Day 51 - Visited The Real CASS Depot & Climbed The Mountain By Train This Time

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Today we get to ride a train. Not just any train, but an actual steam locomotive! I've always loved trains, ever since I was a child, and today we are visiting the Cass Scenic Railroad in Cass, WV. The train doesn't leave until 11:45, and it's about 2 hours away, so we didn't have any reason to rush this morning. It rained last night, and there was a forecast of rain later in the afternoon, so Jody and I decided to wear our rainsuits this morning, just in case. So after a quick breakfast in the hotel, we loaded up the bike and headed back across the mountains.

We started our journey by heading back on US-33E which was such a great motorcycle ride yesterday. The roads were still a little wet from last night's rain, so the riding wasn't quite as spirited as yesterday, but it was still fun. We turned south on WV-92S and the riding was still awesome. This part of West Virginia is just beautiful for motorcycle riding. There are so many mountains that every road seems to go either up or down a mountain. The views were beautiful, the riding was great and eventually when we were about 20 miles from Cass, the Garmin Lady had us make a turn onto Back Mountain Road. Now I never figured out whether that was the actual name of a road, or whether it was just a description of what the road was, but we turned onto a very narrow, but paved back mountain road that ran up an over a mountain, through various farms and woods. The road was not wide enough for 2 cars, but we did meet a couple of cars going the other way and were able to fit nicely with the bike. There was even a turn that was so sharp that I had to stop the bike, back up, and turn again before I could continue. This went on for almost 20 miles, while I was a little concerned it may turn to dirt or gravel, it nevertheless remained paved the whole way. For most of the road I was in second gear, with an occasional upshift to third, or even a downshift to first. It was really fun! Eventually we came down the big hill into the town of Cass, WV.

The first thing we both noticed is how creepy the town of Cass really is. Cass was once a logging town and as such was built as a company town where the logging company built all the housing and owned all the businesses and made all the rules. Cass has been preserved or recreated as a State Park, and all of the company housing has been restored enough that the houses can be rented as vacation cottages. I'm sure someone had a vision, but when we looked at it, the town is laid out on a grid with rows of virtually identical houses all painted white. I'm sure this is accurate for how it looked in its day, but the result now is one of abandoned sterility. It did not look very welcoming. We blinked, and passed through town without seeing the train station, so we had to turn around and find our way back. Sure enough, at the bottom of another hill, we saw the Cass Depot, the Cass Company Store, and the parking lot. By now, it still had not rained, so we put away our rainsuits and headed into the Cass Company Store.

The Cass Company Store was a combination Gift Shop, Soda Fountain, Restaurant, and General Store housed in what once was the actual Cass Company Store. There is also a small museum with a diorama of the town and a 20 minute historical film. So we bought a couple of t-shirts, grabbed a couple of sodas and headed over to the museum to see the movie. It was interesting to see how difficult was the life of a logger, and how much the logging company controlled everything about the loggers lives because it was a "company town". There were other buildings across the Greenbrier River which was outside the companies jurisdiction. It was there that the loggers could buy all the things forbidden in the company town.

As we sat on the bench outside after the movie, the first locomotive pulled up. It was belching a thick cloud of black smoke from the smokestack, and the whistle was deafening! One look and I could tell it was definitely a Shay Locomotive. I had first seen a Shay in Yellowstone back on our last trip and was fascinated with the mechanics. They explained the Shay a little at Yellowstone, and a little more during the 20 minute movie we had just seen. Most steam engines are symmetrical, with a boiler in the center and steam pistons on either side driving some number of main wheels in tandem on each side. All the other wheels on the front and rear truck and on the coal & water tender are unpowered and just roll along. This works for most applications, but it limits traction since only the main wheels are driven which limits the steepness of the grade, it limits the turn radius because the main drive wheels are in a straight line, and the more drive wheels you add for more traction, the worse it goes around corners, and the tracks must be smooth and even or the engine can derail.

The Shay was invented around 1905, has the boiler in the center, same as a normal locomotive, but the 3-piston steam engine is mounted on the right side, pointing down, with connecting rods connecting to a segmented drive shaft that runs the entire length of the right side of the engine and coal & water tender. Under the engine and coal & water tender, the various trucks have large bevel gears that are turned with pinions on the driveshaft. Between the trucks, the driveshaft has a slip joint that moves in or out in a curve. The result is that many more wheels are driven giving better traction allowing for much steeper grades, the wheels and their trucks are relatively small and can turn around curves easily allowing for very sharp curves, and the trucks can follow uneven rails and still provide traction and stability. The only real disadvantage is that it is slow moving, but for a logging engine, it is perfect!

