It’s been 70 years since the Big Emmas went cold.
Also known as M1s, they were the Louisville & Nashville Railroad’s last new steam locomotive, built in the 1940s as railroads were converting from coal power to diesel.
They pounded the rails of eastern Kentucky until 1956, hauling passengers, freight and coal.
The railroad men who operated the trains in that era were beloved figures in their communities, revered by young people who watched them at work from the platforms of small-town stations.
But as steam engines lost favor as new technologies evolved, none of the 42 Big Emmas were saved from the scrapper’s torch.
Charles Castner, an L&N employee who died in February, was an authority on the powerful engines. He wrote an article on them for Trains magazine in 1972.
That article and Castner’s meticulous notes formed the foundation of a book he co-authored with Charles Buccola and Ron Flanary in 2024, titled “Big Emma: The Story of Louisville & Nashville's M1 2-8-4s.”
Flanary grew up in central Appalachia admiring the trains and the men who operated them.
For the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, WEKU’s Curtis Tate spoke with Flanary about the famed locomotive and his book that was 50 years in the making.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Curtis Tate: How did the book come about?
Ron Flanary: It was my intention and (Buccola’s) intention to take Charlie Castner’s original text and amplify it and particularly to include a lot of things that didn't make the cut for the original magazine article. You know, there are serious limitations when you're writing a piece for a periodical. He had saved all of it (in) a box about this big of notes, correspondence, drawings, photographs and stuff when he was doing that article. And it was like a treasure trove.
CT: Tell me about Charlie’s writing. He was a storyteller, right?
RF: Charlie was less of a technical guy and more of a folksy kind of person, a writer. He captured a lot of the humanity that people who designed and built and operated these locomotives, maintained them, tested them. And so that part of it comes out clearly, and that's why I've always admired him so much as a writer, and I've emulated him because it works. It's entertaining.
CT: What did you want to convey to readers?
RF: My intention was to put the reader on the jump seat behind the engineer. And so the engineer is pulling anywhere from 5,000 to a 10,000 ton freight train with one or two engines, depends on what route and everything.
It's a little bit of eastern Kentucky folklore in the way I see it. You're going back in time, and you're literally getting a window and a ride on an operation that was just everyday stuff back then. But it was fascinating, whether you worked for the railroad or watched the trains go by. And it's long gone, all that's long gone, so we tried to capture a lot of that history.
CT: The railroad used to be involved in our everyday lives the way it no longer is for most people. Can you talk about that?
RF: It's not only true in L&N territory, it was true all over the nation. The railroad industry was extremely labor intensive. The railroad was involved in your personal life in just about every way. Your mail was delivered by the train. If you ordered something from Sears and Roebuck, a large item, it came by train. If you were a local merchant, whether a hardware store, a lumber company, appliances, it was delivered by train.
Life literally evolved around a small-town depot. You had two places where the epicenter of the community might be. If it were a county seat (or) the courthouse, and the railroad depot. That's just how deeply entrenched it was.
CT: The men who ran the trains, operated those big steam engines, they were outsized figures in the public’s imagination, right?
RF: These guys within their community were somebody that you knew. “Oh, he's an engineer for the L&N.” So they were somebody, and youngsters like me looked up to these guys. Like, “Wow, I can't imagine doing a job like that. I'd love to do that.” They were somebody important.
This was everyday stuff to these guys. I sensed as a youngster, and it spilled over to me, an incredible passion for railroad. These guys that worked on the L&N and other railroads in the steam era, they had an incredible passion for their work.
CT: These men are long gone, right? Is anybody alive today who did this as regular work?
RF: Well, the answer is no, not really. If someone was still living, they would have been at the tail end of it, and so they wouldn't have had the depth of knowledge or firsthand experience that someone else had. Even when Charlie Castner wrote the original article that was published in ’72, he was talking to guys who were already long in the tooth by then, and so pretty quickly, they were gone.
The guys that I knew, that I knew personally on the Cumberland Valley Division, one guy was “Singing Sam” Sturgill. He retired from the L&N in ’71 so it was before this article came out. But Singing Sam lived in Corbin. He was a skilled shape note singer, and that's where the nickname came from.
CT: Running a railroad doesn’t take as many workers now, does it?
RF: We have lots of company photographs where they have posed people on the locomotives around a turntable. It may be the first and second shift at the roundhouse at, say, Loyall, Kentucky, with maybe 200 people on there, 200 employees.
And they get this photograph and you realize when you look at the numbers, who are these people that just work in the roundhouse? They don't operate the locomotives, they just maintain them. So you have pipe fitters, electricians, carpenters, boilermakers, machinists, general laborers and on and on. All these are crafts where these people have gone through an apprenticeship and have papers to prove their competency in these fields.
There's a small dedicated group of people who have obtained those skills through hard study and experience who can still do this stuff. So it's possible, but the days of it being a large employment base — it's kind of like the buggy whip company — they don't need that anymore.
To learn more about their work, see pictures of the Big Emma, and hear the sound of its whistle, go to W-E-K-U-dot-org.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
