MISSISSIPPI CENTRAL RAILROAD

I grew up on the Mississippi Central Railroad about half way between Mile Post 33 and 34 from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in the small town of Bassfield.  The Mississippi Central Railroad ran from Hattiesburg to Natchez.  Natchez was 116 miles from Bassfield. Our house was located beside the railroad.   

In the 1930’s, I watched practically every train that passed.  I believe every hobo stopped at our house. We called them tramps.  My Dad always said, “Feed a hungry man.”  However, he believed in the work ethic also, and required the hobo to cut some stove or firewood before Mother would give them some food. 

Until the mid 1930’s, we had four passenger trains pass our house each day.  I always ran to the crossing and waved my arm up and down so the engineer would blow his whistle many times.  I remember two of the engineers quite well.  One was Tynes Hatten and the other was Rube Evans.  They always waved and blew their whistle at me. Tynes Hatten was the engineer on engine 98 and Rube Evans was the engineer on engine 99. They were identical 4 4 0s built by the American Locomotive Company.  Engine 98 is the only Mississippi Central steam engine still in use and it’s on the Wilmington and Western Railroad as a tourist train.  Engine 99 became famous because of colliding with a school bus in Bassfield in 1934.

The passenger engines were 4 4 0s with an engineer and a fireman.  Behind the tender was the baggage car and then the passenger cars.  The Mississippi Central passenger cars were segregated.   There was a conducter and porters on the train.  In the baggage car there were two individuals.  One sorted the mail and the other dealt with the railway express shipments and baggage.   I became acquainted with Mr. Lee Hemby who worked as a porter and conducter on the Mississippi Central Railroad for about 50 years.  After he retired he would come out to Bassfield and we would follow the then Illinois Central Gulf Freight Trains.  Some of these trains would be two miles long and have 250 cars. We went to Hattiesburg on several occasions and followed the freights all the way to the big Georgia Pacific paper mill near Wanilla, Mississippi.  The Illinois Central Gulf routed all its Northbound traffic out of Mobile thru Bassfield to Memphis from 1975 to about 1980. This was during the time that the ICG was rebuilding its rail line from Hattiesburg to Jackson. 

Until the mid thirties, passenger Train 1 arrived from Hattiesburg to Bassfield at 7:34 a.m.  It arrived at Carson 10 minutes later and Prentiss at 8:00 a.m.; Silver Creek at 8:26 a.m.; Wanilla at 8:50 a.m.; Brookhaven at 9:51 a.m.; and Natchez at 12:45 p.m.

Eastbound passenger Train 2 arrived in Bassfield from Natchez at 10:14 a.m. It arrived in Hattiesburg at 11:45 a.m. 

The evening passenger train 3 headed Westbound to Natchez arrived in Bassfield at 3:58 p.m. and got to Natchez at 9:05 p.m.

Passenger Train 4 Eastbound got to Bassfield at 6:26 p.m. and Hattiesburg at 7:45 p.m.

It was the two evening trains on Sundays that we would meet at the depot.  I enjoyed watching the engineer, Mr. Rube Evans, oiling the train around the drivers when he stopped at the depot and looking at his watch studying how far behind schedule he was and whether he could make up any lost time.

The maximum speed of passenger trains was 40 miles per hour.  On one occasion, I remember Mr. Rube saying he could get up to 50 miles per hour between Epley and  Hattiesburg as the track was relatively straight and he could make up lost time and arrive in Hattiesburg on time.      

In 1937, the Mississippi Central on its east bound passenger train also had freight cars or what we called “a mixed train.”  I remember that my sister, Myra Louise Deen, got on the mixed train one afternoon to Hattiesburg and then to Newport News, Virginia. The mixed train did not last very long.

On several occasions my Mother and I rode the passenger train to either Silver Creek or Wanilla to visit my Grandmother, Myra Greer, at Monticello, Mississippi.  My uncle, Ted McCullough, or his daughter, Dot, would meet the train.  Not long before the passenger train was taken off, my Mother and I rode from Brookhaven to Bassfield.   I always hoped that I could ride the train to the far west, which I then thought to be Natchez.

Our next door neighbors were the Holland family. Mrs. Holland’s father was Sam Harper, who lived to 99 ½ years.  He fought in the Civil War and following its end, he walked from Atlanta to Bassfield.  His son, Sam, Jr., was a conductor on one of the passenger trains.  I thought he was rich because he would always ride out to Bassfield from Hattiesburg in a four hole Buick automobile. Uncle Sam, the confederate veteran, often walked the half mile to the depot to meet Sam Jrs’ train.

