Photography By Ryan Hulvat
It’s 8 o’clock on a hot summer morning and brothers Jerry and Preston Lewis are waiting for me aboard engine No. 2000. They’ve paused the midnight-blue, 1,850-horsepower diesel-powered locomotive in a knot of woods outside Hallwood, Va., so I can board. “How ya doin’?” says Jerry with the good nature of a host welcoming a friend into his house. He’s a fifty-three-year-old Cape Charles native, sporting well-worn jeans and a neat T-shirt.
He and Preston, fifty-nine, have spent more than two decades hauling freight for the struggling shortline, whose 64-mile-length of track stretches from Pocomoke City, Md., to Cape Charles, Va., running along the original 1884 NYP&N rail line (New York, Philadelphia, and Norfolk). Once in Cape Charles, operators load the freight cars onto a barge that travels 26 miles across the Bay to Norfolk, Va., hooking up with another network of rail lines.
On board, Preston greets me from his seat at the controls at the far end of the engine room. He sits snugly between the side window and a console that holds a jumble of levers and switches, the decidedly non-high-tech mechanics of an old iron horse built in 1955.
The engine car is surprisingly roomy—about the size of a VW microbus—and besides the controls, sparsely equipped except for a chair on the opposite side of the compartment next to some side windows. Jerry offers me his seat, kept clean with a makeshift cardboard covering. From the high perch of the conductor’s seat, I’m provided a great view of the approaching track.
With “Pres” driving, it’s Jerry’s turn as conductor, meaning he’ll supervise the train’s operations and keep track of paperwork. The conductor also leaves the engine to shift freight cars on and off the train, while the engineer stays at the controls.
Pres pulls a wooden lever on the console, and the serenity of the wood is filled with the loud blast of a train whistle and the clanking of metal on metal. As the engine begins its slow, rattling progression down the rails, I settle in for what will be a three-and-a half-hour journey to Cape Charles.
Chugging along at a top speed of just 15 miles per hour, the train’s leisurely pace seems to mimic Shore life, but it’s the track’s condition that dictates how fast the train can go. (At one time passenger trains on a parallel track whizzed along at 45 miles per hour.) Before Larry LeMond took over as president and general manager of the Eastern Shore Railroad in 1996 and began upgrading the line, trains were kept crawling at less than 10 miles an hour. It’s an expensive proposition, both upgrading and maintaining the higher-grade track, especially for freight lines hard-pressed for cash.
The brothers long ago grew accustomed to the train’s slow pace. They once worked as watermen but stopped crabbing and oystering when the “water went bad,” says Preston. “Trains are like the water,” he says. “It gets into your blood.”
They find their own unique ways of dealing with the slow-paced twelve-hour shifts. “You have to like doing this if you’re gonna work with your brother,” chides Preston.
“It’s about near as bad as [working with] a wife,” says Jerry.
This morning the brothers began their 1 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift hauling freight from the Cape Charles yard north to Pocomoke City. But with freight drastically down on the shortline, our return trip south is empty-handed.
We continue along the track hemmed in by lush woods, and come to a byway, Mears Station Road, that heralds its locomotive history. As we pass the hamlet of Mears, we catch a glimpse of two old storefronts and a teeny clapboard post office. Nearby is the barrel factory that once cranked out the wooden containers used to ship produce by train. But the spot where the town’s train station once stood is now a tangle of trees and underbrush. It’s a sad sight that will be repeated all along the line.
When Pennsylvania congressman and coal tycoon William L. Scott first proposed a rail line on Virginia’s Eastern Shore to the Pennsylvania Railroad, the only railroad executive interested in the venture was Alexander J. Cassatt. It was Cassatt who explored the Shore on horseback in 1882 to plot the new railroad’s course, with locals lobbying him to place the lines along their lands. But Cassatt opted for a straight route down the center of the peninsula, through thick forests and farms. And he solved what had thwarted plans to build previous railroads: the way to traverse the watery gap between Cape Charles and Norfolk.
An engineer by training, Cassatt designed a system of giant steel barges that were fitted with tracks and could float train cars across the water to hook up with tracks on the other side of the Bay. Construction of the track began in April 1884 and was completed that October.
