(The Huntington, WVa., Herald-Dispatch posted the following article by Bob Withers on its website on October 10.)
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – “Here comes ‘Roy’.”
Larry Fellure was referring to a locomotive, not a man.
He interrupted his interview and looked out a window of the Main Street Station in Walt Disney World. Momentarily, a tiny steam engine chugged into view, pulling five coaches ready to haul their first load of visitors in the Magic Kingdom.
Sure enough, it was locomotive No. 4, the “Roy O. Disney,” named for Walt Disney’s brother.
How did Fellure know?
“I can tell by that whistle,” he said. “It’s different — deeper and more melodious than the ones on the other three engines. They think it came off a boat.”
Fellure, a 66-year-old Huntington native, is making that dream Jiminy Cricket is always singing about come true. After a 44-year career as a clerk and dispatcher for CSX Transportation in Huntington; Peach Creek and St. Albans, W.Va.; Baltimore, Md.; and Jacksonville, Fla., he is an honest-to-goodness steam engineer on the mile-and-a-half-long Walt Disney World Railroad.
Railroads have fascinated Fellure all his life. He received his first of several electric trains, a tiny Marx set, from a special aunt when he was 4. His dad, Milford, used to take him down to Huntington’s passenger station to watch trains arrive.
“Our relatives came up from Tampa to visit,” he said. “They rode the train quite often.”
The little lad was impressed with the 78-inch drivers on the elegant “Hudson” type passenger steamers on CSX predecessor Chesapeake & Ohio Railway.
“They came slamming into the station and stopped right where they were supposed to,” he said.
At that moment, “Roy’s” engineer gave out with three short toots.
“Back up,” Fellure translated. “He must have overshot the platform.”
No. Fellure remembered that his colleague Joe Rebello, running the day’s first public train, intentionally passed a red signal at the end of the platform to make sure Disney’s automatic train stop feature was working. It was.
Fellure waved to Rebello’s fireman, Fred Stewart, a Russell, Ky., native and former director of lodging at West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain whose grandfather Wylie Albert worked as a mechanic in C&O’s Russell Shop. Then it was back to the interview.
Fellure began taking pictures of trains after receiving his “first good camera” for his birthday in the summer of 1956. He took it with him everywhere, even on Huntington High School band trips. When a train happened by, he threw down his clarinet and picked up the camera.
Already hooked, Fellure received more picture-taking inspiration from John Killoran and David Bond, whom he met at Huntington’s first Model Railroad Show in 1958. When they founded the Collis P. Huntington Railroad Historical Society Inc. a year later, Fellure soon joined them.
“They really inspired me to get into this stuff,” he said.
Another interruption: Colleague Ed Medina brought the railroad’s “backstage tour” group into the station and told Fellure somebody in the group knew him.
Huntingtonian Jim Cooper, another CPH member who was vacationing at Disney with his parents, entered the station. The surprise reunion must have been similar to thousands of them that occurred in railroad stations across the land generations ago. Only this time, the conversations revolved around trains and cameras.
That done, the interview resumed again — after, that is, No. 3, the “Roger Broggie,” puffed into view and Fellure scanned the crew for acquaintances — sure enough, there was fireman Jeff Bond, a Fairmont, W.Va., native.
One of Larry and Julia Fellure’s sons whose wife works at Disney suggested that dad also might like to. So, after the couple moved from Jacksonville to central Florida, Dad applied, and became a Disney employee — whoops; that’s “cast member,” because, after all, it is a show — in October 2005.
Many of Disney’s 70-some train crewmembers are retired and work a few days a week. Most of them have no prior railroad background; they were everything from CEOs, bakers and ministers to detectives and Air Force intelligence officers.
“I was assigned to Main Street Operations,” Fellure said. “They operate the double-decker buses, the antique cars — and the railroad.”
He trained for Parade Audience Control, and his first assignment was as a greeter, taking tickets at the Magic Kingdom’s turnstiles. But he quickly tired of watching the narrow-gauge trains depart Main Street without him. So he requested a transfer — and became a conductor.
“I soon found out that kids always want their pictures made with the conductor,” he said.
Fellure learned that the job includes duties not normally associated with the big roads. First off, crews walk along the track before the park opens, picking up trash thoughtlessly thrown off the trains by the previous day’s passengers.
Then there are the rotations. On one recent day, Fellure was assigned as the Frontierland greeter on the train designated Roundhouse 1.
“You get on at Main Street and ride to Frontierland as the conductor,” he said. “You relieve the greeter at the bottom of the ramp and stay for two rotations of your train. Then, you’re the station conductor — I call it ‘stationmaster’ — at the turnstiles in the station for one rotation of your train. Then, you’re conductor on the train again, around to Main Street, where you take a 20-minute break in the Main Street Station’s ‘bomb shelter’ (which is off-limits to members of the public even if they’re reporters AND jealous rail fans) and start it all over again.”
The rides have their humorous moments, too.
“One kid asked me, ‘What do you do when the batteries run out?’ ”
He stifled a snicker.
“We don’t use batteries on this train,” he told the child. “This is a real steam train.”
True. Disney “imagineers” found the four WDW locomotives, built between 1916 and 1928, in Mexico two years before the park opened in 1971. They had been hauling bales of sisal — a strong fiber obtained from the Yucatán Peninsula’s agave plant which is used in making rope.
As soon as he could, Fellure trained for the fireman/engineer position, too. Last July, he started running trains around the loop with the best of them.
Medina, having dismissed his tour group, explained some of the railroad’s Disney-flavored jargon.
“An engineer rookie is a ‘piglet,’ ” he said. “When a younger person starts training, you become a ‘pig.’ After six months, you’re a ‘hog.’ ”
“Piglet” Fellure has learned much in the locomotive cab, too.
“The track from Toontown to Main Street is on a 2 percent grade,” he said. “Every three or four days the ‘graphite ferry’ comes out and greases the rails with his ‘pixie dust’ to make it easier for the cars to go around the curves.”
Fellure hates to depart Toontown on the first train after the graphite ferry has slickened the rails — especially if it’s raining.
“I’ve done that,” he said, wincing. “You have to gently ease out on the throttle, or the drivers will slip. I’ve done that, too. But I didn’t leave any engine burns on the rails.”
Fellure doesn’t mind the grade so much if he’s operating “Roy.”
“It’s the easiest engine to run,” he said. “That throttle is so easy to work.”
So why does a retired man give up his rocking chair to run circles around the likes of Mickey, Goofy and Cinderella?
“It’s actually running an engine,” he said. “It’s real live steam.”
After the interview, Fellure rode with a reporter aboard “Roy’s” train to Frontierland.
In a tunnel, the rhythmic sound of the locomotive’s driving rods bounced off the walls.
“Hear those rods slapping?” Fellure asks, obviously enthralled. “That’s ‘Roy’.”