(The following story by John Andrew Prime appeared on the Shreveport Times website on April 14. Donald Joseph Richard is a retired member of BLET Division 183 in Houston.)
SHREVEPORT, La. — He stood speechless, lost in time, six decades after he last pulled a team throttle on the Houston-to-Texas run railroaders called “the rabbit.”
“Oh, man, when they took steam engines away from us, they took the thrill out of railroading,” Donald Joseph Richard said Wednesday deep in the heart of Kansas City Southern’s Deramus Yard north of Cross Lake. That wasn’t long after a stunned silence as he gazed at the 1921-vintage, New Orleans-made locomotive SP 745 he once operated.
“You can make a steam engine climb a tree,” said Richard, a Paterson native who pulled throttles for Southern Pacific Railroad from 1935 to 1979. “You can make it do anything.”
The 90-year-old retired steam engineer had some stories to tell as memories of his long gone iron mistress, an Mk-5 “Mikado” 2-8-2 steam locomotive, came back when he climbed back in the cab.
“They’ve still got that ‘Extra’ up there,” Richard said, pointing to an identifier on the front of the engine. “X 745” it says, noting the train as a special run, along with the unit number.
The engine was rescued from display at Audubon Zoo and has been lovingly restored by the Louisiana Steam Train Association. The engine, its tender and its four-car train are on a monthlong statewide tour that began a 10-day rest stop Monday in Shreveport. On April 23, it will head into Bossier City for two days of public display, then resume its tour, heading to the Ruston-Monroe area, then south and back to its New Orleans “barn” by way of Baton Rouge. The tour tentatively is set to end May 4.
Richard, who still carries his railroad engineer license from December 1943 in his wallet, noticed the tiny changes and the big ones.
“Whoa, they changed the brake valves. And they put steps on it! They rebuilt this all the way around. We had a ladder to climb on.”
Annie, his wife of 67 years, was back at their Shreveport home. With him Wednesday were daughter Mary Giddens, one of six children, and granddaughter Penny Zimmerman, one of 14 grandchildren. He also has great-grandkids
“I bet it would be fun to ride on and listen to,” Giddens said. “We’ve taken him on steam rides in east Texas. And he says there’s nothing like (steam) — it’s like heaven.”
KCS workers agree. While Richard relived old runs, yard workers came by and took photos.
“They’ve been up and down ever since its been here,” Willis Kilpatrick, KCS’ director of heritage operations, said as a couple of tough but nostalgic workers trudged reluctantly away from the great metal engine.
At age 90, Richard — you pronounce it Ree-shard, just like they do in Cajun country — was running people half his age ragged. He only grudgingly accepted assistance up into his old cab.
“He’s hale and hearty,” said Shreveport attorney Gary Fox, a rail fan helping LASTA with its Shreveport layover. “He still operates a mowing machine and cleans out his own gutters on a ladder. They try to stop him, but you can’t keep a good man down.”