An Old Train Station

Train Station in Winona, Mississippi (Webmaster)

There is nothing sadder, I think, than a train station that stands alone, forlorn, and all but forgotten. Too many stand today in various stages of decay. The train does not stop there, anymore. In most cases, the train stopped visiting small towns. In the case of the station I will tell you about today, the owner of the tracks (Canadian National, which bought out the Illinois Central) refused to spend the money to upgrade them for passenger use, and so, Amtrak began taking its trains down another track, the old Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad track. Now, the trains run diagonally from Memphis; through Greenwood and Yazoo City and down to Jackson before they rejoin the old Illinois Central tracks on their southbound run.

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The train in question is the City of New Orleans, which runs between New Orleans and Chicago. Yep! That’s the one, the train whose last privatized run was immortalized in a song of the same name (Composer: Steve Goodman; Artist: Arlo Guthrie). The run was actually worse than Mr. Guthrie portrayed in the song. Too often, equipment did not work properly. Dining and café cars were absent. Schedules were close to being lip service, only.

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The station in question is a Queen Anne Victorian in the sleepy Mississippi town of Winona. An untold number of stations that looked essentially alike were built in the early 20th century. The brick is red, the trim is dark green, and the windows are long, narrow two-over-two. There are two waiting rooms, one on either side of the ticket agent’s office, and the Railway Express Agency office is at one end of the structure. The platform is red brick, although someone black-topped over it many years ago. Today, even the blacktop is cracked and worn away at the edges.

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By rights, Winona should be a bustling town, since it stands at the intersection of Interstate Highway 55 and US Highway 82. I-55 runs between LaPlace, Louisiana, and Chicago, Illinois; in fact, it supersedes Route 66 between St. Louis and Chicago. US Highway 82 runs between Brunswick, Georgia, and Alamogordo, New Mexico. Well, maybe Winona would be a bustling town if it weren’t located slap dab between I-20 and I-40. The east-west traffic has disappeared just as surely as the north-south rail traffic. Cotton’s all but dried up in the delta, some thirty miles to the west. Few farmers milk cows, anymore. Unless one is en route to one of the state universities, one might not even see Winona.

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Even so, the local folk have hopes for saving the old station. Someone’s running a restaurant in part of the building, and someone else sells flowers there. A group have purchased a wooden caboose and a Budd Corporation sleeping car, ex-Southern Railway, but the old rail cars are in such a state of disrepair that only a miracle will save them. Sometimes, life is just not fair.

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As for me, I stand on the cracked platform, look down the grass-filled tracks, and still see the old brown-and-orange Electromotive Division E-8 locomotive making its way slowly into the station followed by Pullman coaches. This is the train I rode as a child to visit my grandparents, and this is the train that gave me my love for riding the rails. They can stop running the train, and they can close the station, but they never will take away my memories.