Now, I had picked this particular train trip for a few reasons: it was long - 4.5 hours and 11 miles each way, it was steam, and it had scenic views. But the most important reason was that it was named Cass. My career as an engineer at Lockheed-Martin revolved for the last 30 years around a Navy program called Consolidated Automated Support System (CASS) so I wanted to see what a railroad named after my old program looked like. Imagine my surprise when this train trip turned out to be the best train ride ever!

Since CASS Scenic Railroad is part of a state park, they decided to build a new set of tracks along the old logging route from the Cass Depot to a place at the top of a nearby mountain called Bald Knob. The elevation at Cass is about 2400 ft. The elevation at the top of Bald Knob is 4800 ft. So the Cass Scenic Railroad has to climb about 2400 ft of elevation in 11 miles of track. To do this there are 2 switchbacks and grades of up to 11%. Cass Scenic Railroad has the steepest grade of any track in the world that does not use cogs (like Mt Washington or Pike's peak).

This is the first time I had ever seen an actual switchback in action. On auto roads, a switchback refers to a 180 degree hairpin turn if the road is rising to the left, the 18 degree hairpin changes the direction of the car and the road begins rising again above the previous section. Trains don't do 180 degree hairpin turns, so the train rises by, in our case. pushing the cars up the hill to the left, passing through a switch, the brakeman flips the switch, and now the train reverses direction and pulls the cars up the track to the right. This track has 2 switchbacks, so the sequence is repeated again at the second switchback and we are back pushing the cars up the mountain back in the original direction.

I'm not sure why they push the cars up the hill, but I imagine it's for safety reasons as when pushing a coupling can't break and send a car rolling back downhill. But in our case, there were 5 passenger cars on the train and we were in the one closest to the pushing engine. When I say close, I mean that the engine was within inches of us in the car in front of it. We were so closet, I probably could have reached across and burned myself on the boiler. We were certainly close enough that Jody would warm up by standing in the passenger car close to the engine and warming up from the heat radiating from the boiler.

And the noise! Normally we are in a car several down from the engine. In this case, we were in an open car right in front of the engine. We could look right in the eyes of the engineer driving.When the engine was struggling to push us up the 11% grade, the engine was a really loud chug-chug-chug! When the engineer blew the whistle at crossings, it was deafening! And depending on the wind direction, thick clouds of black smoke would occasionally drift down into the passenger area, or little pieces of hot coal ember or black soot would get on your arms, face, hair, or clothing. As we reached higher elevations, there were plenty of opportunities for scenic overlooks to the adjacent mountains.

Along the way, they also fed us with what the called a "Hobo Lunch", which is kind of a box lunch, except you have to make your own sandwich with the ingredients supplied. It was actually pretty good! When, after 3 hours of climbing we finally reached Bald Knob, there was an observation platform, and the view was spectacular. We took a bunch of pictures, visited the restroom and prepared for our journey down. There was also a caboose at the end of the track, and that was one of the other amenities of the state park. For a fee, you could sleep overnight in the caboose. Not my idea of great accommodations, but for the right train nut, it would be heaven!

The ride back down the mountain was a little more subdued than the ride up. They did turn the engine around so that it was still the bottom most car, but now the coal & water tender was visible from our car. Since the engine wasn't working quite as hard to keep the train slowed down, the engine noise was much less. As we were heading down, the sky was looking more and more ominous, and we could see lightning in the distance.As we continued down, it began raining hard, and we had visions of rainsuits and crossing the mountain roads in the rain. There were no hotels in the area, and we had to go another 100 miles east to Harrisonburg, VA to find a decent hotel.

But by the time we actually reached the bottom, at 5:15, the rain had stopped, but everything was wet. So we put on our rainsuits and headed out for the 2 hour ride to the hotel. It never did rain, in fact the roads dried out quickly, and by the time we made it back to US-33E, all was dry and the ride was awesome! The beauty of riding a mountain road in the other direction is that it's just like a completely new experience. Even though we had just ridden US-33W from east to west, when we rode it west to east today, all yesterdays downs are ups and yesterdays lefts are rights, so it really is a completely different experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed the train ride, it was one of the best ever! Jody liked it too, but toward the end 5.5 hours captured on a train is a long time, and she was ready to head to the hotel and wash the soot out of her hair. We were both dreading the ride back and the rain on the mountain roads, but in the end, it never happened and the ride to the hotel was just awesome! Tomorrow we pass back through Luray and back onto Skyline drive for the rest of Shenandoah National Park and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway and Smokey Mountain National Park.

190.9 Miles Today

7980.9 Miles Total

0.0 Gallons Today

197.781 gallons Total

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