To start out on the railroad in those days, you had to have somebody to speak for you. Well I was living in Charlestown and didn't have anybody to speak for me but I knew I wanted to work for the railroad. My insurance agent was an unlikely connection for me. Mr. G.V. Rice worked for Metropolitan Life and one day he was in Charlestown collecting premiums. I knew he was from Cumberland so I said something to him about wanting to work for the railroad. He said he had two uncles who were shop foremen. He was going home that weekend and would talk to one or both of them. He did and I got a message to come on up on a certain day, and to be present at the YMCA at 7AM as the Road Foreman of Locomotives would be there. I took train No. 3 arriving in Cumberland at 2AM. I didn't have money for the bus fare from Queen City station to the shops so I walked down the tracks. Walking by the streets was longer. I got there and sat down in a chair until the time. I saw men coming and going and introduced myself to Mr. Rice, who told me I was a little early and to come back in about an hour as Bill was not there yet. I did and the Road Foreman was sitting at his desk. Mr. Rice went up with me and said "Bill, this fellow is a friend of mine and is looking for a job firing. He looked at me and said, "Well what have you been doing?" "I've been working in a stone quarry breaking up rock with a sledgehammer and forking it back." He looked at the calluses on my hands and said' "it looks like you're a man who's used to hard work". I told him I was used to any work that would pay me. So he went in and signed me up. That was in September of 1941. I passed a test and come out that evening and went to running on the road. I had to qualify on all types of equipment and we had one engine, Class S1 2-10-2 6109 with a front end stoker. A front end stoker works like a normal stoker, except the coal is delivered under the firebox to the front end of the firebox and sprays it backwards. Anyways I was 3 to 4 days catching that darned 6109 in order to ride it or I would have gotten marked up sooner. The engineer on those trial trips had to log in the date and engine number and sign that you had made the trip. There was one particular engineer, George Fisher, who was a contrary and mean old SOB. I made a trip with him from Cumberland to Brunswick, and when we got in he would sign my papers. He told me he didn't see me do anything coming down the road and I had to make another trip. I had another examination, but it didn't amount to a whole lot. I finally got marked up and the Road Foreman told me he was going to put me on a Brunswick crew since I was from down there. And don't you know who I got the first trip but George Fisher! I thought I would quit right then. I had him the first and second trips and never had him after that. He was a good railroad man but he had a grudge against other railroad men as another brakeman had run away with his wife. He held it against everyone.

There is nothing left in Keyser compared to what is once was. Today the roundhouse, yard and call office have all been torn down. I worked in freight service out of Brunswick and Keyser, reached by the Patterson Creek cutoff, was the western end of my territory. Actually it was a little farther than I thought. Z tower was at the west end of the yard. One trip I went into Keyser with a hopper train and the yard couldn't hold me, so they gave me orders to Piedmont. I tried to get out of it and told them I wasn't qualified over that part. They told me it was all in the yard limits and I was qualified in the yard so keep going. So I went up to Piedmont, cut the engine off and ran back to the roundhouse. I ran as an engineer in freight service on anything we got. The steam engines were not always in the best of shape and you were lucky to have a successful trip without stalling somewhere. Most of the coal traffic out of Keyser crossed over at Cumbo and went into Hagerstown on the Pennsylvania. During the war we had so many oil trains that went through Cumbo. During and after the war the railroads were busy. All freight trains stopped midway at Sir Johns Run for coal and water at the mainline coaling facility. We never had too long to wait as we had four tracks. One incident I remember that occurred in the winter was when the coal froze up in the tower. A crew was told to cut its engine off and run the smokestack underneath the coal bunker to warm up the fuel. Well it must have not be froze too much, because a whole load of coal came falling down into the engine stack. Once on a westbound I was stopped for another reason. I worked by EM-1 up for coal and water and a clerk came out of the office and said "Mac, the superintendent wants to talk to you on the phone". What does he wants with me I thought? So I went in and called on the phone and said I understand Mr. Williams wants to talk to me. So I talked to him and he said, "Does that engine you're running have a speed recorder on it? (Not all the 7600s had them but this engine did). "Yes sir", I said. "Well I'm going to be on the ground at Pattersons Creek when you go up the cutoff. I want you going 25mph, and I don't mean 24, and I don't mean 26." That was the kind of man he was. The week before E. B. Victor had had a derailment right in the same spot. Well I started through the crossover at 25mph but when I came off the bridge and started up the hill on the cutoff I began slipping and the speed dropped. But I guess he was satisfied as I never heard anything about it, but that is an example of just how exact he was. The perfect route for a tonnage train was around the low grade line at Cherry Run. I could take a 6100 with 90 loads of coal on the low grade line. The low grade just was just a gradual upgrade. From Cherry Run you went down into the Cherry Run dip, and then from the Opequon Bridge it was all upgrade to Cumbo yard. Sometimes if traffic was heavy, or they didn't want you on the low grade line, or something else, they would put a help on at Cherry Run they would shove you all the way. When laying over in Keyser I dreaded getting called for the CV Turnaround. I