Street Level
The Man Who Loved Trains Jimmy Carter’s passion for railroading was right on time
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hen W.J. (Jimmy) Carter Jr. died last year, a railroad journey that had rolled on for more than 70 years ended. As a boy in the 1940s and early 1950s, Carter had the family chauffeur drive him downtown to the Southern Railway Station on East Washington Street. They’d make their way up through the tunnels to the tracks. Carter would stand on the platforms and watch train after train, many stopping, others speeding by. The boy loved trains, real and toy. He had a model set up in the basement of his family’s big house on Sunset Drive in Irving Park. But his family’s name was synonymous with North Carolina textiles. His father, W.J. (Nick) Carter Sr., and Nick’s brother, Harry Carter, founded Carter Fabrics in the 1930s. The company opened a big plant on what’s now South Elm-Eugene Street in south Greensboro and another in the Carter brothers’ original hometown of Wallace in eastern North Carolina. Carter Fabrics eventually was absorbed by the giant J.P. Stevens & Co. textile empire. The Greensboro plant closed in 1995 and was demolished in the early 2000s. The site is now a city fire station and governmental complex, with an area set aside on the lawn as a memorial to the Carter plant. W.J. and Harry Carter were passionate about their alma mater, N.C. State University. They donated money to help build what at first was called Carter Stadium, now known as Carter-Finley Stadium. Carter Gym at Campbell University is also named in tribute to their generosity. As a teenager, Jimmy Carter showed a lack of enthusiasm for following the family tradition of working in textiles. Instead of textile-oriented N.C. State, he enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill. After graduating, he worked awhile for J.P. Stevens, but eventually told his father he intended to make railroading his career. His father supported the decision, but in a letter Jimmy Carter wrote in 2009, he mentioned that his father warned him “that by the turn of the 21st century the railroad industry may be gone.” In January 1964, Jimmy Carter joined Norfolk & Western Railway in Roanoke, Virginia. He worked in the company’s headquarters until his retirement in October 1993, when the company was known as Norfolk Southern Railway, after a merger in the 1980s of Norfolk & Western and Southern Railway. Many people who work for railroads get their fill of the business on the job. After quitting time, the last thing they want to see is another locomotive or boxcar. Engineers are amazed at constantly seeing people at track side staring at passing trains and taking photos. What is the fascination? Jimmy Carter would be one of those enthusiasts at track side, even during those years with the railroad. He was a regular on steam train excursions that Norfolk & Western and Southern Railway sponsored before their merger. Once, he and his wife, Polly, went to Idaho and learned how to engineer a diesel locomotive. When the two traveled, they took the train whenever possible. “We think he was conceived on a train,” says Polly Carter, joking and wondering where her late husband’s fascination with trains had come from. “I don’t know.” 28 O.Henry June/July 2012
Carter had a room set aside in the couple’s Roanoke home for his model railroad complex. It included pre-merger black and gold Norfolk & Western engines and apple-green Southern Railway locomotives. Eventually after he retired, he and Polly moved to a condominium in Greensboro’s Fisher Park. He stuffed a closet with his vast collection of railroad books, with the overflow spilling into a bookcase in the bedroom. Books included histories of what rail buffs call “fallen flags,” defunct railroads such as the Wabash, Frisco, Rock Island and the Virginian. One book seemed to have been written especially for guys such as Carter: The Men Who Loved Trains. To enjoy the sound of trains of old, Carter would listen again and again to a phonograph recording of Norfork & Western steam locomotives demonstrating their strength as they climbed steep grades in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Railroad art decorates the condo’s walls, including sketches of the Greensboro railroad station and the depot in Wallace, which Carter visited often during summer stays in his father’s old hometown. Carter’s second cousin, 38-year-old Will Carter, grandson of Harry Carter, showed a visitor around the condo recently. He opened a kitchen cabinet and lifted out a drinking glass with the old Southern Railway logo. He said it was one of a complete set “and there’s plenty more” from other railroads. He said Uncle Jimmy, as he called his much older cousin, was a walking railroad timetable. Will Carter remembers being with Jimmy at the bar of the Marriott Hotel in downtown Greensboro. A woman who was a stranger to both of them was sitting nearby telling someone about a rail journey she had enjoyed in Mexico. Jimmy Carter couldn’t resist piping up and telling the woman she must have been on route so and so, on train number so and so. Hadn’t it reached its destination at such and such a time? he asked her. The woman was astonished. Carter was right on all points. “It could have been the Pacific Northwest, Canada or wherever,” Will Carter says. “I feel pretty confident he would have known the schedule of practically every railroad.” Carter’s railroad collection includes letters he wrote to top railroad people, not as part of his day job but as a rail enthusiast. Until his death just shy of age 72, he was lobbying for a return of the passenger train era. “He was an advocate of re-railroading America,” Will Carter says. It anguished Carter to see rail lines disappear, especially the one that once followed Battleground Avenue out of the city to Summerfield, Stokesdale, Belews Creek and on to Mount Airy. He saw those rusty, weedy tracks as once having potential as a commuter line. In retirement, he constantly attended meetings where railroad issues were discussed. Once, when he couldn’t attend a gathering where the speaker was an editor of Trains magazine (Carter collected it and other rail magazines), he talked Will Carter into going and taking notes on 3 by 5 cards. Instead of working for a railroad, Jimmy Carter probably could have afThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
PhotograPhs Courtesy oF the Carter Family
By JiM SCHloSSer