Casper Man Loves Steam-Powered Trains So Much He Built His Own Railroad

CASPER — The sound of a steam whistle echoed through a central Casper neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon as a Southern Pacific Atlantic-type 4-4-2 engine puffed smoke and pulled six cars and a caboose.

For nearly two years the sounds of the freight train’s whistle squeal had been silent as the engine underwent an overhaul at the hands of 82-year-old Chuck Eckerson in his fully equipped railroad machine shop in a two-story garage behind his house.

Railroading has been his passion since the time he smelled the coal smoke from steam trains churning out of the Casper depot as a youngster.

“When I was 5 years old, I fell in love with the steam locomotive,” Eckerson said. He made railroading his profession as well as his hobby and has enthralled hundreds over the years with rides on his 7 1/4- inch tracks and his one-sixth-scale train — all built by him and detailed down to the miniature toilet paper roll in the caboose.

The railroad aficionado boasts a library of 700 railroad books, 800 railroad-related DVDs and as the last living passenger train conductor in Wyoming, he has the marker light from the final passenger train that pulled out of Casper headed to Billings on Sept. 2, 1967.

Born in 1943, Eckerson said he started learning how to do machine tool work at 13. His earnestness to learn railroading as a young teen earned him a Union Pacific Railroad pass from the railroad superintendent to their machine shops across the state.

“They knew I was serious. I took notes on everything,” he said. “They let me get up and put tubes in boilers and I got to turn an 80-inch drive wheel on a lathe, and I was only 13 years old. In those days you could do that kind of stuff, but today you couldn’t, of course.”

In 1965, he hired on to the Burlington Railroad in Casper which would later become the Burlington Northern and then BNSF. He spent the next 43 years of his life working as a brakeman, conductor and yard master. He said he spent the last year of his working career training conductors for the freight trains.

A Snowstorm

During his career he remembers a snowstorm in the 1970s when he boarded a freight in Bonneville headed for Casper with snow piled on the tracks and piling up their engine.

Both he and the engineer were forced to open their windows and stick their heads out into the storm to see, but they couldn’t see much.

“They had to dig us out of the locomotive with snow shovels when we got to Casper,” he said.

He enjoyed being the conductor on passenger trains for a two-year stretch from 1965-1967 until the passenger trains were taken away. He called that decision “devastating” to him at the time. His uniform from those days has been donated to the Fort Caspar Museum in Casper.

Eckerson still recalls the trains he was on that collided with vehicles. Often as the brakeman or conductor on the train, he was assigned to go investigate the damage.

As a young railroader on a train headed out of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, he said the train hit a car filled with teens.

“We had just left the depot and were getting up to speed when we hit that car, right at the edge of town,” he said. “It was their graduation night, (it) killed them all. I was the brakeman on the passenger train at that time and the conductor says you better go up Chuck and find out what is going on. So, I did. It was really hard looking at that.”

Stopping a train going 55 mph often takes more than a mile, he said.

Eckerson said he spent much of his later career as a yardmaster in Casper, switching boxcars. It gave him a regular schedule unlike his time on the “road” when you could be called in at any time, day or night. That is when he started his scaled-down railroad around his yard.

“When I went to work for the railroads of course they were all ‘dieselized.’ I call them feeble electrics,” he said. “Diesels are like gang members, a single unit you can’t do anything, but you put three or four together and they think they can pull a train. Years ago, one engine, one train, (that) sounds good to me.”

Building His Train

He built the steam locomotive cruising around his yard for the first time in the mid-1960s.

“When I built that engine the first time, I was 21 and I didn’t even have plans for it,” he said. “I had a drawing out of a Model Railroader magazine, page 67, and that’s what I copied. It was an HO (scale) drawing.” 

The Atlantic-type 4-4-2 design of the locomotive was his choice because it was the biggest size that could still navigate the 50-foot curves at both ends of his lot on the 340 feet of track. He said he has rebuilt the locomotive three times. After the most recent run, he planned to paint it again.

Craftsmanship is his forte. Eckerson has patterned each railroad car on his train after an original car. 

“They are all to scale, they have working air brakes, which we don’t have hooked up right now. Hand brakes work. The caboose inside is totally detailed,” he said. “It has 1945 calendars on the wall and girlie pictures just the way I remembered them when I was riding them.