used to hate to get this job. This was taking a coal drag out of Keyser to Cumbo, pick up a train of empties and take it back to Keyser. I was working out of Brunswick and I would never get home on this job but I got two days pay in one day, one for going down and one for coming back regardless of how long it took. This was usually 5 to 6 hours each way. The downside was you might wait all day and half a night to get a train back to Brunswick. When I was away from home I wanted to get back as quick as I could. Now the men who lived in Keyser loved those jobs but not me. I didn't want any parts of them. But then again I made a lot of moves I didn't want to make, and they paid me for all of them. We would take these trains over the Patterson Creek Cutoff. There was a grade going west all the way to the tunnel and the tunnel was the same length (7/8 mile) as Stuart Tunnel. I remember one incident that happened on the cutoff as the result of poor judgment on the part of the conductor. This occurred on a coal drag coming out of Keyser. This conductor saw a hotbox and turned the air on the train just east of Mackenzie and stalled the locomotive in Knobley Tunnel. The engineer died from it. I heard (through the grapevine) they told the fireman to lie for the company as say conditions weren't bad in the tunnel; it must have been the engineers’ physical condition. The engineer died and today the fireman is living in Florida. Knobley Tunnel itself was not difficult if they didn't give you a bad signal. Going into the tunnel from the west, about half way or not quite that far, you shut off and the train would shove you on through. When you got to the other end of Knobley, coming out of it, you were barely moving. But you were through! The cutoff was later taken up and abandoned. But I have always thought the demise of the Patterson Creek Cutoff was in part due to the difficulty of overlapping seniority districts. So many crews had to deadhead out of Keyser that it became a disadvantage to the company. We used to deadhead to Cumberland and go on the list and wait for our turn to come up in order to get back to Brunswick. We could deadhead from Keyser to Cumberland on a passenger train and of course we got paid for that. I miss a lot of things about the railroad, but certainly not the CV Turnabouts out of Keyser.

It is amazing they never had a serious derailment there. I can just imagine a derailment taking out that station and telegraph office. I got an engine on the ground at Martinsburg one night. We were coming out of Cumberland going to Brunswick, and we didn't have any train to speak of. We got to Martinsburg and picked up a few cars. Meanwhile the dispatcher changed his mind, about us and told us to cut our engine off, to cross over to the shop and deadhead to Brunswick. I went on the ground at the crossover at Burke Street and tied up both tracks. I tied up all them passenger trains and they blamed the whole thing on me. Howard Mankowitz was the head brakeman and he stayed up at NA tower instead of going down with us. Usually you have two brakeman, with one for each switch at crossovers. Since Howard stayed in the tower I jumped off the engine and went down to get one switch. But the rail didn't go all the way over to the switch point, and the wheel went right in between, derailing our train. All the helper men working around Martinsburg said the points had been written up as defective, but I was blamed. Helpers for the North Mountain line were based out of Martinsburg. Some 2-8-2s, Class Q1c were used as helpers, but mostly used the S Class 2-10-2s or 6100's, with short tenders held these assignments. During the War they used a couple of Mallets as helpers over North Mountain. At Cherry Run we had a wye track and the 6100s took up every last inch of it. Located south of the river as you go west towards Miller Tower near the road crossing, there was a spot just long enough for a wye. Martinsburg was on the western side of Nine Mile Hill. Nine Mile Hill was a grade that ran from Weverton to Martinsburg. Hobbs was the summit and was located nine miles from Weverton and nine miles from Martinsburg. Hence the name for this grade was Nine Mile Hill. A bit of trivia here, the steepest part of the Cumberland Division (grade + curvature) is right around Engles switch. Anyway we always got a helper out of Martinsburg if we had too much tonnage. That is except for the time a brakeman told me a lie. We had a 7600 on our train and they stopped us at Cumbo. This brakeman went to the phone box as per our usual custom, although by rule the engineer was supposed to go. He came back to the engine and told me, "The dispatcher said he didn't have a helper for you and he would give you to main track at Martinsburg and you could make a run for the hill. If you stalled they would have to find some way to get you out." That whole story was a darned lie but I didn't know it at the time. Well, when I went through Martinsburg I was laying down a streak! I made a run for it, but on one left hand curve I didn't think we would. And wouldn't you know it, as we went by NA tower in Martinsburg, Mr. C.T. Williams, the Division Superintendent and J. D. Woods, Trainmaster, just stepped out the door. Well, when I went by them I had that 7600 a-dancing! Speed by the station was supposed to be 20mph but I was making 40-45. Mr. Williams went back inside and told the operator, Whitney Lewis who I knew, "You find out what time that "THING" passed Millers, what time it passed Cumbo, what time it passed here, what time it passed Hobbs and Harpers Ferry and have it on my desk in my office tomorrow morning. But I never heard a single word about it. I had been going to fast, but the 20mph limit meant that a coal drag would be braking all the way through town. We got by that time but we were lucky. When he compared the times on his desk, he probably guessed at what had happened. It was only because the brakeman told me a story. He wanted to get in early and it almost cost me. I violated the rule by having him go to the phone box. And yes the 7600 did get us over the hill at Hobbs, but only barely!

