Like many young boys, Jarrett Prince's first brush with locomotives was a video of Thomas the Tank Engine. Except the British cartoon series wasn't exactly his cup of tea.

"I wanted the real thing, so my parents started buying me train documentaries," said Prince, 17, a senior at Henderson County Early College High School. He got his first model train set at age 12 or 13 and now has about 25 feet of model track at home.
But not just any track. Prince's L-shaped train layout is a replica of a logging railroad like the ones that operated in Western North Carolina from around 1905 until the 1930s. They have become Prince's passion. He's even turned the train layout into his senior project for school.
On Saturday, Prince joined about 75 fellow train buffs and curious tourists at the Cradle of Forestry's "Train History Day." It was his fourth year at the annual event, which featured a slide show from WNC train historian Jerry Ledford, an interactive display of train whistles and a tour of a 1914 Climax logging locomotive.
The piercing sound of train whistles filled the air at the Cradle, as Prince and other young train enthusiasts climbed on board the Watauga Valley Railroad Society's "Ghost Whistle Truck," a flatbed truck equipped with 15 different train whistles and horns from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.
Logan Grasty, 8, of Waynesville pulled several of the historic whistles, putting his whole body into the effort of yanking their pull-cords. Were they difficult to engage?
"Not really that hard," he said modestly.
Instead of steam, the society powers the whistles and horns with compressed air. Prince's favorite was a 5-chime air horn found on Amtrak passenger trains. He milked the whistle like a musician, drawing out some notes and shortening others. Little girls put their hands over their ears and winced.
"I would've come up (for the event) anyways," Prince said, grinning broadly. "But this was a little extra excitement for me."
Not only did individual engineers have their own whistles, which they would take from job to job, many of them had signature sounds in the way they pulled them, said Ledford, who recently retired as band director at Apple Valley Middle School.
"So you could actually tell who was running by how they blew their whistles," he said.
Logging locomotives were different from the standard steam engines used on passenger lines of the era, Ledford said. Some ran on "narrow-gauge" tracks only 3 feet wide, which snaked up creek valleys to load up timber and haul it back down to the mill or tannery.
The Shay locomotive was one of the most popular. It featured two or three cylinders on the right-hand side of the engine, which drove a line shaft connected by gears to the wheel sets, known as "trucks." The coal-fired steam boiler sat opposite the cylinders for counterbalance.
"A lot of the old-timers refer to these locomotives as ‘sidewinders,'" Ledford said. "The reason why we had geared locomotives in the woods was because the grades were so steep that a regular steam locomotive wouldn't go up and down these grades."
The logging rail lines themselves were fairly simple affairs, often using wooden rails instead of steel. But Ledford said many of the trestles built by WNC logging companies were "pretty spectacular," involving a complex series of buttresses to help log-filled cars across steep terrain. Still, train crews didn't always trust them.
"So what they would do is stop the locomotive, they would walk across the trestle and then they would leave a guy or two on one side that would start the engine and the cars across," Ledford said. "Then the guys on the other side would hop on after the train got across the trestle, because they didn't want to be on it in case the trestle gave way!"
The railroad era of logging in WNC didn't last long, Ledford said. By around 1928, the logging companies had either cut themselves out of business or remaining stands of timber were inaccessible. The Great Depression "put an end to a lot of that," he added.
Yet glimpses of the logging railroads are still visible throughout the mountains, Ledford said. Those who drove up U.S. Highway 276 to the Cradle's Discovery Center were following the route of an old logging railroad grade, he pointed out.
"Now when you go in the woods, a lot of times, you may look down at the ground and you think, ‘My goodness, what are these wooden planks that are in the ground where I'm walking?'" he said. "Well, guess what? Those are probably railroad cross ties. There was a train where you're walking right now."
Reach Axtell at 828-694-7860 or