Recently, while searching through the old Railroad Magazine files, I stumbled upon three photographs of the Waterville Railway. While they were not what I was looking for, they immediately caught my eye, so much so that I stopped what I was doing to share them with my colleagues. A lone steam engine, a few old, wooden boxcars and the wide open country dusted with freshly fallen snow-these captivating images of shortline railroading elicited a sense of nostalgia for a bygone era. How I wished I could have been there on that cold, snow-covered day. Digging deeper into the folder I hit upon a newspaper clipping dated Monday, September 29, 1941, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The above-the-fold story was on the front page of the second section. A typical "little railroad that could" feature, it was accompanied by four good-sized photos. There was a large shot of Ten-wheeler No.949 (a secondhand Baldwin classic built in 1896), one of the engineer in the cab, another of the local board of directors meeting in the town hardware store, and, finally, a shot featuring two women visitors from Wenatchee gleefully waving from the cab. Ten weeks before Pearl Harbor, it was obviously a slow news day in Seattle. That would soon change, but the slow pace of business on the railway would remain for at least a few more years.
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