There were many branches on the Cumberland Division. Over time I got to work them all, except the Romney Branch, and I had to make a trial trip over that as well. I spent a lot of time on our Hagerstown branch, but I don't mean the one From Cherry Run that people today think about. B&O's Hagerstown branch left the mainline at Weverton. We used the Q Class 4400s up there. The line had some wooden trestles with the largest one being the Antietam trestles. We were only allowed to make 12mph over it and I used to say every time I went up there they moved it on me. I say that because you would be running along and would have to brake like H--l! to get you speed down. There was a good bit of business on the B&O at Hagerstown and we had a transfer to the Western Maryland. Just right inside the Hagerstown City Limits the engine would cut off its train and go up the Security line. Later B&O got to short hauling itself by setting Hagerstown cars off at Cherry Run and turning them over to Western Maryland. I never will forget the turntable at Hagerstown. On my first trip up there, I thought they were pulling a joke on me. I was sitting up on the engine as they turned it before we started back to Brunswick. The brakeman came up and hollered at me, "Come on down here and help us turn this engine." Well I thought they were kidding with me so I just sat there. Then the conductor came up and said, "Mac, we need your help down here to turn this engine,...to push it around". Well I got down and helped to push it. Now, you had to go so far with your engine onto this turntable, then you had to move it again for balance so you could turn it some more. It was either up hill or downhill on that thing. I was thinking to myself, "Well darn it, this some modern machinery1" Another departed branch that I spent some time working was the Bakerton Branch. It was all down hill going east. You had to stop and set retainers. Some old conductors would make you stop and do it, and some didn't. This depended on the train that you had. You had to brake your train down the grade, but it was in the timetable that it required retainers. If you weren't careful you would get out on the main. When you got to the bottom of the hill, a lot of times we had to cut off the engine and go up to Hobbs to pickup something. Then we would have to go down to Shenandoah Junction and pick up something off the Norfolk & Western before we went back to Bakerton and get our train before we went east. Up the road in Martinsburg we had a branch called the Frog Hollow line. That was another dangerous place. The cars would kick you in the butt when to come up on that power plant. It is a wonder we didn't turn them over down there. And then you had to run hard because that is a steep grade up there. Mike Lowery, was an aviator on the side, and braked on that job and was a good man. Somebody told me, "Let Mike run that engine for you. Well I took his word for it. I didn't have much time on that engine at the time. I watched him work it and he did just fine. We had several crews that went up the Shenandoah Sub as far as Millville. There were 3 quarry operations located there, Blairton, Keystone and Standard that were busy in those days. Blairton changed hands a few years ago to become Millville Quarries but back it was so large it had three jobs working on it. Blairton used an old track along the river as storage. While not as glamorous as a mainline run, these were important jobs and I got to work with a lot of good people. As long as you need what they paid you for, the officials left you alone.

