N.C. Transportation Museum, Spencer, North Carolina

The North Carolina Transportation Museum is located on the site of what was once Southern Railway's Spencer Shops, the largest steam locomotive repair facility in the southeast. This 60-acre site features an authentic train depot, antique and vintage automobiles, locomotives and railcars from the heyday of railroading, aviation exhibits, and North America's largest remaining roundhouse. They offer seasonal train rides, guided tours for scheduled groups, specialty tours offered seasonally, and events throughout the year.

We did take a train ride, which just took us down the tracks a mile or so and then back to the Depot.

Train Depot

Graffiti Cars

Tankers

Virginia Railway Express

Double Cars

After our train ride, headed into the Museum to see what trains they had on display. I've actually never seen a train with tires on it; but I imagine it must be for rides around the yard.

Merci (Gratitude) Train

This French boxcar was sent to American in 1949 as part of the Merci Train, filled with gifts of gratitude from the people of France. With the country in ruin after WWII, they were showing their appreciation for the 270 boxcars worth of food and medical supplies sent by individual Americans two years earlier.  Forty-nine boxcars were sent by ship, one for each of the 48 states plus one to be split between Washington D.C. and the Territory of Hawaii. Alaska was also a territory but did not receive a boxcar. Each was filled with personal gifts, including toys, clothes, art, books, and thank-you notes. Many of the gifts in North Carolina's boxcar are on display at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh.

These French boxcars are known as the Forty-and-Eight because they can carry forty men or eight horses. Built in the 1870s as freight cars, they were used during both World Wars to carry soldiers, POWs, and freight. 

Railroads have long been used to move military supplies and troops both on the homefront and in war zones. Their importance made them a target for aircraft and saboteurs. After D-Day, Nazi forces retreating from France twisted up rails and punctured steam locomotive boilers to slow down the Allies. The US Army's Military Railway Service (MRS), made up mostly of soldiers who had worked for civilian railroads before the war, repaired tracks and equipment and ran trains in France, Italy, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. 

In France they brought in 1,500 new American-built locomotives and 20,000 railroad cars, some delivered onto the beaches of Normandy by converted tank landing craft just weeks after D-Day. Between 1942 and 1944, the French railways under the control of the French Vichy government carried more than 76,000 Jewish people and thousands of other so-called "undesirable" people to death camps, often in boxcars similar to this one.

Merci Train Symbol

The flowers on the front of this French steam locomotive symbolize the American soldiers killed in WWI and buried at Flanders Field in today's Belgium. This symbol was placed on each boxcar and on gift tags accompanying each of the more than 52,000 gifts. 

As we walked through around looking at all the trains, our next stop was the Bob Julian Roundhouse. It is one of the largest roundhouses still standing in the United States. In the roundhouse the giant steam locomotives of the Southern Railway would come in for regular inspection and repair. At the height of operations during WWII, as many as 3,000 people worked in this and the surrounding buildings of Spencer Shops and freight yard. 

Work Yard

Contraption that sits at the bottom of the pit

Wheel Drop Pit

The wheel drop pit allowed workers to repair or replace a locomotive's wheels. In the roundhouse, five stalls were equipped with pits for dropping driving wheels ~~ the large power wheels on a steam locomotive. Other stalls had pits for dropping the smaller truck wheels and the wheels for the tender. Dropping wheels meant removing an entire two-wheel unit, attached by an axle. It was a delicate job and meant working beneath a locomotive weighing hundreds of tons.

Seaboard Air Line No. 544

Norfolk Southern No. 1616

The original Norfolk Southern Railway served rural eastern and central North Carolina from 1883 to 1974. Its trains carried mostly agricultural and lumber products from towns along its route. Passenger service ended in 1948. No. 1616 was built in 1955 to replace the railroad's last steam locomotives. It pulled freight trains until the railroad was bought by Southern Railway in 1974. Southern Railway reused the name in 1982 when it merged with the Norfolk & Western Railway to become today's Norfolk Southern Railway.

