us as we turned off of route 3 and onto the road into downtown Gorham. We skidded to a stop near the old railroad office and grabbed our gear, setting up for our shot as quickly as we could. And then nothing happened.

Five minutes. No sign of it. Then ten. Finally we heard a couple of fans talking nearby.

“The detector at milepost 92 got ‘im.”

That explained it. Every twenty miles or so is a device alongside the track which checks for overheated axle bearings. Long ago this task was performed by local station agents who would watch trains pass their stations all hours of the day and night. Those little local operations are but a memory now, with the automated trackside detectors doing the job.

Only problem is that with a steam engine a detector can’t tell the difference between a overheated bearing, the cylinders which are heated by superheated steam and the locomotive’s firebox. When the detector misread the cylinders or firebox (or both) as a hot bearing, the train crew was mandated by rule to stop and inspect the non-existent problem.

“Well, that explains what hole he fell into,” I said.

Before long a flock of fans pulled up, and moments later we could hear the sound of the locomotive’s exhaust in the distance. A billowing cloud of thick, black smoke appeared in the distance as the train rounded the curve south of town. Moving at a pace of better than a mile a minute, the train bore down on us with its baritone chime whistle sounding its warning for the one crossing in town. In a flash it was gone, a dancing red taillight in a haze of smoke receding into the distance.

Mary Rae McPherson / Along the Rails Blog