Numerous people posed for pictures in front of 611’s drive wheels one group, on the other side of the guardrail, caught my attention: Among three engine crewmen stood a much older man, wearing a reflective vest and carrying a small grip. Crewmen and other “official guests” mingled with us, and the vibe felt welcoming and friendly, even jubilant. By the time I made it down the steps alongside the Motive Power Building, a few other people had gathered, and soon we made quite a crowd, separated from the engine only by the low guardrail. Richard and I stood on the sidewalk on the Williamson Road bridge spanning the tracks, looking down at the engine – and then we saw a young fan I knew in the parking lot at track level, setting up his video camera only a few paces from her. In 2017 we went back again, this time for three days of trips similar to 2016’s (Richard's videos here and here and here) – and somehow the railroad’s attitude had completely changed: On the Saturday morning, we watched 611 come from Shaffer’s Crossing into the center of town, to stop right where we had seen her the previous year. Imagine my excitement to get a cab ride in 611! Whether before or after the photo I do not remember, but the friendly hostler let me stay in the cab while he moved the engine a hundred feet or so (and whether forward or backward, and why he had to move her, I do not remember either). I certainly did not look like an authentic engineer, but hey, I got to put my hand on the throttle. (Not a trace of that yard remains today, new development having wiped it away.) My negatives show that I got into 611’s cab that afternoon (I made a couple of exposures looking forward along the boiler through the engineer’s front window), and that evening my father made a photo of me sitting in the engineer’s seat in my polyester short-sleeved Oxford shirt, no hat covering my mop of curly hair. I do not remember when we left New York that Friday, but early enough that we saw the engine – and Norfolk Southern excursion stablemate Savannah & Atlanta #750 – in daylight in the railroad yard a little ways southeast of King Street Station in Alexandria. In July of that same year, my father and I spent a weekend chasing 611 on the former Southern Railway main line between Alexandria and Charlottesville, Va. You can watch Richard's movies of that trip here. main line while the smoke on the horizon kept getting farther and farther away from us. Well, we kept up with her as far as the Great Dismal Swamp: She ran away from us somewhere east of Petersburg, Richard pushing his Rover 3500 sports car up to 85 miles an hour on arrow-straight-and-dead-flat two-lane U.S. In April of 1983, my friend Richard Boylan and I chased the engine, then a year into her glorious second career (as the star of the Norfolk Southern steam program), from her Roanoke birthplace all the way across Virginia, to Norfolk. And for either of us to ride in that immense cab? That would never happen. My father made a photo of her that graced the pages of the Steam Directory guidebooks for a few years, and he says I said something like “Boy, I wish we could see her run.” I do not remember that, and certainly neither of us could have expected that she ever would again have a fire on her grates. The giant streamlined engine greatly impressed the eleven-year-old me, especially the vast size of her cab (accessible by a set of wooden steps). She sat outdoors at the Virginia Transportation Museum’s location at the time, next to the Roanoke River across from downtown. My initial experience of Norfolk & Western Class J 4-8-4 #611 came in the summer of 1976, when my father and I first visited Roanoke, Virginia.
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