‘m down in a dark low place, a plywood and benchwork cavern under the hills between Darby and Elkview, looking for reefer cars off my Pacific Fruit Express run which was turned into tossed salad  by a miss-thrown turnout. Several cars were derailed in the tunnel and one had hit the floor. On my knees in the dusty dark, it was then that I saw it.

Tucked in the corner opposite me, under the town of Harris, the dull ivory of ancient bones amid a scattering of Indian war bonnets, rusting tomahawks and flint arrowheads. It was an Indian burial ground which the Harris Yard on the Komar’s West Virginia Northern had been built over.

Okay, so that explained it.

Harris yard seems cursed. Every time a guest run it, it turns out into more of a carded mess than a mob hit in a poker game. I’ve watched Gail shut down a session after two or three trains had deadlocked the place. I mean, how hard can it be? Basically four tracks, a turntable and four industries. It’s not a sprawling division yard like Ashbury – it’s just a flyspeck coal country town where short locals dump their cars for distant Clifton Forge and Huntington.

Mid-morning, I was (okay, this is weird) holding at a green signal with a mile-long coal train, waiting for a sweep-job to Harris to spot out a lumber flat at New River Mill. It’s the way the block signals work on the WVN, that you capture signals, getting greens to enter and protected by facing reds. But this was a strange case – I was following a slow (really slow) local and had to wait until he cleared the block so that I could enter. But his following signal was green, so I waiter for a … permissive yellow? …to follow him.

Finally got into Coalwood and shoved the johnson bar forward, rattling past the poky local, over to Elkwood to get a helper on the pilot (Host Greg and I would do this so many times in the session that it became rote). Cleared Harris and on to Clifton Forge. Ran another train and passed through Harris, where the local was now working slowly. And then, before lunch, I signed up for the last morning job, the Harris switcher. Should be easy – pick up outbounds from four small westside shops, sort them on two outbound tracks in Harris (east or west, color coded to make it easy) then scrape up any inbound deliveries from said to spot. Just a simple job. So I settled into my small steamer in the back engine house, already fired and ready to roll, to note that the Harris local was still the Harris local. He should have been gone hours ago.

So I made my pickups and then hung around on the westside ladder, watching as the local worked the far side like an old Chinese lady pushing mahjong tiles. I did what I could to help, pulling my inbounds off his track to give him elbow room (I’m sure glad Gail did not see me shunting about the west ladder with four cars on the pilot and three off the tender, a nice switcher sandwich).

The crowning moment came when I was standing by on track three, waiting for the local to finish the westbound return with a capping move to put his caboose on the back end of the return cut. He shoved it towards his waiting train, only to go down the wrong track. Woops. Then he backed up, aligned the turnouts, and pushed in again. Down a different wrong track. I sat in my faraway cab, sighing forlornly. Gail was now in the kitchen, prepping lunch. Sand drained from the fast hour glass. Finally the local was out. I sorted my cuts and then went to finish off the run, spotting four cars at local sites. Four cars, three sites. How hard could it be?

I’d been working so nicely, basking in my superiority and smirking at my skills, when I realized that the two back cars were both on the wrong tracks. I just stood there, engine popping and hissing, staring at them and checking, re-checking and disbelieving my damning cards. Ordinarily this would have been a quick fix but the tiny teakettle I was working with had a two car limit to switching the grade, and the work was on a hard slope. Finally Gail came in (everyone was lining up to eat) and told me to finish up after lunch, giving me that look (the same look) I gave other people when they screwed up. Oh, the shame.

My Harris Turn waits for the yard goat to clear before working its way up the long grade to Harris.

I did reflect on things on the long drive home (more on that in closing). The difference between Harris and Ashbury Yards is not the tribal burial ground under the former (why that wasn’t cleaned out when the benchwork was erected, I don’t know). It’s because dedicated crews work Ashbury. They sign up for a shift and work very repetitive jobs for a few hours. They quickly learn the ropes of their end of the yard, these go here, those go there, next train. I’m sure that if you did studies of work in Ashbury, more errors would occur in the beginning of the shift than the end. But in Harris, the crews show up to do transitory one-time work in an unfamiliar yard to do a lot of new things. They come in as session-newbes, working things out and screwing things up until they eventually finish. Even I got bagged by it – I hadn’t worked the west end industries in possibly a year or more – I glanced at the building signs and got them mixed up.

That’s my take on it anyway. I just know that after lunch, I cleaned up my mess as quickly as I could, the scent of buffalo chip fires and sweaty smoke lodges hanging faintly in the air, the sound of distant tom-toms thumping over the toot of my dutiful whistle signals.

But the session was, as always, enjoyable. By session’s end, I got to run a lot of trains as crews ran out of steam – I even got to run the PFE train (which I’ve always wanted to run, but that ended in the disaster we opened with). All I can say about that last run was that it coulda gone better. The pain point takeaway here (my pain, someone else’s point) is to not blindly throw a turnout control in the dark.

If you are checking your calendar, you’ll note that this was a Friday session, a bit of a rarity on the WVN. Coming over, I left the house at 5:30 AM since I was facing two rush hours (and Disney traffic). For the ride home, commencing at 4 PM, I decided to run north on 275, across on 50, and then up 27 out of Groveland to the turnpike, and in on the 408. On every leg except the cross-Florida run, I had standing or slow-rolling traffic (you gotta love a stick shift). I was on the road for three hours to get home. But still, the session was worth it.

Thanks to Gail and Greg for hosting.

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The WVN only invites the finest operators. That’s far enough back.

All photos Greg Komar