In its Heyday, U.S. 71 Highway connected major cities and small towns from International Falls, Minnesota to the Louisiana Gulf Coast. In the 50’s it ran south out of Kansas City through the village of Holmes Park, then Hickman Mills, Grandview and Belton. Holmes Park and Hickman Mills have been swallowed up by the big city while Grandview and Belton have major business development along their respective exits off Interstate 49. U.S. 71 doesn’t go through town there anymore. The old roads are still there but they have new names; Hickman Mills Drive dead ends at the Grandview boundary only to pick up again as North Scott on the old route through Belton.
I was in Belton yesterday. The business community is up to date and it feels like any number of once upon a time, small farm towns gone suburban. The old town part is off the beaten path. Main Street only runs a few blocks, lined with time weathered, stucco or brick facade, two story buildings; some refitted to other purposes than the original. Behind the stores on the north side, an old railroad spur is still in operation. The Belton, Grandview & Kansas City Railroad is a tourist attraction that runs outings on weekends. With an old diesel engine, a flat car with picnic tables, a passenger coach and caboose, you can take your grandkids for an old fashioned train ride or indulge yourself in nostalgia from another day.
Tucked up against the back walls of the buildings, an old steam engine with its tender and several box cars are on display. The doors on all the cars are padlocked but you can climb on the engine. From a distance the old work horse looked pretty good but up close you can’t help notice there are things, important parts missing. Then there is rust, cancer for all things made of iron. If you don’t keep things cleaned and painted, they die of rust. I climbed everywhere I could, looking for good photographs. Anything made of flat sheet stock had rusted through. The tender had been converted over to a big tank for fuel oil and the guy who did the shoveling had to find another job. I did my best to imagine the rumble under foot, the clack-clack of steel wheels agains the rails and subtle touch on the whistle handle that would give it a church organ sound. It was a stretch, even for an old make-believer like myself.
There was an old, creosote, railroad trestle on the road west of our house. It was on high ground with the train passing below, through a cut. Down the track a hundred yards or so, the hill fell away and the train popped back out into the clear. From out house, you could see the smoke and hear the engine before it came into view. My big brother and I spent a lot of time at the trestle. It put the jungle gym at school to shame. You could climb on the timbers, play in the dirt, throw rocks or walk the steel rail. The best place to be when the train came through depended on who you were with and how brave you wanted to be. It was good to be just under the lip at the top, so you could watch the engine coming at you, feel the vibration, see the smoke begin to load up under the bridge. At the last second you could jump up and around the pilings and take shelter on top of the bridge. The smoke and steam were intense and the cinders were real. From the creosote to the smoke, Mom could smell it on us when we got home and we had to convince her that we stayed on top of the trestle. I was there for the last days of steam engines; lucky me. Diesels took over and it was a good thing I suppose. They are stronger, faster, more efficient. But their horns are either on or off. They have no personality, there was never a conversation, no dialogue, no “WOOooo-WOOooo-WOOOOOOO-woo0OOooo”. A good man on the handle could play the steam whistle like a flute I loved trains then and still do. The diesel is as good as it gets now and my ears stay tuned for a far-off diesel horn in the middle of the night. There was a song back in the 90’s by Travis Tritt, Dixie Flyer. I own the first verse, by heart. It gives rhyme and reason to all the times when my mom needed kerosene on a rag to get the creosote off my hands and knees. It went:
Well the first thing I remember
Was the smell of burnin' cinders
And the sound of that old whistle on the wind
I always wondered where the train was goin'
But I never cared at all where it had been.
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