All freight trains coming east from Natchez had difficulty getting over Geneva Hill at Carson, about four miles northwest of our home. This was the ruling grade between Natchez and Hattiesburg and all steam power and tonnage had to be computed based on this grade. Many times, at night, I have heard the steam engines trying to get over the hill. They would sound like they were saying “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” until they started slipping.  On many occasions, they had to double the hill. In other words, they would cut the train in half and put one half in the siding at Carson and double back and get the remaining train before proceeding towards Hattiesburg. This was very time consuming but there is more than one way to skin a cat.

The West Bound Freight train number 51 in the1930s departed Hattiesburg at 8:05 P. M. and passed through Bassfield at 10:03 P.M; Prentiss at 10:43 P.M. and got to Brookhaven at 1:10 A.M. where it met the through East Bound Freight number 52 and later arrived in Natchez at 5:25 A.M.  The East Bound Freight Train departed Natchez at 7:00 P.M. and passed through Prentiss at 3:53 A.M.; Bassfield at 4:37 A.M. and arrived at Hattiesburg at 7:30 A.M.

In addition to the through trains, we had local freight train 11 which departed Hattiesburg at 7:00 A.M.and got to Bassfield at 10:14 A.M. and only went to Brookhaven and got there at 2:15 P.M. The local only ran on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Local 10 ran from Brookhaven on Tuesday. Thursday and Saturday to Hattiesburg and got to Bassfield at 11:20 A.M.

A lot of the trains had to get water from the water tower at Prentiss which was located on the East side of Whitesand Creek.   I remember the west bound morning passenger train would always stop there and take on water.  On other occasions I saw freight trains like wise take on water at Prentiss.   At other times the Mississippi Central would run shopped engines out to the Y just beyond Jay Bird Creek and turn them around and head back to Hattiesburg.  When additional power was needed to get over Geneva hill at Carson they would send a helper engine to assist the other engine in climbing the hill. After the Mississippi Central got Diesel engines they had no difficulty in getting over Geneva hill. The days of steam on the Mississippi Central Railroad were fascinating to me. Maybe I should have been an engineer.

  

Riding the passenger train during the depression on the Mississippi Central was not too expensive.  The Railroad only charged a penny a mile.  You could ride from Hattiesburg to Natchez for $1.50 cents. However, money was scarce and I can remember my parents wondering how they were going to pay Home Owners Loan Corporation a $8.00 note each month.

About once a year the Mississippi Central would run the president’s special from Hattiesburg to Natchez and return the same day.  It was exciting to watch as it went very fast and was pulled by one of the passenger engines or the Mikado 120s.  On one occasion some officials of the Rutland Railroad were on the president’s special which consisted of the office car and a passenger car.

Until around the mid 1930s, on July 4^th each year the Mississippi Central would commemorate the holiday by giving all its employees a picnic on the banks of Pearl River. It had the engine decorated and had eight cars.  

One of the exciting times occurred when circus trains belonging to Barnum and Bailey and/or Cole Brothers would pass our house.  Mr. Will Kerley of Bassfield would always feed the animals on the circus train when it stopped at Bassfield.  I saw my first elephant on a circus train at Bassfield.

One of my classmates at Bassfield, Hurd Robbins, lived in a house Southeast of Bassfield in the Melba community.  His Parents home was about fifty feet from the railroad.  I spent the night with him and I will never forget the trains going thru that awoke me.  It sounded like they were coming through the house.                                                                                                                                          

Not all of the conductors of the various trains were nice to me.  Around 1938, the work train which was pulled by Engine 115 was doing some work by our house.  I went up to the railroad and saw the caboose and started walking toward it.  About that time the conductor, Jack Ptaschek saw me and told me, “You little S.O.B. get your ass off the track”.  Actually he was warning me that it was dangerous to get close to the caboose as it could be knocked backwards quite a ways once the engine connected to the train. Anyway he was the first man to ever call me an S.O.B.  Later on in my life I heard it so often that I was beginning to think it was my name.

My Daddy had a steam powered cotton gin in Bassfield.  He also had a spur off the railroad to the cotton seed house where the cotton seed were loaded into a box car for shipment to Jackson, Mississippi.  A local came by the gin six times a week.  On one occasion, I was permitted with others to ride in an empty car that was being switched.