Why is a caboose red? They are red so the locomotive crew can see them clearly and they don't blend in with the other cars. Interestingly, some cabooses are also painted orange, silver, green and blue. Why does a caboose have windows in the top? The windows, or cupola, are used to look over the cars while the train is in motion. Some cabooses have bay windows on the sides rather than cupolas. The conductor, flagman and rear brakeman ride in the caboose. 

What do men do in the caboose? Two men ride in the cupola to observe the train while en route. They look for loose equipment, wheel bearings, or other problems with the cars. If necessary, the conductor can stop the train by throwing the emergency brake lever. The conductor has a desk for filling out his paperwork. Workers can also store food, cook and sleep in their home away from home. 

Why do most trains no longer have cabooses? The end-of-train electronic device, rather than the crew in the caboose, now monitors the train's activities and problems. There are also hotbox detectors that locate bad journals (wheel bearings) and dragging equipment. The downsized crews now ride only in the locomotive. Some local trains still use cabooses for crew safety.

The dispatcher  on the other end of the phone controlled train traffic from a remote office. Depending on the complexity of the line and the amount of trains, one dispatcher could control up to several hundred miles of track. One of the tools dispatchers used was Centralized Traffic Control. This tabletop system allowed them to control key switches and signals along the route. This is the Seaboard Air Line Railroad dispatcher in Raleigh, NC in charge of the line between Hamlet and Richmond in 1962. 

Before the widespread use of locomotive radios in the 1960s, train crews and track maintainers at locations throughout North America communicated with dispatchers by telephone. Concrete phone booths which sheltered phone equipment and employees using them were placed in yards and at sidings, water towers and along the mainline where crews might need to copy train orders, report information to the dispatcher, or request permission to occupy a section of the track. 

This guy is a machinist. Machine work was often routine but always required a lot of skill. Among the items on the locomotives repaired by machinists were the intricate running gear (driving rods, connecting rods, crossheads, and guides), cylinders, pistons, and wheels and axles. With the help of blacksmiths, they could make whatever parts they needed to complete a repair job.

Freight and passenger cars are just as important as locomotives to the operation of a railroad. Inspecting and servicing cars at Spencer Shops was the responsibility of carmen, once the shops largest group of craftsmen. Like workers in the backshop who could dismantle a locomotive and alter its size if necessary, carmen could strip a boxcar and rebuild it to serve an entirely different function. Spencer carmen used their skill to work wonders with rolling stock thought to be unserviceable. 

Blacksmiths did not produce horseshoes or farm tools. Instead they forged entire locomotive frames and other pieces of railroad hardware. Working with forging machines and steam powered hammers, teams of blacksmiths and their helpers turned out driving and piston rods, crank pins, driver axles, rolling stock frames, car side bars and handles, and heavy springs for driving wheels. They also forged most of the tools made at the site.

A mile south of the main shops, workers moved freight between different rail cars to direct goods to their final destinations. A shipment of peanuts from Georgia might be unloaded and distributed to cars bound for cities in the Northeast. Or a boxcar of manufactured goods from Chicago might be unloaded and reloaded into cars bound for southern destinations. Workers at the transfer sheds were either drivers or packers. Packers loaded and unloaded freight from boxcars. Drivers operated the forklifts or small tractors, which hauled freight between cars.

At the heart of the steam locomotive is the boiler which, if not carefully maintained, can explode at any weak point. Boilermakers were responsible for seeing that it didn't. As part of routine maintenance, they fabricated or reworked the layers of plate metal which formed the boiler and tested flues for blockages and leaks. They repaired fireboxes and brick arches, along with the braces, rods, and stay bolts that supported these structures. Boilermakers were responsible for water tanks and drums, grates and ash pans, pilots, steel cabs, and running boards. The coming of diesel power made most of their extracting and once dispensable skills obsolete.

Laborers performed any physical work at the Spencer shops not assigned to craftsmen or helpers. They loaded trash and waste onto wagons and carted it off. They kept buildings as clean as possible and cleaned locomotives at the roundhouse before they were returned to service. Laborers also added sand to locomotives and  filled their tenders with coal and water. Though these men received the lowest pay of anyone else, they were paid better than unskilled workers at other industries in the area. 