I worked on the B&O from 1941 to 1977. Within that time I saw the road go from steam to diesel power and I got the opportunity to run some mighty fine engines, and some I would just as soon forget. When I hired out the S Class 2-10-2 was the signature engine of the Cumberland Division. The men all liked them better. You could take a 6100 with 90 loads of coal east all alone if they gave you the on the low grade line with no trouble at all. Within the class, very few were exactly alike. I remember S1 6110 had a duplex stoker. We had other smaller steam engines also, Q Class 2-8-2s and P Class 4-6-2s, some of which were "shovel engines", that is no stoker at all. During the war, traffic soared, I quit firing and began running, and it seems the B&O ran out of engines. I remember we had four Bessemer steam engines that had electric grate shakers. Those were the only engines I ever saw that had those things. You would turn a valve and they would get the grates to shaking. If shook long enough, you could accidentally get all your fire down in the pan. A lot of times we got a rotten load of coal with a lot of rocks and dirt and the grate shakers helped. We also got the 7600s, or EM and EM-1 Class 2-8-8-4s. They were really good running engines and they even looked pretty. It would have really been nice if one of them had been saved. We also got some engines from Seaboard. Some of the mallets went right to the West End, but they gave us the KB-1 2-6-6-4s. They could have kept them for all I cared about them. I didn't like those engines. I like the 7600s but not them 7700s. The KB-1 would get out and go, they were high wheelers, but they were dirty as the devil and didn't ride very well, not nearly as good as the 7600s. It seems like we always had diesels around, and probably would have bought more if the government had let us. Around 1950 we started getting more diesels all the time. When we first started running engines from General Motors they just put us on the diesels and said to go with them. But when Alco came around we had to go in the car and get instruction. When I was in engine service the man was in Brunswick over at the shop telling about them. You didn't actually have to pass anything, just go in for instruction. But I didn't like the noise of the darned Alco. The B&O right after the war wanted to get some other type of engines, but they couldn't get them. I ran the Baldwin Cabs a little but B&O didn't have many of them. I might have had two runs out of Keyser with them, coal drags into Cumbo, turn them and come back with empties. That reminds me of a story about the Baldwins. When we got on the first set at Keyser we couldn't even find the handbrake. Paul Taylor was my fireman on that run and he couldn't find it either. So we went slowly down to the station to cross over to come back through the yard to our train so we asked them. "Well this is a darn crew; they don't even know how to get their train stopped". We didn't have any service time on them, but we got by. Up here in Winchester on the Shenandoah Subdivision I made sure we got GP7s or GP9s. I Liked General Motors and I didn't like to switch with cab units. Once in a while they would send an F7 up here. I would get on the phone to the shop in Brunswick and raise h--l, because you can't see a brakeman out of one of those cabs. All those engines had a heater on them, which would draft out down at your feet, but you had the window open a lot depending on the job you were on. You certainly couldn't certainly heat the outdoors with them. Anyway I went through the steam to diesel change and got to run both the good and the bad. As long as you went out with what they had to give, you got paid, which is the most important part.

It got to be on the railroad that people would sometimes play dirty tricks on each other. Some were intentional, and some were just born out of frustration. And there was a lot of that kind on thing going on in those times in the early 1960s. Sometimes they would do it just to make you mad, and sometimes just to take their spite out on somebody. Somebody chewed on them, so they passed it on down the line. My last main line road trip before I took my job on the Shenandoah Subdivision. Was all one big dirty trick. The last trip that I made out of Cumberland in 1961....they called me and told me to go to Cumbo yard near Martinsburg with some engines, turn them and take some hoppers over the cutoff to Keyser. Well we started out with some light engines and when we got down to Evitts Creek we had to stop to get orders to get out of Cumberland yard. George Forhees was my conductor and he went up to the telegraph office to get the orders. When he came back there was a message attached to our orders to get out of the yard. MOVE EASTBOUND COAL TRAIN FROM HANCOCK SIDING TO CUMBO. TURN YOUR ENGINES AND MOVE EMPTY HOPPERS TO KEYSER. Well, it was a dirty trick. I was pretty high up on the roster and wouldn't have taken the assignment if the crew caller hadn't said to run light to Cumbo, but I figured (1)-it was my last trip, and (2)-I would put up with it. It would have been 5 or 6 hours to do it all as first set up, but when I got the message all that went out the window. So down the road we went. When we got to Hancock Yard and got our train together, we couldn't get out on the main. The dispatcher was busy and wouldn't let us out. We had trains going both ways and I thought to myself that No.4, the passenger train was running. If I get back to Keyser in time to catch No.4, I'm going to be on it. There was a yard job at Brunswick that was coming up for bid I wanted. Well, many hours later when we got into Keyser I went into the callers’ office. There was a fellow there named Thompson, and I told him, "Mark me on as relief, I'm going home". "What's wrong with you", he replied. "I don't know. I'm no doctor", I said as I walked out the door. I kept on going. The railroad could tell you alot of things but they couldn't tell you how bad you felt. I hated to go on relief because they couldn't move the train until they got somebody there. But the whole thing started as a dirty trick. Somebody around Keyser would get this train quickly. They knew who among the enginemen and conductors lived around Keyser and they could depend on them because it was their home. So many of the other men deadheaded out of Keyser because of the trouble they had. We used to deadhead out of Keyser to Cumberland and go on the list and wait until our turn came up for a train back to Brunswick. It was a 30 minute ride and I got a days pay for it. I came home to Brunswick and although I didn't get the yard job, I was soon on the valley. But that story will have to wait for another day.