With the view of the 21st century Chemung River valley outside blocked by curtains -- the better to view the speaker's slides -- some 100 retirees and guests could almost hear the whistles and the steam hissing from the trains that regularly rolled over the hodgepodge of tracks in our crossroads community during the early half of the 20th century.

Dr. Kenneth Hogrefe's assortment of slides recalled the days when the Lackawanna, Erie, New York Central, Pennsylvania, and the Bath-Hammondsport-Prattsburg lines plied the Twin Tiers area. Mostly, they carried coal from Blossburg and other coal-rich areas of Pennsylvania. There were even passenger trains that actually stopped in places like Corning, Elmira Southport, Bath and beyond.

There were nostalgic images of smoke-belching behemoths to sleek-looking diesels and photos of train wrecks that happened in the region. In the most notable of those, 47 people died July 4, 1912, when a passenger train had stopped while a freight train ahead of it was changing rail lines and was rammed from behind by a train operated by an intoxicated engineer.

One slide showed a train with eight engines and Dr. Hogrefe explained that because some of the equipment wasn't all that reliable then, an engineer who had to take a freight train to Williamsport would pull into service as many engines as he could find. The logic, Hogrefe said, was that with a bunch of engines to start with, he improved his chances that at least some of them would be serviceable enough to pull the train over the mountains between here and Williamsport.

Preservationists in the audience were pleased to see the slide showing the old Erie Railroad Station in downtown Corning and recognize how the Centerway parking garage's facade was designed to reflect that now long-gone rail station.

One reminiscence that brought many chuckles was Dr. Hogrefe's account of the"Gravity Express" on the old Bath-Hammondsport-Prattsburg line. It seems trains plying that route consisted of freight cars heading for Prattsburg and a lone passenger car full of folks bound for Hammondsport and Keuka Lake. To save time, the passenger car was placed at the front end of the train so that when the train got to the top of the hill overlooking Keuka Lake, a brakeman would pull the pin on the passenger car which would continue on with just a brakeman while the freight train switched tracks and went on to Prattsburg. "Folks would come from Buffalo and all over to ride 'the runaway train'," Hogrefe said.

The size of the audience and the many who stayed on to chat with Dr. Hogrefe afterward just proved that while railroading "ain't what it used to be" it's still a big draw among men and boys...of all ages.

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