The steam cotton gin had a boiler which was fired by a black gentleman whose name was Luke Otis.  The steam generated a huge wheel on which there were many belts that operated the gin.  Luke was also used by my parents as my babysitter when they would go shopping in Hattiesburg or Columbia.  He would always give me some candy.  Today, if a parent left their child in such a dangerous place the authorities would place the child in a foster home.

Mr. Will Burkett managed the gin for my father.  Denton Reddock assisted him and in  later years lost one of  his  hands in another gin.  Around 1936, my Dad sold the gin to Ernest Clinton who operated it for a couple of years until it burned.  Mr. Clinton also had a movie theater in Monticello where he lived known as the Mono.  Many times I would ride with him over gravel roads to visit my Grandmother.  Mr. Clinton drove very fast, sometimes doing 75 mph on narrow gravel roads.           

In addition to growing cotton, we also sold our red Irish potatoes on a platform by the railroad.  I helped load the potatoes onto the box cars.  We also had a cucumber patch and we took our cucumbers to the platform and sold them.  They were then loaded in vats and put in salt.  They were later shipped via rail to Wiggins, Mississippi, to Brown-Miller Company.

Our big money crop was cotton.  My Dad in the 1930’s had three farms and almost 900 acres of land.  We farmed this land with mules pulling the plows. We picked the cotton by hand by placing same in a cotton sack until we filled the sack. We then took the sack of cotton to the barn where we weighed it and put it in the cotton house.  When we got 1200 pounds, we would load the cotton onto a mule wagon and take it to the gin.  We tried to get a 500 pound bale of cotton.  The rest of the cotton was seed which was extracted from the lint cotton by the gin.

Bassfield was noted for the uniformity of the length of its lint.  The cotton lint was sometimes used in making gun powder.  Two other places in the world were noted for its uniformity in the length of its cotton lint.  These were Cairo, Egypt and Yuma, Arizona. 

The cotton was sold on what we called the cotton platform on the siding across from the depot.  There were two other gins in Bassfield during the 1930’s.  One was owned by the Faler Brothers, John Adam, Andrew, and Martin and the other was owned by Mississippi Power Company and operated by Mr. Beasley as well as the Ice House and Mississippi Power Company. There were two other gins near Bassfield in the country, Wilkes and  Lipsey.  I have seen the Mississippi Central local freight train pick up twenty five box cars loaded with bales of cotton at Bassfield for shipment at one time.  A cotton gin could produce 48 bales of cotton in a 24 hour period.    

We had several cotton buyers who worked on the cotton platform.  There were O. T. Hathorn and Sons, A. F. Carraway Store and Ray Hathorn.  When a bale of cotton was taken to the platform by the farmer, they would cut the bale and examine the cotton and make a bid therefor.  One of the most colorful buyers was Bill Doris, son-in-law of O. T. Hathorn. Gus Carraway bought for AF Carraway Store and Ray Hathorn for the store owned by Ray and his brothers Kermit and Billy Hathorn.

We boys used the cotton platform as a meeting place.  During potato season we would take the culled potatoes and see who could throw them through a knot hole in a big warehouse owned by Faler Brothers just north of the cotton platform. Kermit Hathorn was the champion.  We also played Hide-And-Go-Seek and Come to Court.  In addition, we talked extensively about the girls.     

In the spring, we had to have fertilizer and this was shipped into Bassfield by the local freight train.  Mules, not tractors, during the depression, provided the power for                plowing the land.  Will Kerley had a barn and traded and sold mules. On some occasions, he would have 4 cattle cars with mules shipped from Ft. Worth unloaded at the corral on the siding.  They would then drive the mules down Main Street to the barn.

The economic benefits of the railroad were very closely interwined with our lives.  I knew every freight engine and its whistle from Engine 115 through Engine 142.

The Mississippi Central had five passenger engines. They all had 62 inch drivers.   They were numbers 98 and 99 built by ALCO-Schenectedy.  Baldwin manufactured engines 100 and 102.  Rogers built engine number 101 which was originally known as Union Pacific Number 768 and it pulled the last Eastbound Mississippi Central passenger train on February 27, 1941 and my father, mother, sister Marjorie, and I all gathered on the front porch of our house and waved to the people riding the last Eastbound passenger train through Bassfield.  I believe there were 8 cars. The next morning, the last westbound train past our house headed for Natchez.  Public transportation didn’t end as buses started running from Natchez to Hattiesburg through Bassfield and the bus station was at City Drug Store on Main Street and Hawkins Avenue.  Tri-State Transit, later known as Trailways, provided Bassfield bus service during World War 2 and they ran 4 buses in each direction a day.  On weekends, I recall there being as many as four buses on each schedule. They would be full with a lot of soldiers who were going to and from Camp Shelby.      

