Steam

March 30, 2024 – Day 15

Chester Frost Park, Hixson TN

Today was a travel day. By way of the dump station, we slid over just 9 sites. We had mentioned earlier that we needed to change sites in the same park. We had never done that before, it seemed inconvenient. Checkout for this park was noon, check-in was 2pm. Do we just drive around for 2 hours? At check-in the helpful ranger told us to sit tight and between noon and 1pm a ranger would stop by and give us our new paperwork for the new site. You clip the paperwork to the power pole at this camp. When you leave you put that paperwork in a special mailbox. This is the first time we’ve seen this setup.

We had the morning to kill, but nothing really to do, so Paul made bread and Susan got in another load of laundry. Paul had frozen several batches of dough at home. He took one out of the freezer the night before to both thaw and rise. And rise it did! We’ve been using a vacuum sealer at home and it works really well for freezing all sorts of things without freezer burn, including bread dough. We do think a ziplock bag would have just popped from the CO₂ pressure. (susan here: this looks of kind of sort of like a jellyfish to me. OK, not quite, but kind of sort of, okay people, work with me!)

Of course we didn’t have any flour with us. Paul contemplated his options and then buttered the cutting board and his hands to knead the dough. (susan here: it’s a dough with butter so…more butter is good?) He wanted it out of the oven by noon. Well, that didn’t happen, it wasn’t ready then. But it went in a little after 12 though. By 12:45 we still hadn’t had our paperwork delivered! Susan went over to the ranger station to see when we should move. The bread was still in the oven at the time. They told her that the paperwork was already on our new site (gee thanks for knocking on the door!). It had probably been there for hours. We saw the campers leave around 10AM. Oh well.

We drove the camper over to the new site. We made another rookie mistake. We forgot to make a stop by their dump station. Worse? This site is, to put it kindly, a challenge to level. We gave it a few tries but we had tickets for the TN Valley Railroad Museum and we were bumping up against our bug out time to ensure we arrived for our departure time. We finally decided to plug our RV into the electric. We had a 3:15 boarding tine and a 3:30 departure time catch a museum to go to before the train.

The museum was small when we had seen it the day before. Paul had thought that that was only the first section. It was the only section. But still, there was a nice collection of exhibits showing the history of the trains in the Tennessee Valley as well as the history of trains during various wars.

There were yellow arrows on the ground but there were so many and pointing in some many directions we actually ran the museum backwards, which was ok since the timeline inside the museum was confusing anyhow.

We started with a model train set, you can see about half the museum behind the set. Yes, the museum is that small.

They even included a See Rock City barn!

Behind that was a section on the importance of trains to the military.

Here we see the problem. Maybe it was a problem because we’re not train nuts. They’re cool, obviously. But we don’t live trains. We didn’t even know what a 2-8-0 locomotive was until we got on ours. There were about 50 of those signs around the museum, some free-standing, some on walls. After a while it just became “word salad” and it became hard to take it all in. If there was a final exam, we both would have failed it. But, the exhibits themselves were fascinating. So without too many words, here’s the rest of the museum.

Next up was a cool antique Studebaker truck. For all the signs around there wasn’t a single sign saying why the truck was there!

Susan figured it out though. See the small trailer next to it. It had a painted on sign saying “Railway Express Agency,” just like the tiny red diamond sign on the truck. There was a piece of vintage luggage in the truck and on the trailer. It was the baggage truck!

This semaphore was kind of cool. You could press the buttons on the pedestal and make it go up and down, cycling through the red, yellow and green lights. Behind it you can see a switch control station. At least we think it was that. Of course there was a long wordy sign above but that doesn’t talk about the control station.

And finally, proof positive that the Ticket to Ride map is wrong!

There is only one route to Miami, not three. (Hi Howard!)

Next it was time to get our paper tickets for the train ride. We strolled through the yard of mostly un-restored trains to get to the station. We did pass this one lovely caboose though.

After grabbing a quick snack at the Depot Deli we wandered through the gift shop and waited for the 630 to come in. We’ll put together a video of much of the ride but it is way to large to upload from our current campground. We’ll try to get into a library or something and upload. So here’s a still of the 630 from after our ride.

