The Sunday Poem: The Spencer Wheelhouse

I am in Kannapolis, North Carolina, on vacation. My dad recently moved here. Naturally we are exploring the area — did you know that Salisbury steak comes from the time a train’s chef didn’t have a T-Bone for a passenger, so he made him two burger patties mashed together as they pulled into the Salisbury station here?

In fact, the area’s history is heavy on the trains. And hence the poem (and pics) here today, which resulted from our visit to the North Carolina Transportation Museum.

The Spencer Wheelhouse

Enough’s been written now about old 97,
The way she rushed downhill to reach the Spencer Yards,
How she ran the rails ragged off the Stillhouse Trestle
And died a steamer’s death, splinters all afire.

But not enough is said about the men of Spencer town,
Where the broken locomotive came to be repaired;
The wheelhouse round the turntable held her shattered heart
And men of Rowan county stood around her and prepared.

Listen for the hissing of the water at 180,
Scalding hot and stinking of the grease, the lye, the soap.
Watch the molten metal be pounded back to 4-6-0,
The heaving of the cranes, the burning of the ropes.

Three shifts of hours eight, five and three sixty days a year,
Three quarters of the town held the Spencer jobs down tight
And sent their children to the Shops, to work the Southern line,
To keep the romance of the rail running steaming hot and right.

And Spencer’s families stood proud, invested in their rails.
Then diesel came. The town, it died. The years of boom are gone.
The locomotive 97, she was melted down for scrap
And Spencer’s work was lost, whatever you might hear in songs.

Today just a museum stands, the boxcars lanky orange rust
And empty echo wheelhouse halls full of dining cars and dust.
That is how the steamers died: not crashed, but economic bust;
As Spencer’s men learned that rails, and steam, and all the dreams entailed
Are things that you can love, but cannot really trust.