Tom STAFFORD
COMMENTARY
SPRINGFIELD — At Chicken Foot Crossing, Snyder Domer Road heads west and Terre Haute Road north. In between them, Thackery Road, ambles northwest like a vein on the back of a hand, crossing the railroad tracks a couple of times before both come in sight of the grain elevator at Thackery.
In 1935, Rich Snouse was the third of Walter and Harriet Snouse’s children born on a farm on the south side of the tracks at Chicken Foot, which sits at the bottom of what railroaders knew as St. Paris Hill.
Today’s powerful diesel engines have no trouble making the hill, said Snouse said, who still lives in his childhood home. But during his childhood, “a 40 car coal drag (train) took a double-header (steam engine) to get up the hill.”
And it didn’t always make it.
It’s one of the reasons Rich and his siblings kept their ears open for trains.
“We’d stop whatever we were doing,” Snouse recalled. “If we was putting up hay, we’d always ran to a knothole (in a board of the barn) to see what was on the train.”
In those days, the tracks were the property of the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railroad. Although Henry Ford had sold it, Snouse said the owners followed his style.
“He had everything polished, everything clean. His engine was spotless and shiny, and the observation car ... was immaculate. It was like museum pieces.”
During the 1940s, with the country at war, Snouse said there was more reason for a child to keep an eye on the tracks. “It was a big thrill to see 10 tanks on a flatcar.”
His days revolved around the DT&I schedule. “There’d be a steam train that was scheduled to go up at 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning, when we were ready to go up to school,” he recalled. “You’d look for the smoke rings” rising high above the track.
About 4 p.m., after school, another would come.
“The sun would fall on the rods of the locomotive (connected to the wheels). In all that black (smoke), you could see the rods shine like gold ... God, that was beautiful.”
He would keep a special eye on the caboose of a coal train.
“The power of a steam locomotive is uneven enough that on a heavy load like that, you’ve got to keep throttling down” to maintain momentum, he said.
The approach to Thackery was particularly tough, Snouse explained.
“The Chicken Foot curve would slow them down. Curves take a lot of power to pull a train around. The rest of the hill was straight up to Thackery, but it was steep.”
When the engines didn’t make it, the train would stop and the crew set the brakes on the back half of the train and uncouple it. The engines then would take the front half to a side track by Rosewood, back down to the rear half, pull it to Rosewood, then link the halves and go on.
From his place today, “you can’t see the railroad because the trees have come up,” Snouse said. But while kids his age were caught up in the drama of “The Little Engine That Could,” Snouse watched a real life drama at Chicken Foot — and with a trained eye.
“Us kids knew whether they were going to make the hill.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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