The passenger trains also carried the mail and parcels of freight like UPS carries today.  Joe Evans, whose wife was Nicie, was Postmistress, and the post office had a two wheeled cart which Joe used to take the mail from the train to the Post Office.  The parcels of freight were kept in the depot and the agent took care of same.  The depot agent also sold the tickets to people riding the passenger train.  In those days there were two waiting rooms.  Also, the passenger cars were segregated. One was for whites and the other was for colored.  The depot agent also had a telegraph in addition to a telephone. Meads Ballard was the depot agent at Bassfield in the 1930s. There were always advertisements about train trips by the American Association of Railroads in the waiting room that intrigued me. I longed to see the world.  Many years later my dream was fulfilled after my daughter Rebecca graduated from high school and our entire family took a rail trip via Jackson, Mississippi to Chicago and San Francisco.    

In the 1930s, the railroad was maintained by a section crew.  They lived in 4 houses facing the tracks.  The section foreman lived in a larger house that faced east.  They maintained about 8 miles of track.  Wardell Gray’s father, who lived to be 115 worked in the section gang part of the time.  The section gang also had a motor car with a trailer.  It was a fascinating moment watching and listening to the chant of the section gang as they installed and lined up rail.  It was team work at its best.  The motor car was locked in a shed when not working.

During the depression, numerous poles for piling were loaded onto gondola cars by Mr. Sam Graham from the New Chapel area of Covington County.  These poles were loaded by placing two poles onto the gondola car and pulling the pole with a truck wench or mules onto the car.  Also, many people cut cross ties with an axe and would load them onto a box car. 

There was a large paper mill at Bogalusa, Lousiana.  Pulpwood was also loaded onto paper wood cars at Bassfield for shipment to the paper mill.

The freight trains during the war did a big business.  There was two locals during the war  and they generally had 30 to 40 cars and the Mikado 120 engines or one of the 130s pulled them.  In the evening, Train 51 would usually have about 75 cars and was double headed by one of the 120 engines and the larger 140s engines.  I would try to work until about 6:30 p.m. when Train 51 would pass our field. It was a thru train that took freight off of the Southern Railroad in Hattiesburg to Natchez and then on the Louisiana & Arkansas to Dallas and to Hope Arkansas.  The Eastbound train 52 would come by Bassfield in the early morning hours.       

When I was 13 years old, WW II was well underway.  One Sunday in June we returned from church and I heard Spec Brinson on old 123 blowing his whistle about 2 miles below Bassfield.  I told my parents that I was going to go up to the crossing and watch the train.  I knew that it had to be a troop train as there was no regular train scheduled at that time on Sundays. 

I went to the crossing and observed a double-header steam train coming around the curve just west of Bassfield.  It was pulling flat cars loaded with tanks, half tracks, and other armored vehicles; I counted 75 cars.  It was the 43^rd infantry division armored equipment heading for the Far East in the war against Japan.  There was a guard on each car.  On the rear of the red caboose there was a soldier with a submachine gun .  I waved to him and he aimed the gun at me and fired it and I heard bullets whiz by my head.  I took to the ditch. 

When I got back to the house I told my Dad that the soldier had shot at me and he called the Sheriff.  The Sheriff told him that the soldier had shot into a house down at Melba about 7 miles southeast of Bassfield and that he was already going to stop the train.  They did stop it at Prentiss and found that the soldier had “gone off his rocker.”  In any event, I was nearly the first casualty in Bassfield from WWII.  I never heard anymore from the soldier. 

One of the saddest things as I now look back that occurred on the Railroad by our house during World War 2 were train loads of Japanese-Americans who had been summarily evicted from their homes in California and placed in camps.  One of the internment camps was located at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.  These trains came over what is now known as the Burlington Route from the West Coast to New Albany, Mississippi where they got onto the GM&O Railroad and stayed on it for the next 10 hours until they reached Wanilla, Mississippi where they transferred to the Mississippi Central Railroad for the final route to Camp Shelby where they were interned.