The NYP&N began passenger and freight service in November 1884. A year later, the barge operation—the first of its kind in the United States—began. It’s been in operation ever since, one of only two train-barge operations (the other runs across New York Harbor) on the East Coast. During its heyday, twelve barges crossed the Chesapeake a day.
A flood of people and commerce traveled through Cape Charles City, the jewel of the railroad, a community Scott began on 2,000 acres of farmland he purchased. Thanks to the line, produce from the South could reach northern markets easier, and passengers could make their way to New York City, Philadelphia, and points north much faster than the inland route.
Cape Charles itself grew to a peak of some 5,000 residents. According to LeMond, more than half worked for the railroad. Many other towns grew up along the line, creating a profound impact on the development of the Shore, which can still be seen today. In 1958, though, the Golden Era ended as the last passenger train pulled out of Cape Charles. Freight continued, but without the flow of passengers. Towns ended up isolated, entire main streets were mothballed, and jobs dried up.
Penn Central took over the line in 1968, but went bankrupt in the early ‘70s.
“This line, along with several others, was going to be abandoned,” says LeMond. “That’s when the two Shore counties [Northampton and Accomack] got together in 1976 and later issued bonds to keep the railroad going.” A series of operators ran it, until it became the Eastern Shore Railroad (ESHR) in 1981. Today, it’s run by the Accomack–Northampton Transportation District Commission, a public transportation entity of the state. The ESHR, like other shortlines, must rely on state grants, with its own matching funds, for its capital improvements.
The Shore’s rural nature, which gave it life, is now one of the main reasons the shortline struggles. “There is no industry on the Shore, which is needed to sustain a railroad day to day,” says LeMond. “Yes, we have grain, fertilizer, propane, and stone during season, but Bay Shore Concrete is basically the only industry on the Shore that goes year-round for us. So we live and die on overhead traffic, where we take it off other railroads like CSX and Norfolk Southern and pull it up and down the Shore and give it to another railroad.”
Most of the nation’s 550 shortlines are struggling like the Eastern Shore Railroad, which employs only twenty-one people. “For us, every year is a fight,” says LeMond. “We make adjustments accordingly, cut back on things, and wait for better times.”
Bloxom is the next stop on the line. As we pull in, a clump of abandoned, rusty grain silos, and remnants of the long shoots that fed grain and other farm products into the train cars, greet us. Nearby, there’s a group of weary wood buildings that once formed a booming downtown. A few old men sit on chairs in front of a defunct grocery store. An old-fashioned sign touting “cigars” peeks out from the boarded-up window.
Unlike many of its counterparts, the Bloxom train station did survive. But it’s not here to welcome us. It was bought and disassembled and is currently being rebuilt as part of an exhibit at the Cape Charles Museum.
The busiest place in Bloxom is its namesake mini-market/gas station. Preston “parks” the train across from the store. We climb off and amble into the mini-market. When the old-timers inside see me, they take the opportunity to jab at the Lewis brothers, “That’s all you do is give people free rides.” A few Cokes and a couple of packages of Nabs crackers later, and we’re back on our unhurried southbound trek.
Ambling through peaceful rural scenery, it is easy to be lulled into the illusion that working this country line is a carefree occupation. But “everyone who works on a railroad has a close call,” says Jerry. He tells the story of fellow railroad man, Thomas “Newt” Widgeon, who nearly lost his life during a switching accident, diverting a train from one track to another. Widgeon, Jerry says, threw the switch to send a train down one track and mistakenly thought he had sent it down another. The train hit Widgeon from behind as he was walking. Amazingly, he wasn’t crushed, but instead the train pulled him under and took his leg. He miraculously survived, tying his own tourniquet to stop the bleeding. “He should have been dead,” recalls Jerry. “He told us he kept reciting the Lord’s Prayer over and over. He never cussed once. He just said the Lord would take care of him, and He did.”
