(The following story by Roy Hoffman appeared on the Press-Register website on June 25. J.R. Phillips is a retired member of BLET Division 140 in Mobile, Ala.)
MOBILE, Ala. — Although at age 88, J.R. Phillips is thin, stooped and battling congestive heart failure, time was, he says, when he stood a sturdy 5 feet 9 inches, weighed 180 pounds and had arms powerful enough to shovel tons of coal a day into the boiler of a steam locomotive.
At his home in Eight Mile, in rooms filled with pictures of trains, antique steam whistles and a big iron bell, Phillips recalls his career working on locomotives.
He ultimately became an engineer — one of the few still living who hearken back to that pre-diesel era — but he began his career as a “fireman,” responsible for stoking the boiler.
The Mississippi-born son and nephew of steam engineers, Phillips remembers toiling as a youth using a “Number 4 scoop” to dig into the coal and hurl it into the boiler. The fire kept water boiling, and its steam drove the engine’s cylinders.
His blistered hands sometimes “froze” when opening a boiler door to sweep out the ashes — muscle spasms, he says.
“It was hot. I’d get off, and the water would be sloshing in my shoes.”
There was a rhythm to the work, though, with the locomotive chugging through piney, Southern woods, along iron tracks and over bridges.
He makes a motion like throwing in coal and lowers his voice to a whisper: “I’ll take this one, you get another. I’ll take this one, you get another. That’s the smokestack talking to you.”
He smiles.
Even though Phillips describes his life as being rich in many ways — a long marriage, five children, and more grandchildren and great-grands than he can keep track of, and a passion for fishing — his stories about trains have a heat of their own.
From the first time, at age 3, he rode with his daddy on a logging run near Meridian, Miss., to an outing in his 80s, when he operated a restored steam engine as a tourist attraction in Austin, Texas, Phillips has spent the better part of a century fixing, operating and restoring locomotives.
“My nickname’s Monkey Wrench,” he says, explaining that he’s both a mechanic and engineer.
He owns a steam whistle he calls “Uncle Jim” because his Uncle Jim first owned it. He refers to engineers as “hogheads — because they like to hog up everything” and train conductors, who ride the caboose, as “pen heads — because they’re always writing things down.”
And once he became an engineer he worked for “Old Reliable,” the nickname given to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the L&N.
Monkey Wrench’s route on Old Reliable was along the Gulf Coast: Mobile to New Orleans.
According to Phillips, that route is 146 miles by rail. In the early days, when there was one rail, and orders were sent by telegraph or written by hand, the trip could take up to 16 hours.
That included, for freight trains, adding and dropping cars at various factories along the way.
“He knew every inch of the track,” says Louis Zadnichek, 62, a close friend of Phillips and regular visitor to his Eight Mile home. Although Zadnichek did not work for the railroads, he loves trains, and the two men met at a train club several years ago.
When they visit, and Phillips tells his stories, sometimes forgetting a point, Zadnichek adds in the rest.
Zadnichek, for example, reminds Phillips how he sometimes had to run his locomotive through the middle of blinding Gulf Coast fog.
“He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, but he could sense the track,” Zadnichek says. “The scary part was crossing the trestles over the Mississippi sound.”
A disruption in the tracks could spell disaster. “Only three-quarters of an inch flange keeps the train on the tracks,” Zadnichek observes.
During those years spent crisscrossing that 146-mile-long section of the Gulf Coast, whether passenger or freight train, Phillips saw a lot of humanity, good and bad, through his engineer’s window.
“To see how stupid the public is,” Phillips says, “you have to ride up in the cab of a locomotive on the main line.
“The guard rail comes down, lights are flashing, the bell is ringing, and you’re bearing down in the locomotive with your headlight on and blowing your horn. I’d see seven cars lined up waiting, and the eighth come up and goes around and zigzags over the crossing.
“Did he get across? Yes sir. If he’d had another coat of paint, he wouldn’t have.”
There were animals who lingered disastrously on the tracks.
“I killed 10 goats in one lick,” he recalls.
Cows crossing the tracks to graze were fatally oblivious, but dogs would “go a-runnin.'”
He would watch hobos hop on empty freight cars, but dealing with them was not his responsibility.
“Train whistle blows,” he says, as though repeating an old saying, “hobo’s delight.”
There were happy pictures, too: The folks in front of houses, on their porches, standing by the roadside, who saw him and waved. To them he was just an engineer blowing a steam whistle, waving in response, hurtling past at the same time every day.
Sometimes he got to know little aspects of their lives.
There was one woman, for example, who always came out to see the train. She disappeared for awhile, then returned. Phillips found out that her husband had worked for L&N as a “section man” — one of the workers responsible for keeping a 10-mile stretch of track in good shape. But her husband had died.
When she returned to the tracks again, waving at Phillips when he passed, she was doing so, it seemed, in memory of her husband and the tracks he had proudly maintained.
And there was a little girl in Biloxi who loved to stand behind a fence and gaze at Phillips when his great locomotive roared by. Phillips found out that her father worked for a coal company, and that her name was Renee.
On one Christmas Eve, “I bought her a big, pretty doll,” Phillips says.
He got off the train when it stopped and went up to the house to give it to girl. Renee was asleep, so her father took it for him.
Back on the train, he looked out of the locomotive, and there was Renee, in her nightgown, standing sleepily behind the fence. She hugged the Christmas doll and waved.
“It does something,” Phillips says, a catch in his voice now, “to your heart.”
In the 1950s, when diesel locomotives replaced steam engines, Phillips drove those, too, but a diesel, he says, uses a horn, while a steam uses a whistle.
The whistles he keeps at his house — stacked in a corner, like toy, iron soldiers — are ones that he used on his locomotives.
An engineer’s signature, he explains, was his whistle.
In addition to the whistle he calls “Mr. Jim,” there’s another, much smaller, he calls “Screaming Mimi” because of its high-pitched sound. Others he refers to by the manufacturers.
“All engineers can blow a whistle, but very few can play one,” he says.
He was a musician of whistles.
“There’s a trick to putting the tail on the end of the whistle,” he says of the sound. “A lot just bob off.”
The whistles in his home are silent.
But Phillips can recreate one sound that often filled his locomotive — his voice, singing, as though he’s still riding the rails, looking out the window at the coastal landscape.
His favorite song was the spiritual, “Peace In the Valley.”
His high, reedy voice sings out again:
“There will be peace in the valley for me some day/There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord, I pray/There’ll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I see/There will be peace in the valley for me.”