My obsession with the Mississippi Central Railroad during WW2 was great.  My daddy purchased a palomino horse for me.  I had the horse for a week.  My black friend, Dale Hut, let my friend, Tommy Carraway, ride the horse.  Tommy got on the horse and followed a car that was slowly moving southeast on gravel State Highway 42 and started passing the car and collided with a truck belonging to a merchant in Bassfield loaded with fertilizer.  The collision killed the horse and severely injured Tommy, who only lived a few hours after the accident. 

Sometime later my father purchased a white horse for me which I named Tony.  Tony was the fastest horse in the Bassfield area.  No other horse that I raced with Tony ever beat us.  I always knew during World War 2 when a troop train was going to come from the direction of Wanilla as the double-header steam engines with a caboose would come out of Hattiesburg and pass our house about 4 hours before they returned with a troop train.

Following the end of WW2, Camp Shelby was a separation center for troops returning from overseas.  The railroad sometimes had fifty troop trains a month during this period.  Most of those troop trains came over the Southern Railroad and then got on the Mississippi Central at Hattiesburg to Camp Shelby but quite a number came from Wanilla off of the Gulf Mobile and Ohio railroad and passed through Bassfield.  One day as I was standing near a railroad crossing, George William Thurman, was standing in the door of the rear car and hollered for me to call his Dad and tell him to come to Camp Shelby, which I did.                                       

When the troop train came from Wanilla it had to get over what we called “Geneva Hill” at Carson.  All loads and their engine power had to be computed based on the “Geneva Hill” which was the ruling grade for trains headed East on the Mississippi Central Railroad.  The grade on that hill is 1 to 1.7%, which means it went up 1 foot every hundred feet or 1 and 7 tenths of a foot every hundred feet.  At Jaybird Creek, three miles northwest of Carson the elevation is 250 feet above sea level.  At Carson the elevation is 492 feet above sea level.  I could always hear the train trying to get over this ruling grade.

 

After I got my horse  Tony, when I heard the whistle of the train on “Geneva Hill,” I would ride toward Carson and wait for the train.  Old Highway 42, which was then graveled, paralleled the Railroad and the right-of-way was cleared.  When the troop train, most of which were double-headers pulled by two steam engines with 17 cars passed Tony and me, I would let Tony loose and we would race the train.  By the time we got to Bassfield every soldier was sticking his head out cheering us on and we would pass the engines.  Tony could run almost 45 miles per hour.  We would always pass the train after about 1 ½ miles. 

One morning in January, 1934, my father took me with him to our cotton gin where he was checking on shipping some cotton seed to Jackson, Mississippi via rail.  After we got through, we went uptown about one-half block to my Uncle’s store where we all gathered around a pot bellied stove burning coal.  At that time there were four passenger trains passing through Bassfield each day.  It was about 7:35 a.m. when I heard engine 98 blowing for the crossing by my father’s cotton gin.  A few minutes later a black man named George Taylor came running into the store and told us that the train had hit a school bus.  My daddy, Uncle Boone, and every other man ran to the railroad.  My daddy told me to stay in the store with the lady clerk, Lillie Mae Carraway.  I was three years old, and my curiosity would not allow me to do so.  I went to the train wreck and there I saw a little Stapelton girl cut in half and several injured pupils of the school.  I also remember Mrs. Bessie Puckett comforting a little Aultman girl on a bench in front of the drug store.   The little girl also died.  A Roberts child died too, and many children were injured.  There were 42 passengers on the school bus and litigation later ensued and the issue was whether the bell of the locomotive was ringing as was then required by State law.

The school bus had a wooden body.  After this accident, the Mississippi Legislature outlawed school buses with wooden bodies.   The train wreck also resulted in the construction of new Highway 42 in 1936.  New Highway 42 was constructed from Carson to Bassfield to eliminate two crossings over the railroad.

The engineer on the train that hit the school bus was Mr. Rube Evans of Hattiesburg.  He and I often talked to each other in later years.  He said that he rang the bell.  Mr. O. T. Hathorn testified that he did not.  Mr. Rube never liked Mr. Hathorn as he felt he had perjured himself.  The case finally went to the United States Supreme Court.  Rather than having the bell ringing question ever rise again, Mississippi Central Railroad installed two bells on their steam engines, one of which rang all the time. 

