Back Shop at NC Transportation Museum

[NW Mailing List]

Gordon, Your friend and former co-worker Coyte Garner may be the last person living who worked in both the SOU Ry Spencer Back Shop (machinist apprentice c.1947) and the NW Roanoke Erecting Shop (Tool Supervisor & other positions c.1956-1987).   John

-----Original Message-----
From: NW Mailing List [mailto:nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2018 3:51 PM
To: 05NWHS Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
Subject: Back Shop at NC Transportation Museum

Some of the events at last week's fine NWHS convention at Spencer/Salisbury, NC, were held in the former Southern Railway Back Shop, an impressively long structure.  As we looked down the inside length of the shop, Paul Weber and I speculated whether this Back Shop might be longer than the N&W's Roanoke Shops Erecting Shop.  It certainly gave that impression to me, although it has been many years since I have been in the N&W Erecting Shop, so I checked the length of each shop using Google Earth with the following results:  Spencer Shop Back Shop: c.  597 feet; Roanoke Shops Erecting Shop:  c. 675 feet (not including the shed at the west end).  I think two factors made the Spencer Back Shop seem longer (1) it appeared to me to be narrower (2) it was not full of locomotives to break up the length illusion.

Gordon Hamilton


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