Modeling Childhood Memories -- III

I'm starting to realize I'm covering territory that another model railroad blogger has covered recently, why we like certain prototypes. Ralph V says, "It’s often been suggested that a lot of model railroaders prefer to create layouts that reflect their early awareness of trains." He especially likes the Penn Central as a result.

This brings me to a family trip that is even more puzzling than the one I mentioned to Roanoke, VA in my last post. Around 1955. my paternal grandparents moved to Lenoir, NC, where my grandfather worked for a wood chemical company in Hickory. Sometime around 1955 or 1956, a memory places me in a car on what I now realize had to have been US Route 421 southbound near Clinchport, VA, where I could clearly see a high steel railroad trestle with a lower timber railroad trestle paralleling it. There was a green diesel on the lower trestle, with the unique profile of an RS-3. (This had to have been the first RS-3 I ever saw, age about 8).

This was pretty clearly the well-known Clinchfield Copper Creek trestle, with the Southern Railway trestle below it. Another memory puts me later in the day in what must have been Kingsport, TN, because I clearly recall a concrete underpass lettered for the Clinchfield. At just about that time, I remember the sound of a 5-chime horn, loud and unique -- the first 5-chime diesel horn I ever heard. As an 8-year-old, I must have blurted something about how neat the Clinchfield Railroad was.

My paternal grandparents, I fear, were even more against my railroad interest than my own parents, and my grandfather, who was in the car, said something intended to discourage me. Didn't work, I guess. But if neither my father nor my grandfather was interested in railroads (and would have preferred that I like cars or baseball or whatever else), I'm left with the puzzle of why they appeared to have driven some distance through three states along the route of the Clinchfield, which itself was far away from either Lenoir, NC or New Jersey. I simply have no answer.

All I know is that this was my only sight of the Clinchfield in the flesh, and 60 years later, I still think it's really, really neat.