Tennessee Valley Railway - Chattanooga

Tennessee Valley Railway
29th September and we are off to the Tennessee Valley Railroad for our first planned excursion. Chattanooga was once an important railroad junction and interchange point for river traffic which made the whole area a focus for the skirmishes which helped to decide the US Civil War, and this little preserved railway line climbs over the Missionary Ridge which featured in these exchanges. Railroads around here are perhaps an even more run-down shadow of their former glory than elsewhere in the USA, and little of the town's heavy industry remains for modern visitors to see, so there was something rather forlorn about this short line. It is not like the smart and really quite slick heritage railways we enjoy in Britain.

The railway's starting point is a time-capsule of a depot building; all polished wood and old typewriters, but the train is a bit of a let-down with a couple of old cars hauled by an old army diesel-electric engine. It is a sedate trundle up to Missionary Ridge tunnel which is an extraordinary narrow-bore job cut in the 1850s and very like the early railway tunnels on Britain's network. Our journey is illuminated by our conductor Curtis who gushes a torrent of facts in a Tennessee drawl, but with an enthusiasm for detail shared by train-fans the world over. So, our minds wander off a little onto the scenery outside of the car which, hereabouts, is suburban back woods and backyard South.  Sporadic isolated wooden houses with their accumulated junk and peeling paint loom out of the trees and scrub between periodic bridges where the old railway crosses a modern road. The gulfs in wealth which separate Americans are (again) brought to our notice on the trip, and later in the day it was not really a surprise to learn from the local TV news that another gun-murder had taken place in this area.

East Chattanooga is the end of the line where turning the locomotive on the turntable is a big event! Here there is an interesting collection of rolling-stock including the very last steam locomotive to be built for  a US railroad by the once mighty Baldwin Locomotive Company at its huge Eddystone works, but the large catalogue of vehicles in various states of dis-repair in a drab workshop suggests that this railway has the same problems of funding and manpower that dog struggling preservation schemes in Europe.

(I can't take credit for this writing or supply of information, Alan writes the technical information on my blog.)