We pass the little town of Parksley next. The attractiveness of a groomed town square and beautiful Victorian homes is a stark contrast to many of the Shore’s rundown railroad towns. Here, the Eastern Shore Railroad Museum resides in the refurbished station that was moved from Hopeton, two miles north. Catching only a passing glimpse of the town, it’s possible to sense what things must have been like during the railroad’s reign on the Shore. Even the locals’ reactions hearken back to a simpler time. A young girl and her mother sitting near the station wave furiously at the engine until they are rewarded with the call of the train’s deep, drawn-out whistle. And the magic’s enduring: A farmer on his tractor and a dozen migrant workers motion for a whistle, while truckers on the parallel U.S. Rt. 13 honk a bright hello.
The brothers enjoy the interaction; it breaks up the monotony. Though they have had some exciting moments over the years, some welcomed, some not. Says Jerry: “It was about 8:30 at night, everything was real quiet, and I heard this tapping sound hitting the engine.” The brothers thought it was someone with a gun firing from the window of a building beside the track. “Me and Pres hit the floor. We called the law but they were long gone. Probably a bunch of kids, but it scared the heck out of us.”
Of course, the pair also has their lighter moments. “One night, this girl, at every crossing we come to, she pulled her top up and flashed us,” says Jerry between laughs. “Then we got to Hallwood, she pulled the whole works up. This happens quite often—it’s the highlight of working the railroad.”
As the morning wears on, the tracks lead us through the town of Tasley, over to the sea side of U.S. Route 13. We pass a community of gray squat buildings, a labor camp for migrant field workers.
In Onley, we see a century-old train station still sitting along the track. According to LeMond, at the height of the railroad’s prosperity, twenty-six stations dotted the railroad’s route through Accomack and Northampton counties.
Down the line in Melfa we again hug Rt. 13 and pass the black and orange billboard proclaiming “Tammy and Johnny’s.” It’s not uncommon to see the ESHR “parked” here while Pres and Jerry run across the highway for what they tout as “the best fried chicken on the road.” It’s too early for a sampling today, but I make a note to return.
Today, our engine looks almost forlorn, with not one freight car in tow. Just two decades ago, seventy freight cars a day was more the norm; nowadays, it’s closer to thirty-five. Its primary freight is concrete structures from Cape Charles’s Bayshore Concrete Products making their way to Iowa. Soybeans head one direction to the Perdue plant in Chesapeake, Va., then come back again as soy meal and soy oil for its Delmarva chicken plants. Fertilizer comes from as close as Chesapeake, Va., or as far away as Mississippi, ending up at farms all along the line, on into Maryland and Delaware. Grain, paper, even cocoa beans on their way to Hershey, Pa., pass through the Eastern Shore countryside.
Some days hobos are part of the cargo, too. “When it starts getting cool up there in Baltimore, we get a spurt of ‘em,” says Jerry. “At night they hop on the cars. I don’t think that will ever change. Some will even ask us when the barge leaves, like we are on a passenger schedule.” Like one hobo named Larry, who, about two in the morning, decided to walk on top of the cars when the train was moving, and up to the engine. “He opened the back door to the engine behind Pres. Now we always lock that door.”
Probably the most beloved tramp of the Eastern Shore Railroad is Fred, a sixteen-year-old orange cat who stowed away eleven years ago on the Norfolk barge, and settled into the railroad’s office in Cape Charles. As the railroad’s unofficial mascot, he has the run of the place; luckily, president LeMond is a cat lover.
The trip is winding down as we cross Rt. 13 and roll into Cape Charles. The main street across from the yard resembles a vintage model train village, a nod to its recent recovery from the long downturn that began when the passengers disappeared. A faded sign proclaims in ghostly writing: Eastern Shore Railroad, The Norfolk Gateway.
In a few moments Engine 2000 will be coupled to another engine already sitting in the yard, where it will await rail cars floated across the Bay on the 414-foot-long steel barge. If our engine had been hauling freight, the cars would have been pushed onto the barge, and then pushed or pulled (depending on weather conditions) by tugboat to the Norfolk side. The entire roundtrip operation, including any reordering of the cars, takes six to eight hours. But now, Preston slows the train to a crawl. He flicks a lever on the console, and, as it has for more than a century, a train whistle echoes over the Chesapeake tide.
