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B&O Monongah Memories by Louis Alderson Baltimore & Ohio
B & O Monongah Memories by Louis Alderson
Soft Cover
Copyright 1988
60 pages
Table of contents:
Preface 2
Acknowledgments 3
About the author 3
Map I - State of West Virginia Cities in the Narrative 4
Map Il - Central West Virginia Rivers and Railroads, Monongah Division of the B&O Railroad 5
Map III - Location of the Sago Tunnel 7
Map IV - Richwood to Grafton Line, Monongah Division of B&O RR 27
Narrative Sections
I. Old C&C RR and Old Pickens Line Photos 1 thru 15 6
II. Changing Accommodations Photos 16 thru 28 17
III. Old Freight Workhorses Photos 29 thru 44 26
IV. Big Stuff Freight Photos 45 thru 55 38
V. Distant Points Photos 56 thru 72 46
Calling in the Flag 57
Appendices
Summary of Locomotives 58
Bibliography 59
Preface
In recent years I have encountered several publications about the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the information and photographs presented in them have given me immense pleasure. However, they have been primarily devoted to a period since World War II, depicting the decline and termination of the steam era. Furthermore, they are concerned with big city and mainline situations with only an occasional sally into truly back country.
My book intentionally concentrates on an interesting period from about 1937 to the middle of 1942 when the country was trying to kid itself that it had pulled out of the Great Depression. Ominous war clouds were hanging over the horizon. Nobody would have believed that the great economic and technological changes that were about to happen would doom most coal-burning machinery along with much of the prosperity of the great bituminous and anthracite coal fields of the United States. Eventually, diesel, or more accurately diesel-electric locomotives, would replace all the steam locomotives I show in these scenes. I never saw a diesel locomotive on any of the tracks shown here and my memories are unsullied by them.
Some may wonder why I, or others, did not do more railroad photography in our locale while it was still possible to capture some quaint railroad equipment on film during the late 1930's and early 1940's. For a start, trains and steam locomotives were such a mundane sight that many people took them for granted. During that era, railroads in the United States had approximately 47,000 steam locomotives in operation. The B&O alone was running slightly over 2,000 of them on its lines. Not surprisingly, steam locomotives were perceived in much the same unconcerned manner that passenger pigeons and buffalo had been by people when they were numerous. It was inconceivable that anything as common as steam locomotives could soon be extinct. For my part, I was handicapped by a chronic shortage of funds, lack of personal transportation and a legal system that required me to be in school during the times of the days and the days of the weeks that were best for ambushing trains in their haunts. Furthermore, much of the populace in our conservative rural region considered free-lance railroad photography as strange and possibly dangerously deviant behavior. Fortunately, B&O employees were usually benignly tolerant of my activities in their domain, and sometimes very cooperative. Otherwise, many of these pictures would never have been taken.
The B&O's tolerance of people was thrust upon it by circumstances in central West Virginia. The mostly rural population was comprised of rugged, self-reliant people who were masters of the country they inhabited. They were also the people who loaded and unloaded the freight cars and were cash customers for passenger, mail, express and other rail services. It would have been a major mistake in public relations to have denied such people the right to walk along railroad tracks, especially in roadless areas otherwise inaccessible, if not down right impossible, to get through any other way.
Given the foregoing conditions that understandably led pedestrians to stay on railroad tracks rather than sally across an inhospitable countryside, it may not be immediately evident why there were any impediments to off-track travel through those areas shown in many of these pictures where the countryside appeared to be tame, docile, domesticated and clear of all vegetation taller than the grass on a golf course.
The reason was bulls...not the railroad bulls, but the livestock kind. While the farmers were generally not unduly concerned about humans trespassing on their property, their bulls were, especially the extremely short-tempered dairy bulls that infested the idyllic farmlands. It was considered foolhardy to cut across grazing land that even looked as if it might harbor a bull, unless one was very fleet of foot. These bulls honed the reflexes of a whole generation of young men in our region who later became some of the most crafty infantrymen in World War II. For such men as these fresh from bull-inspired crosscountry training, jobs as loggers, miners, gaudy dancers and other less-than-white collar positions, induction into military service and the infantry basic, or boot training, that followed it was not a physical hardship. In fact, this introduction into military service, which terminated both my railroad and my photography careers in July, 1942, was almost restful for me.
All the photographs in this book were taken by me with a Kodak bellows camera on 616 black and white film that provided eight exposures per roll of film. No photographs taken by anyone else appear in it, save for two postcards. Likewise, all maps and other such renditions are original with this work, are based largely on personal recollections and are not intended to be precisely accurate
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