Metro Pulse/Gamut/Three Rivers Rambler

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A Ride on the Three Rivers Rambler

by Jack Neely

You see the train steaming up, blowing its horn. You hurry to the ticket office and get your ticket as the blue-uniformed conductor hollers "all aboard." He punches your ticket with the puncher he keeps in his vest pocket, and you climb on, feeling lucky to find a window seat, an old padded-leather reversible bench, and when you hear the final whistle, you relax on the first passenger train to offer regular service to Knoxville since 1970.

The eastbound train—four cars, not counting the caboose, with a few dozen passengers aboard—clanks and pulls along the riverfront beneath the Henley Street Bridge. The great thing about riding in a passenger car is watching the changing landscape, unimpeded by billboards or roadsigns or concrete exits and overpasses or uniform highway-department foliage.

Out the window, you watch several distinct regions go by: one's an industrial place of factories and warehouses. One's a pastoral region, farming country. Then you come into a region of river commerce. Finally you're in in a mining area, with huge marble quarries. You also see 200-year-old graves, and what remains of an 18th-century settlement.

You can see a lot from a train. Never mind that this particular train only goes about five and a half miles; it hardly escapes Knoxville's city limits.

The Three Rivers Rambler, opening its third season of excursion trains from Volunteer Landing, has just commenced weekend service for 2002. Tourists seem to have already discovered the train, but this ride is guaranteed to surprise Knoxvillians and may revise some opinions of our home town.

It's run by the Knoxville and Holston River Railroad, an active freight shortline. On weekdays, it's a freight company, serving several local customers—Holston Gas, Kern's, Ameristeel, and Weyerhauser. It's a fairly prosaic business, Monday to Friday, hauling freight cars between destinations that aren't used to being tourist attractions. The fact that this line gets a little nutty on the weekends is all the fault of railroad enthusiast (and Gulf & Ohio executive) Pete Claussen, who purchased several vintage cars—two standard passenger cars, a Pullman coach with three private suites, an open car, and a caboose, to latch onto a restored and occasionally functional 1925 steam engine. Even to those old enough to remember routine train travel, these cars may look a little old-fashioned; the newest component of the train is the open-air gondola car, which dates from 1934. Three of the passenger cars are circa 1932 cars that once did commuter service in the Philadelphia area, and the Pullman, with three vaguely art-deco luxury compartments, is a jazz-age veteran of the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad.

Claussen's daughter, Karen, handles the excursion train's day-to-day operations. She says her dad's trying to train her to be an engineer someday. For now, she seems content to tend to the passengers' comforts. A steward keeps them supplied with drinks and snacks.

There are two conductors today, both of whom look as if they were born to wear these outfits that look like a fire chief's uniform, with the word CONDUCTOR etched in brass at the front of the flat hat. The one who punched our tickets is Gary Lape, an old tool-and-die man who has made a second career as a conductor here and at the Tennessee Valley line in Chattanooga. A longtime train enthusiast, Lape grew up in Elkhart, Indiana, fascinated with the New York Central. He's a Lionel train collector, and he sometimes looks up and down the Rambler as if it were something he found under the tree on Christmas morning.

The antique train takes us on a slow tour through a Knoxville most Knoxvillians have never seen. It rolls along at 10, never more than 15 m.p.h., but even at that speed, you're likely to miss something on the first trip over.

The surprises along this route might as well have been arranged by the Chamber Partnership. The first is the marina, which looks bigger than you might guess from the corner of it you can see from Volunteer Landing; today it's berthing around 100 boats, most of them luxuriously large, with room for more.

Then it's on past some corrugated steel warehouses and under the South Knoxville Bridge to Riverside Drive and the odd, boulder-strewn Gov. Ned McWherter Riverside Landing Park, a popular put-in spot on a Saturday afternoon. This particular scene is also accessible by automobile, of course, but most of the train's route is not. Unless you're a serious urban hiker with a reckless streak, this ride will show you things you've never seen.

Like the interior of what may be the region's biggest brickyard. You see them piled by the thousands, first on the right, then on both sides, and you're in the middle of General Shale's biggest factory anywhere, which can bake and stack 1.6 million bricks in a week. The operation, partly exposed, is labelled Mill Room, Grinding Dept., as if for the benefit of excursion passengers.

Then, on the left, you'll see a huge marble mansion, or what looks like one. But it turns out to be the main source of our drinking water. The train provides our best look at the Whitaker Water Plant, the marble utility building built in 1927, during a rare period when the city spared no expense to do things right. Today it has to be one of Knoxville's most beautiful public buildings. It's more extravagant than the courthouse, and as a piece of architecture it beats all but a handful of Knoxville's churches, but it's rarely seen this close by people who don't work there.

Then the shoreline returns, with ducks and herons. Across the river is the Island Home neighborhood; maybe the only spot, on land, where you can see this much of that community in one glance.