Another interesting sight on the Railroad about every year during the 1930’s was circus trains, which came by our house.  They always stopped in Bassfield and Mr. Will Kerley would have hay and feed for the animals.  I would go look at the lions, elephants, and tigers while they were being fed. 

One time there was a special train which pulled two major league baseball teams from McComb City to Hattiesburg via our house at Bassfield.  All the switches were open for this important train.  The train was not allowed to exceed 25 miles per hour due to the fact that it was carrying such a valuable cargo of baseball players.  The two baseball teams were the New York Yankees and the Cleveland Indians. 

One of the great places for socializing during the depression was gathering around the depot on Sunday afternoons waiting for Trains 3 and 4 to pass by.  I can remember to this day seeing Mr. Harry Applewhite and his wife Gladys parked in their car along with other couples at the Depot on Sunday evenings.  We would all look and see who would get on and off the train.  That was the big news of the day.  

 

My mother during the depression did not use clocks to get the time.  When No. 2 went by our house at 10 o’clock, she would always ask me to go get the stove wood and bring it in the house and would start noon dinner by cooking on the wood stove. 

A lot of my education was obtained on the front porch of the only house I lived in until I was grown.  Every night our entire family would sit on the porch and discuss various things including the progress being made by our soldiers in WWII.  At 10:03 p.m. train 51 would pass our house west bound.  This would end our discussions for the day. I am now semi retired and again live in the house I was raised in during my youth.   

My closest friends in the 1930’s were the children of the depot agent’s, George, Terry, Frank, and Barthwick.  Mr. Meads Ballard was the depot agent and he was married to a lady we called “Mrs. Jake Ballard” who originally was a Holloway from Carson.  I envied them very much during the 1930’s as each summer they would take a vacation on the train.  Mr. Ballard and his family had a pass, and could ride trains for free all over our Country.  I enjoyed very much listening to them tell about the places they had been.

The Depot at Bassfield was painted light brown with a darker brown wainscoat about 4 feet from the ground up. On the East side there were two waiting rooms, one for whites, and, one for colored.  In the middle Mr. Ballard , the depot agent,  had his office, and it was secure from the public.  There were two windows with bars where the agent sold tickets to passengers or attended to freight shipments.    There was a phone and telegraph which was extensively used.  Railway Express items were stored in the West part of the building.  There was a wagon which was used to unload items from the train.  There was a coal burning stove in the agent’s area.  There were advertisements of places to see posted in the waiting room.  Some of these were from the American Railway Association.   The Depot Agent also took care of carloads of outbound and in bound freight shipments. There were no restrooms in the Depot but two outdoor privies for whites and colored. There was a long pole located near the agent’s office and on it was the semaphore with a white board and a red board.  The red board informed the train approaching the Depot to stop while the white board was clearance to proceed.     

Around 1940 the Ballard’s moved from Bassfield and this was a shock to me to lose my friends.  However, we have kept in touch occasionally with each other to this day.  George and Frank live in Reno, Nevada.  Barthwick lives in Denver, Colorado.  Terry and his sister Doris live in Eureka, California. I don’t know where Gerald lives.

We were sitting on the porch one night in 1937 as Train 51 approached when Russell Irby of Brookhaven, who had married my cousin Bernice Garraway, called and told us that Paul Deen had eloped with my sister, Myra Louise, and they were going to honeymoon in New Orleans.  Paul had been in the Marines and this excited me.  Also, it was a relief to my Mother who had previously expressed her concern over my sister’s attraction to Lamar Puckett, who imbibed alcohol.  Most of the sermons of the Baptist preachers in those days, following the end of prohibition, were about whiskey.  It sounded like everyone who took a nip was going to hell.

Around 1946, we had a Daley Family that lived across the railroad from our home. One of the guys was named Benny.  He was a hobo who traveled all over the Country. The evening thru freight, which was being double headed by two engines, passed our crossing and it was really moving and Benny jumped up and got on the train and he was slung against the car he caught very hard but hung on as the train sped away.

 When I was in Korea in the Air Force the Mississippi Central dieselized and got rid of its steam heritage.  There is only one Mississippi Central steam engine still in existence, and it is passenger engine 98 which is on the Wilmington and Western tourist railroad in Delaware.  The Mississippi Central Railroad was later purchased by the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad in 1965.  The Illinois Central continued using the railroad by my house until around 1983, and it has since been abandoned.  The railroad is currently the Long Leaf Trace rail trail.  The railroad may be gone, but its memories will live on in my mind forever.