To the public, the most familiar railroad workers are trainmen -- crews that run the train. In the steam era, trainmen included engineers, firemen, conductors, and brakemen. 

Accidents harmed workers as well as equipment. Spencer did have its human tragedies, although they were rare enough to achieve legendary status. Perhaps the worst occurred in 1911, when a young apprentice fell into a pit filled with caustic lye used for cleaning locomotive parts. He left behind much of his skin when he was fished out but remained alive for several hours in extreme agony before dying. The tale passed from generation to generation as a warning that one should be constantly aware of safety at the shops.

Railroad jobs generally brought higher pay than could be found in other industries and offered good benefits. In Spencer those with relatives already working for the Southern Railway had the best chance of getting a job. Railroading became a family affair. The highest wages went to the top trainmen: engineers and conductors. This caused jealously among the craftsmen, who felt they deserved equal pay. But even lower paid railroad workers could expect twice the earnings of their neighbors in nearby textile mills.

This is a washbasin that was used by the railway workers for cleaning up. The foot pedal at the bottom controlled water flow to the sprinkler in the center. Soap dispensers were attached to the top of the sprinkler.

Workers pose with an Atlantic-type 4-4-2 passenger locomotive built in 1906 in Richmond by American Locomotive Company. This circa 1920 photograph may have been taken after the engine was rebuilt in Spencer's backshop.

Southern Derrick & Boom Car

This is a full size replica of the Raleigh, the first locomotive used by the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad Company. Built in England in 1836, the original Raleigh saw three decades of service in North Carolina, including use by both sides during the Civil War. 

A track gang foreman rode the yellow velocipede and inspected conditions along the right-of-way. He spotted defects and gave work orders to his gang. The gas powered track speeder replaced the velocipede after the 1940s. 

A lining bar gang consisted of several men, known as gandy dancers, who manually aligned railroad track onto the ties. Each crew had a foreman and 10 to 30 laborers or "gandy dancers." This term generally referred to a track maintenance worker, but its exact origin is unknown. A gandy, also called a lining bar, is used to align track with manual leverage. Laborers picked up the rail, using rail tongs, placed it on tie plates, and spiked it down to the ties. In order to keep a fluid motion, many crews sang songs. Along with blues and rag, they sang African spirituals that had been passed down through slavery.

A lining bar gang on the Richmond and Danville Railroad, a predecessor of the Southern Railway. Manual track laying techniques did not change from the 1800s until the 1940s, when the first machines were used to lay track.

The top headlight is a Gyralight, which swivels about in a figure-eight pattern for visibility. The white light was used at night, while the red was added later to prevent a repeat of North Carolina's deadliest wreck. In 1943, a southbound Champion derailed its last three cars near Rennert, NC. Nobody was seriously hurt until a northbound Champion hit the derailed cars at 80mph, killing 72 and injuring 187. The red light turns on automatically when the air brake hoses are separated, warning other trains not to pass.

When the first train arrived in Asheville in October of 1880, western North Carolina's economy and culture changed dramatically. Asheville was a sleepy crossroads community and more than doubled in size from slightly over 4,000 to 10,000 in ten years. Mountainsides were denuded as lumber barons ravaged the region's forests and miners scarred the hillsides looking for iron ore, feldspar, mica, barite, and copper. The large scale extraction of these natural resources was made possible and practicable by the coming of railroads. 

Summer visitors began to arrive by train, including George Washington Vanderbilt and his mother in 1887. Tourism and health spas burgeoned and businesses and towns sprang up along the rail lines. Black Mountain, Saluda, Hendersonville, Hot Springs and Waynesville became vacation destinations in what the railroad promoted as "The Land of the Sky." 

The Western North Carolina Railroad had been completed from Salisbury to Old Fort at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains by 1869. Construction came to a halt because of the corruption associated with the Reconstruction Era NC government. The President of the WNC Railroad George W. Swepson, with the aid of a carpetbagger, stole $4 million in state construction bonds, leaving the Railroad broke. The scandal rocked the railroad and it played a role in the impeachment of Governor William W. Holden. 