Bluffs of cut rock appear hard on the left, and across the river is the Island Home Airport, then more woods, and more than 100 acres of pasture: green, rolling hills with a muddy creek.

The conductor explains that it is part of the huge, 18th-century George McNutt farm. The senior conductor on this route looks a lot like retired printing executive and political pundit Jim Ullrich—and, as it turns out, he is. Ullrich grew up in Aurora, Indiana, and rode the trains—B&O and New York Central—so much his family didn't even own a car until Ullrich was 16. He remembers when he was a Boy Scout, they'd even load their canoes on the train for expeditions up to Sault Ste. Marie, along the Canadian border.

"Back in those days, the good jobs were working on the railroad," he says. He was often stuck in his dad's pharmacy, but it sounds as if he envied his peers who felt the wheels beneath their feet, as we do today.

He has ridden this five-and-a-half-mile jaunt well over 100 times, but it hasn't bored him yet. "There's something new all the time," he says. "There's always something different. We see airplanes coming in and taking off from Island Home. We sometimes get gliders. We see birds, herons."

And different plants are blooming each week. This week, it's mainly redbuds. Ullrich says he gets so many questions about plants that he'd like to treat a UT botanist to a ride, just so he can identify some of them. He repeatedly remarks about how much more he can see right now than in the summertime, when the leaves are out.

There's the back of a neighborhood, and next you're in another industrial site, the Hines Soil Co. "Where they make dirt," Ullrich announces to the passengers. Bulldozers shove their product around even on a Saturday. Then there's a large cornfield, not yet sprouted. On the other side, a couple dozen cattle scatter from the approaching train, just like in old cowboy movies. It's not the East Knoxville that people in West Knoxville think about.

And ahead is the languid Holston River, all the way down from Virginia by way of Kingport and Douglas Lake. Without hesitation the train goes straight toward the river, and onto a sturdy century-old steel bridge, its rusty steel superstructure inches outside the windows; the train crosses the water several fathoms above the surface.

From up here on the trestle, passengers have a view previously unknown except to freight engineers and really, really stupid teenagers, of the Holston combining with the French Broad, from North Carolina, to form the 650-mile-long Tennessee. At the Forks, fishermen on the shoreline stare up at the train as if they've never seen it before.

Across the way is huge, wild, Pickel Island, and in the foreground, Burkhart's wharf, the busiest industrial wharf in the county, and the end of the line for all barges on the Tennessee. "They go from here to the Gulf of Mexico," Ullrich chants.

And we're at Forks of the River. Over on the left, not far from the tracks, is the old Lebanon In the Forks graveyard, the oldest marked graveyard in the county, looking far more remote from the industrial parks than it is.

They still call this area Marbledale. There's an active-looking gray-marble quarry on the left, but then an extinct one on the right, 300 feet deep with thick water of a peculiar bright bluish green rarely seen except in third-grade watercolors. Two buzzards circle overhead, casting shadows on the green water. The train stops.

It's a weirdly beautiful spot, and it turns out that this quarry, which they call Asbury, is the closest thing this train has to a destination. It stops here for only about five minutes. As if ordered to, everyone stands. These seats are reversible for the return trip, but most of the passengers leave their seats and make their way down the corridor to the open car. Nearly all of them pull out cameras and take pictures of this scene few Knoxville hosts would ever think to recommend.

The engine disengages from a side track and pulls up to the other end, and latches on again to pull the train backwards back downtown.

On the return trip, the train makes a routine stop, right on the steel bridge, a barely dangerous height above the Holston. Fishermen in boats look up, and passengers snap pictures of them. Visible upstream is Boyd Island, near Holston River Park, close by the home of Rev. Carrick, the founder of the college that became the state university.

From this vantage, Ullrich gives us some history, about the river and about the eerie burial of Elizabeth Carrick, who died in 1793 while Knoxville was under siege by the Chickamaugans. Her husband, the portly Presbyterian minister and educator, was away with all the other men in town, making a desperate defense against Doublehead and his men, leaving the women to bury the minister's young wife, floating her down the Holston to bury her at Lebanon In the Forks.

Then the engineer shifts his big machine into gear again and hauls the passengers back to town. The scenes unreel in reverse: the agriculture, the industry, the aerial and nautical terminals, the remnants of wilderness. Alongside the train are the remnants of older tracks or unknown history, old rails and crossties.

The train arrives back at Volunteer Landing about 80 minutes after it left. The passengers thank the conductors and step out, carrying with them dozens of photographic exposures and maybe a more complicated notion of this north shore of the Tennessee River than the one they brought with them.

The Three Rivers Rambler departs Volunteer Landing each Saturday and Sunday at 2 and 5. Coach prices are $16.95, with discounts for children and seniors; Pullman tickets go for $19.95. Call 524-9411.