Dave Wood

The railroad that runs through my hometown has inspired many tales that have amused its riders, its section hands, and the populace in general. Opened in 1874, it has suffered through many catastrophes and near disappearance, as well as several name changes. But I’ll always call it the G.B. & W., or the Green Bay & Western, a 209-mile track that takes locomotives from Green Bay to Winona.

Ever since it ceased passenger service, naysayers have called it the Grab Your Bags & Walk, sad for its present inability to carry, as it once did, well-coifed matrons on shopping sprees from Whitehall to the emporia of Winona and thirsty denizens of dry towns and counties who boarded its Sunday specials to never-dry Independence with its watering holes like Elstad’s Saloon. 

Those days are gone, but G.B.&W. folklore lives on in tales told from the past. My grandma even got into the Whitehall Times in a story about her and Clara Swenson’s plan for a five-mile junket to visit Mrs. Jahr in Independence. “I told [editor] Scott Nichols that we settled into the passenger car on a siding and waited for the engine to arrive. We thought the interior was rather dusty, and then Depot Agent Erickson boarded the car and told us the G.B.&W. hadn’t served passengers for several years!”

Section foreman John Beatty told Grandpa about supervising section hands laying new track next to the county insane asylum. “It was hotter than hell, and as I wiped the sweat off my brow, an inmate who was lying under a shade tree asked me how much my salary was. When I told him the slender sum, he replied, “Don’t you think you’d be better off here, on my side of the fence?”

I will end these tales with one I just now discovered in a book about the railroad’s history, which reprints in longhand a letter to management from a New London trackside farmer:

Dear Sir,

I got 22 cows what I chase every morning and every night over your railroad tracks here in Northport. Up until two weeks ago everything is fine, no trains is coming in the morning at 8 a.m. when we drive our cows over the crossing.

Then last Thursday comes a little pip squeak of a train with maybe 6 empty box cars like a bat out of hell he comes at just 8 a.m. This I think is maybe a special so I hold my cows from crossing. Now day before yesterday comes the same dam train with those empty box cars and I just get my 22 cows across when he comes barreling through

What I want to know is who is this guy? The railroad president’s son? So they give him his own little train to play with? I would appreciate it very much if you would tell this hot shot engineer to kindly take another cup of coffee in the morning so he could get there later than 8 a.m. and not maybe make hamburger out of my Holsteins.

Either that or he should stop at the Northport crossing and look both ways to see if anything is coming what looks like cows. You can tell the people from the cows because the cows got a smarter look.

You got a pretty nice little railroad, and I don’t want to make you no trouble, so you tell these guys they should send this little train through at maybe noon, huh? Okay and thank you very much, I am

Yours Truly, John Krasne, Rte. 3, New London, Wis. (at Northport)