(The following story by Kathy Bowen appeared on the Daily Gazette website on May 30, 2009.)
MECHANICVILLE, N.Y. — When a new railroad company prepares a high-tech rail yard in southern Saratoga County, it will be building on land that has held tracks for 174 years.
It will also be building on the memories of the older generations that worked the trains for decades.
Mechanicville has been a train town for much of its history. City Historian Paul Loatman said Mechanicville’s relationship with railroads began in 1835, with the Saratoga and Rensselaer Railway.
Today, it’s the Pan Am Southern Railway that is planning to build a $40 million “intermodal and automotive rail facility,” projected to cover more than 200 acres in Halfmoon, Stillwater and Mechanicville. The new company is a joint venture by Norfolk Southern and Pan Am Railways.
The facility will have space for 371 trailers and 690 automobiles, most of which will be hauled away by trucks heading to the Northway.
Construction is expected to begin later this year and be completed by 2012, with some rail traffic beginning next year.
Mayor’s career
Mechanicville Mayor Anthony Sylvester grew up with trains passing behind his family’s house on Second Street. When he was 10, he made 25 cents a day delivering dinner to a switchman at the switching building, known in Mechanicville as the XO Tower, in the rail yard.
“I would wait for him to finish his supper so I could take the basket back to his wife,” Sylvester said. “I loved looking at all the switches and lights.”
As a teenager, Sylvester drove his father’s taxi and took rail workers to the YMCA, where they lodged, so they could rest between runs. Eventually, Sylvester was hired by the Boston & Maine Railroad.
“I worked in the paper mill until 1971, when it closed,” he said. “My father had made a lot of friends on the railroad because he had hauled so many of them over the years in his taxi. He made a call and said I needed a job, and that is how I got hired by the railroad.”
He said he spent three years as a fireman, which was an apprentice engineer position.
“I was taught to drive the trains by the engineer. It was all on-the-job training. My territory was from Rotterdam Junction to Boston, then Boston to Salem, Mass.,” Sylvester said.
He said he loved the job and worked hard to hone his skills to make more money.
“Once you get a train moving, it chases you,” he said. “You have to know the lay of the land and be mindful of what you have built.” Building a train means lining up and attaching the cars in preparation of leaving them at their destinations along the line.
He said hauling coal for the Pennsylvania Railroad was one of the best jobs he ever had, but many engineers shied away from the task.
“Every car was the same, and you were hauling 16,000 tons of coal. The trickiest part of the run was going over the mountain in Fitchburgh, Mass. Coming down a mountain at 30 miles an hour with that load was challenging,” he said.
“Those trains had the best brake systems. The coal was going from the mines in Pennsylvania to Concord, N.H. I would take it over, spend the night in a hotel and then get up and bring the empty cars back to Mechanicville. The job would be done in 28 hours, but I got six days’ pay for it.”
old memories
Anthony Fruci, 83, worked for B&M for 37 years before retiring in 1986. He said he liked being an engineer, but there were a lot of tragedies and mishaps along the line.
“I was in several accidents over the years,” Fruci said. “There was one in Boston, just coming into the yard. I was going about 10 miles an hour, and a woman missed the signal and pulled her car right onto the track. We hit her, and it’s a miracle she lived.”
Fruci said he prefers to remember the good times.
Although he worked for the railroad for more than three decades, for most of his career, he worked the “spare board,” which means he was on call for jobs rather than scheduled each week.
“It was tough on me and tough on my family. I’d get a call at 10 at night telling me I had to take a train at 11:30,” he said. “More times than not, I’d get two or three more calls telling me the time was pushed back, the train’s not ready, don’t come yet.”
He said he took Korean War soldiers to board planes to head off to war and he drove the animals and circus folk and tents for Barnum & Bailey.
“I never knew what I’d be hauling when I got the call to go,” he said.
Loatman said most of the old-timers in the area have stories about the railroad.
His mother-in-law, Barbara DeVito, came to the area with her Italian immigrant parents in 1916. “She’s 99 now and recently moved to the Maplewood Manor nursing home,” Loatman said. “Over the years she often spoke of kids during the Depression acting provocatively around the trains so the engineers would throw coal at them. The kids would gather up the coal because it was a much-needed resource.”
NEW BEGINNING
The majority of the trains stopped running about 20 years ago as trucks on major highways replaced rail traffic.
“Attempts to revive the railroads in the 1980s by Guilford Transportation foundered among labor-management disputes, leading to a strike, which the company attempted to break by hiring ‘scabs,’_” Loatman said.
The glory days of the railroad are expected to return now with the Pan Am Southern Railway project.
At a public meeting in Halfmoon in April, company officials told hundreds of local residents about their plans. The facility plans to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to David Becker, assistant chief engineer for Norfolk Southern.
He said trains up to 8,000 feet in length will come into the rail yard loaded with either cargo containers or automobiles.
Although residents living in modern subdivisions near the station and along the truck route leading to Interstate 87 are expressing concerns, Sylvester said he’s excited to hear the train whistles again.
“This new yard will be totally different from what we knew. You won’t hear the cars banging into each other because the merchandise wouldn’t take the beating,” he said. “There will be no fueling station here and hardly any idling. I do believe this will be a quieter and cleaner operation than anything we’ve seen.”