Railroad jobs were as dangerous and deadly as those in logging and mining. Over 400 laborers, mostly convicts, lost their lives building the railroads across the Blue Ridge. The deadly collapse of the Swannanoa Tunnel in 1879 killed 23 workers and drowned 19 convicts in the Tuckasegee River in 1883 as they went to work on the Cowee Tunnel highlighted the hardships and hazards of rail construction.

Climax Locomotive, Cradle of Forestry

The Climax Locomotive was used in clear cutting of forests. There were two different logging railroads that crisscrossed Mt. Mitchell, the highest mountain in the Eastern U.S. at 6,684 feet. The western slope was logged by Charles Perry, and the eastern slope was logged by Perley & Crockett using switchbacks up the Black Mountain range. Perley & Crockett also ran excursion trains over its logging line and the ride to the peak proved upsetting to many tourists who condemned the deforestation of the mountain. Many of them joined the conservationists who were calling for the protection of the Southern Appalachians through establishment of State and National Parks and National Forests.

Long before two-way radios, railroad workers communicated with each other by lanterns, flags, train whistles, and hand signals. Some hand signals still widely used by train crews. 

US Army Hospital Car

1918 Model T Depot Hack

Rolls Royce 20/25

McCormick-Deering Farmall H

The Farmall H was produced by International Harvester under the Farmall brand from 1939 to 1954.

Coot A Amphibian

The Coot A Amphibian is an airplane built to land and take off on water or land. Bill Motes built this airplane so over a 5-1/2 year period Motes built this plane in his backyard shop. The hull is fiberglass, with the tail section and boom made of aluminum. The wooden wings are covered with aircraft fabric and fold back so the plane can be loaded on a trailer and launched like a boat. 

Bill Mote's Amazing Rotary Engine

Chevrolet Corvair 95 Rampside

1954 Ford F100 Custom Cab

Wouldn't you love to see gasoline prices back to these? Seeing that I was only three years old when this truck was built and these prices were the norm, by the time I was ready to drive prices had gone up about 40¢. 

A piece of Americana, 1997

Garrett Morgan's Traffic Signal

In the 1920's early traffic signals were just as primitive as the automobiles they governed. Inventors around the world thought up improvements, including Garrett Morgan. His traffic signal was not the first to include a warning position (today's yellow light), but it was sold to General Electric for $40,000.

Garrett Morgan was also known as the "gas mask hero." Morgan promoted his gas mask by disguising himself as "Big Chief Mason" and surviving 20 minutes in a poison filled tent. In 1916 he and his brother donned masks and helped rescue several men after a tunnel explosion under Lake Erie. 

Rauch & Lang 1905 Electric Car

Instead of a steering wheel, it has a tiller lever which steers and a single lever for power and brake. Pushed forward it connects the batteries to the motors and pulled back it slows the car using a drum brake on the motor shaft. The car can travel 25mph in forward or reverse.

Steinlauf Uno-Bike (Chicago 1919-1948)

The rider sits inside the single wheel of this bicycle and the pedaling propels the outer wheel. There were problems with riding this bicycle, as when it was stopped too suddenly, the rider will continue to rotate inside the wheel.

Ingo Steel Exercycle

Also known as the "Ingo Bike" this two-wheeled machine features a unique method of propulsion. Resembling a scooter more than a bicycle, it features an off center (mechanically eccentric) rear wheel, allowing the rider to propel themselves forward by bouncing up and down while riding. 

Dandy Horse

This Dandy Horse shows the predecessor to the bicycle. First patented in 1818 by two Germans, their Laufmaschine or "running machine" was propelled by the rider running or walking while sitting on the Dandy Horse, and picking up their legs when they achieved the desired speed. This type of vehicle was eventually known as a velocipede throughout Europe, and improvements on it would give us the bicycle that we know today.

When Jim and I were in Wapakoneta, Ohio in 2019 we visited the Bicycle Museum in Bremen. That place was remarkable ~~ it has unique and one of a kind bicycles, with a history of some of them. It also hosts some famous bikes, such as those of Robin Williams and Pee Wee Herman ~ really!