“All those conductors had those things in there. It’s got a working toilet and stove in it and even the toilet paper is hanging on the wall. That caboose is detailed out to the max.”

In addition to the caboose, there is a Southern Pacific Lines baggage car with hardwood floor that youngsters can get inside and lie in as the train goes around the track.

There is an American Refrigerator Car, Chicago and Northwestern cattle car, flat car, tank car, Illinois Central boxcar, and the tender behind the locomotive that holds coal and water for the steam engine.

Additionally, a working water tank with a toilet float stays filled up and ready to quench the need of the tender car’s tank between runs around his lot.

Excited Riders

Casper neighbor Wanda Hogan said when she heard the steam whistle, she gathered her grandkids to bring them down and let them ride.

“I love hearing the sound when they bring it out and it’s fun to see the excitement of the kids when they are here,” she said. “I brought them up here to see if they could give them a ride. They are very excited.”

Eckerson’s son, Brent, is now the engineer for the locomotive. He said his dad is “extremely smart” and has been dedicated his entire life to making and fixing things, including the local Shrine Club’s calliope.

Brent Eckerson said they buy the coal for the locomotive in Sheridan by the ton and smash it up for the small firebox. But running the little locomotive requires he pay close attention to the gauges that monitor steam pressure as well as his water level coming in from the tender.

“It’s a lot of fun. It’s a live steam engine,” he said. “We’re hoping to run it more this year.”

Friend Wayne Trank was also on hand to help with the train. He characterizes Chuck Eckerson as a “really good guy.”

“You have to have a lot of love to do it if you are going to do it for as long as he has for everybody,” he said. “I’ve helped him rebuild the cars and he’s teaching us how everything works. We’ve rebuilt the refrigerator car and rebuilt the flat car together. It’s just fun to hang out with him and learn everything.”

The elder Eckerson, who said he has put half a million miles on the track as an engineer around his yard, has never charged anyone for a train ride.  He does it for the “love of steam and it’s my hobby.”

“You can’t have it out here and not share it with the public, that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I have never charged a nickel for it.”

The track around the yard includes an additional sidetrack in the side yard and in the back of his lot a turntable to bring the engine and cars into his garage/machine shop for storage.

The Machine Shop

In the machine shop, another engine is on the table and maybe a year or so from completion,  Eckerson said. It will be more powerful than the 1,200-pound locomotive currently pulling the cars and weigh a few hundred pounds more.

The Southern Pacific 4-4-2 has no problem pulling 21 people sitting on the cars around the tracks - the most they’ve ever had on the train. That was at a Halloween event two years ago and the line to ride was a block or more long.

Inside the machine shop, Eckerson said he can do whatever he needs to do to fix his train. He has a foundry where he can cast his own parts, and his tool abilities allow him to cut gears as needed.

In addition to the machinery, the shop boasts a lot of railroad memorabilia including a bell off an Atlantic Coast Line steam locomotive, bells from a railroad crossing, Amtrak train poster, and train schedule board from the Casper depot.

There are also a couple of miniature passenger baggage carts that Eckerson used to make and sell. They are strong enough for him to stand on.

A real baggage cart restored by Eckerson sits beside his home. When the passenger train service ended in Casper, he bought two of them and towed them home behind his 1965 convertible.

The railroad man said he still processes everything through a railroad lens, sometimes calling out signs while driving down the road and during a visit to an ophthalmologist to get a cataract removed answered the doctor’s question about which eye was the issue with an in-the-cab perspective.

“I walked in, and the doctor said, ‘Which eye is it? and I automatically said, ‘The engine man side, Oh, I’m sorry my right side.’ Six years later he remembers me, and he said, ‘Ah, you’re back in for the other eye now, that would be the fireman’s side.’"

When Eckerson retired from the railroad he was the oldest conductor in the state of Wyoming and number one on the seniority list. He was number 100 on the list between Casper and Greybull when he was hired in 1965. He said he was proud to be on top at the end.

The railroad man plans to keep up steam as long as he can. He is thinking about building a little depot and a platform beside the tracks for his lot.

“Railroading has been my entire life,” he said.

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.