Over my life I have lived in six towns in two states and of those six places I have never lived in a single town, hamlet, or city that was not served by the NC&St.L Ry. I see some irony in this fact; the NC&St.L certainly has a vast and firm intertwining with my soul ...

I was born at Dr. Edward's clinic on the town square of McKenzie, Tennessee. Less than one hundred yards from the point of my birth ran the right-of-way of the NC&St.L Railway.
 
About two years after my birth, we moved from McKenzie to Harding Ky. and again a short distance from our house was trackage of the NC. It was 1952. I cannot say I consciously remember the steam engines that by this time must have had only months of service left before they would be replaced by their new younger brothers, the diesels. There must have still been a few steam engines trudging the old Paducah & Memphis Division near my home, but I was too young to remember. I have always hated the fact that because the NC&St.L was such a progressive company, it was one of the first railroads in the nation to completely dieselize and so, I cannot remember seeing steam engines in every day service. [On Sunday, January 4th, 1953 a steam engine pulling a passenger train on the Bruceton-Union City branch chugged into Union City. This train was the last run of a scheduled steam engine on the entire NC&St.L system and this train was the last run of a passenger train on that branch from Bruceton through Weakley Co. to Union City.]
 
In about 1953 the wanderlust of my father then transferred us to Memphis. Though my father did not work for the NC. he did work for a railroad. I remember going to his workplace with my mother to pick him up. My father was a painter of freight cars for the Illinois Central RR.

In 1955, we moved to Dresden, again an NC&St.L Ry. town. Soon, to my great joy I was now living less than 75 yards from the depot and all the fun that can be had at a place like that. Mr. Sam A. Butts was the stationmaster at the Dresden depot in the 1950's. I can only imagine the hours I must have spent in that old train station talking with Mr. Butts. What patients he must have had in answering over and over the endless stream of question I surely fired at him. I remember him showing me every part of the old station. He showed me how the telegraph worked and how the "order hoop" was used to pass up the train orders to a train crew as it sped by. Mr. Butts even allowed me to stand on his desk and pull the handled cables that controlled the semaphore signal adjacent to the station.
 
Dresden was still a farming community in the late 1950's. Two of the primary farming commodities for Dresden and Weakley Co. were sweet potatoes and cotton. Those were two of the items that never seemed to be in short supply around the depot of my youth. I remember the cotton gin that sat about 1/8 mile north of the depot and directly next to the tracks. Because there was not an actual rail spur to the gin, all the large cotton bales produced at the gin had to be wrapped in burlap, tied with heavy steel bands and then transported to the depot platform for loading into boxcars. At any given time there have been as many as 250-300 bales of cotton lined up on the open platform of the depot; to a kid of eight, this was a wonderland of play! I spent many hours romping and jumping on top of those mammoth steel banded bundles of cotton.
 
Directly across the tracks from the depot was a cinder block building that was used as a sweet potato storage building. My grandfather at one time worked in that building sorting potatoes for shipment by truck and rail. At some point, these too were brought across the tracks to the depot for shipment by railcar.

In my minds eye, I can still see shirtless men working late into the night loading both potatoes and 500 pound cotton bales onto yellow striped, Dixieland (NC&St.L) boxes for shipment to market.
 
To the south of the depot stood a stockyard and next to that was a coal yard replete with a dump pit and conveyor belt under the track that took the coal up into the yard. Just south of the coal yard was the foundation of an old icehouse. The icehouse had been used before the tme of mechanical refrigeration to cool the produce in the railcars. During the 1950's the stockyard (operated by Mr. Jack Jolley) was still receiving hogs and cattle, Brooks coal yard still did a small amount of business, but the icehouse was long gone. Though all three establishments had had access to the NC&St.L at one time or another, none were by that time doing any shipping or receiving by rail.
 
I would hang around the depot even when there was nothing going on there. One of the greatest remembrances of my youth was one Sunday afternoon I was playing on the platform of the station when up pulled one of the 800 series, F-unit diesels. On this date I could not have been any older than 8-years old. The engineer who was setting out a car or two on the station team track (a track used for off loading materials not sent directly to the station) looked down and saw me standing on the station platform looking back at him. He must have sensed the fascination in my eyes because at that point he invited me to ascend the steps to the cab of the engine. For the next few minutes I must have been in heaven. He allowed me to blow the horn and to actually open the throttle on that beautiful blue and gray unit. I had played engineer of my Lionel trains but now I was in control of 1500 hp of real NC&St.L power!
 
Although I love the yellow stripes of the 40' boxcars and the GP-7, Geeps, (another kind of diesel locomotive) I must admit that my favorite NC cars are the lowly right-of-way maintenance cars and their associates, the bunk cars.
 
Just before I moved from Dresden in 1960, the State of Tennessee built a new Highway-22 bypass just north of town. The new highway cut a path across the NC. trackage from Gleason to Dresden and a new bridge had to be constructed to form an overpass over 22. The need for a new bridge caused the railroad to bring to town a work train and crew to build a shoo-fly (temporary) track and to construct the new span.
 
By 1959 the NC&St.L had been taken over by the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. The L&N brought to Dresden a dilapidated old work train still lettered in NC. reporting marks. They positioned the train adjacent to the station and the stockyards and within eyesight of my house. For the entire summer of 1959, I watched the bridge building crew come and go to their home upon the rails. As dusk fell each night, you would start to see the faint glow of kerosene lamps being lit. As the light grew a little brighter in the camp cars the men would begin cobbling together some semblance of supper. A short time later, if you listened closely, you could hear the crackle of a far off AM radio station picking up the sounds of country music or maybe it was that new rock and roll that was so popular at the time. Finally near the onset of fall, the bridge girders themselves arrived on the back of a freight train. I can recall riding my Western Flyer bike out to the construction on several occasions to watch the cranes lift the new spans into place. After a while, they finished the new bridge and from that point on the trains and the cars would pass one over the other in safety.
 
The bridge is gone now, as is the old depot. Mr. Butts died in the early 1960's. The cotton mill, the potato house, the stockyards, the coal yard, the tracks from Dresden to Union City and even the NC&St.L itself has passed into history, but, if I listen close enough, and if I let my mind go free, I can almost make out the low rumble of a far off NC&St.L, diesel setting out a boxcar or two at the Dresden depot late into a dark night and I return to a fond memory from my youth.
 
Terry L. Coats
President, NC&St.L Preservation Society and author of "NEXT STOP ON GRANDPA'S ROAD- History and Architecture of the NC&St.L Ry. Depots and Terminals." -www.ncstldepots.com