Trains

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Where our road crossed the Southern Railroad was a bridge. Not just any bridge; but a bridge with a name - Moonlight Bridge. It was made all of creosote timbers and on hot days you could find your way there just by the creosote smell. To me it was a magic place - far enough from home to be safe from parents - close enough to ride to on a bicycle and a serene place to hide and daydream. Serene that is until the morning or afternoon run of the Southern came through. At that point it was an adventurous place - loud and dangerous with rail cars almost near enough to touch.


Rail cars went everywhere - Augusta, Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbia - exotic places that I hardly ever saw. The cars were laden with coal, bananas, pulpwood, gravel and anything you could imagine. Sometimes the train would deposit a car or cars on the siding near our property and if the seal on the door was already broken, you could sneak aboard to see what was in it. Sometimes it would be the bananas left over from unloading. Then we would have bananas - green ones to keep for a week or two, ripe ones for eating, making ice-cream or puddings. Mamma would bake and fry bananas or coat them with mayonnaise and roll them in nuts for a "banana log." Soon after finding a nearly empty banana car we would find ourselves tired of bananas and ready to move on.


Once there was a wreck of the P&N right in front of our house. We heard the cars crashing and impacting with the earth in a very long, loud noise that seemed to last forever. The next morning I went over to the site and will never forget seeing the power of a train wreck. Cars were strewn on both sides of the railway. Some of them were dug into the ground up to six feet or so and some were in splinters. Nobody was hurt or killed in the crash - the engineer lost his job though. The story was that he had been nipping at the brown drinkin' likker all the way from Anderson and forgot about the tight curve coming into our area. The rails gave way and the train stopped prematurely.