Built as a K-Class main-line freight locomotive in February of 1904 for the Southern Railway by the American Locomotive Company’s Richmond Works. This 630 was rebuilt in the 1920s, losing its box headlight and wooden pilot, in place of a round electric headlight. As larger locomotives arrived, 630 found itself in operation out of Ashville, on the Murphy Branch, pulling local freights until 1952 when diesels replaced steam.

Fate smiled upon the 630, and sibling 722, when crews from the ET&WNC RR came looking for second hand locomotives. A sale was reached and 630 and 722 became 207 and 208, working the 11 mile shortline until 1967. Southern Railway reacquired the 630 and returned it to operation in 1968. In 1978 Southern leased the locomotive to TVRM, after which it entered a decade of service at the growing museum in 1979. By 1989, the 630 required heavy work, which began after Norfolk Southern donated 630 to TVRM in 1998.

The work was found to be more in depth than expected, and took over 10 years, with 630 finally re-entering traffic in 2011, and not just at the museum, but on the relaunched Norfolk Southern 21st Century Steam Program, which took the rebuilt 630, now paired with 4501’s original tender, all over the Norfolk Southern system, even to Cincinnati. Today 630 continues to delight TVRM visitors, as it enters its 120th year (ALCO, Richmond, Serial 28446; February, 1904).

The passenger cars were from the 1940s. The interior reminded Paul of his train rides into Boston for work. These seats are far more comfortable with nice padding and cloth coverings. They reclined and had foot rests.

When pulling out of the station we had to back down a small curved section of siding to reverse our direction. You can see the two, short, curved sections of track in the satellite view below. The pink dot is the location of the ticket booth, and about where we were standing when the picture of the 630 above was taken.

The guide kept up a constant patter about the history of the track. We could see abandoned railway ties to the the left and right side of the track were we on. But they were well below us. Those were the old tracks, where the work was all done by hand, so a difficult obstacle was driven around, not cut through.

But the creek would flood, and flood a lot.

The 1867 flood rose about 60 feet above the normal high, submerging the tracks. The TVR decided enough was enough and they raised the rail bed by a lot, since they now had steam power to cut through those obstacles.

Next we went through the 984 long Missionary Tunnel. The tunnel was so tight that we only had about 8-10 inches of clearance on the side and 8 inches above. The smell of the burning coal must have been intense in the open section of the car up front. Our car was nicely sealed. The train is limited to 10mph while in the tunnel, Paul GPS showed speeds up to 22mph when we were outside. We suspect the locomotive could do better, but why risk it. The point of the trip was the trip not the destination.

Here’s a shot of the interior right about when we came out of the tunnel.

We then pulled into the railroad station that was the end of our line. There was an unexpected treat! Neither of us had looked into what the train had included. We got to see the 630 on its turntable and had a tour of one the repair/restoration shops.

We got to see the 630 spin around on the turntable!

We then went into the “Backshop,”

This structure, completed in 1982, is the backbone of our operation. It contains two track pits and is designed to service locomotives, passenger and freight cars. The drop pit is used to remove driving wheels from locomotives and passenger cars, while the overhead crane lifts heavy components into position.
Along the left side of the building are located the Supervisor’s office, airbrake repair room, day, locker and bathrooms, and machine shop and small parts storage area.

From a plaque in the Backstop

And just one more photo of 603. This was after it had backed down the Y and was coming up to the station. It wasn’t going out again, they were prepping a diesel-electric to take the dining cars out for the 5:30 dinner ride. What fun, we’ll have to come back.

Paul declares that this day, so far, has been the best day. Susan also thought it was a pretty darned good day.

We went back to that Italian place for dinner. It was good, but not great, not anything we couldn’t get in Keene. But frankly it was 2/3rds or less the price in Keene!

Back home we got a beauty shot of the bread.

Is today’s blog done? No! We’ve been looking at the weather forecast for Ennis, TX and it isn’t looking good. We’re still pretty far out from the eclipse, let’s see what happens. (Suspenseful music plays, it doesn’t get better.)