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Charles Weber of Little Mountain, a member of Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative, serves as a guide.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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19-year-old Trace LaCons turned his lifelong fascination with trains into a volunteer gig at the museum and hopes to become a train engineer someday.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Tickled by trains
Three-year-old Stanford Brown, clutching his toy train cars, is celebrating his birthday on the BBQ Train.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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In addition to the railcars themselves, the museum offers displays of train paraphernalia from days gone by.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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December’s Santa Trains are among the museum’s most popular offerings.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
It's a mid-April evening and Chris Kovacs paces the platform, peering at the gold pocket watch in his hand and the growing crowd standing outside the South Carolina Railroad Museum on the outskirts of Winnsboro.
At precisely 6:30 p.m., he snaps shut the watch, places the timepiece in his vest pocket, stands ramrod straight and calls out: “Y’all aboard! Y’all ready to enjoy a train ride and some good barbecue?”
And so begins the BBQ Dinner Train, one of the museum’s signature events held on select Saturdays from April through September. The participants enjoy a 5-mile ride from the Rockton station to the old Rion granite quarry, where riders are served a barbecue dinner before the return to Rockton.
This evening’s ride includes a couple on a date night, a pair of middle-aged siblings discovering new adventures in their state, and one special 3-year-old. Stanford Brown is celebrating his birthday, and a train ride was an easy choice, says his mother, Stanyetta Carson.
“He goes to sleep with his trains and wakes up looking for his trains. Everywhere he goes, he has those toy trains with him,” she says, adding that their home in Orangeburg sits not far from train tracks. “He hears them, and we get out on the porch to watch them go by.”
Tonight, Brown has a train in his hand and his head on a swivel as Kovacs morphs into Jerry Seinfeld on iron wheels, dropping one-liners amid a string of historical facts about trains.
Tonight’s train is powered by Engine #1276, a diesel-electric locomotive built in 1953 for the U.S. Air Force and used to deliver aviation fuel to Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter. There is a nice rocking motion as the train moves at a leisurely pace—it will take 45 minutes to make the 5-mile journey.
On one side of the tracks, we pass a factory where Mack tractor-trailers were once built. Now, the building manufactures memory-foam mattresses. A wild turkey runs across the tracks and disappears beneath a chain-link fence that borders the Fairfield County Airport. On the left is a crumbling brick chimney covered in ivy, the last remains of a sharecropper’s cabin. On the right, there’s another sharecropper’s cabin, this one restored into a hunting lodge where chairs with comfortable cushions are perched on an open deck.
A nice breeze floats by with the scent of the wide-open fields where sunflowers, corn and hay are growing. The wheels squeak gently as we pass under pines, following the rusty rails leading the way west.
Railroading in the blood
Guiding tonight’s train is 79-year-old engineer Charles Weber of Little Mountain, a member of Mid-Carolina Electric Cooperative. He’s been with the museum for 25 years.
If you were casting the role of a train engineer, Weber would be a shoo-in with his shock of white hair peeking out from beneath his striped railroad hat, his wide grin and his soft voice that makes one feel at ease. Weber’s got grease on his forearms, and that makes sense since he’s the museum’s assistant superintendent of construction and maintenance.
“I was born with a pint of railroad blood in me, and it’s been with me ever since,” says Weber, whose grandfather, Pat Shealy, was a conductor with the CNL (Columbia, Newberry and Laurens) Railroad.
An electrical engineer for most of his life, Weber’s idea of fun is “getting an old piece of equipment back up and running.” He smiles when he tells how a boxcar was turned into a caboose and takes pride in the fact that, in all the years the museum has been operating trains, there’s not been a single major accident.
Listening closely, and just off Weber’s shoulder, is Trace LaCons, 19, of Newberry. He’s been a volunteer at the museum since June 2023 and serves as an assistant to Weber. A self-described “history nerd,” LaCons is a member of the Army National Guard, and he’d like to become a train engineer.
Railroading is in his blood, too. His great-great-grandfather worked for Southern Railway in Columbia, where he served as a station master. As a child, LaCons was fascinated by trains and spending time with his grandfather, Fred “Pop” Frick. Frick grew up on a mill hill in Newberry County and delighted his grandson with stories of trains on the CNL Line passing through in the evening, the steam engines pausing before they backed up the grade, the engineers blowing their steam whistles until they made it to the top.
“Those are the stories I grew up with,” LaCons says. “Pop said there was one good century of steam engines, and he was fortunate enough to be able to see some of those engines in day-to-day operations. The stories he told me have stuck with me through so many years, and I’ve tried my best to keep them alive in every way possible.”
Hidden gem in Fairfield County
Henry Howe and his sister, Rose Favors, sit with other family members inside the granite-walled Stribling Building that served as the office for the Rion Quarry. They’ve just finished a catered meal of barbecue pulled pork, fried chicken, coleslaw, green beans and macaroni and cheese.
Military brats, they’ve seen more of the world than most of us have, yet they’re still discovering the state they call home. Howe grew up in the Columbia area, and he and his wife recently moved to Winnsboro. Favors recently returned to South Carolina and says she had passed the museum dozens of times before taking the barbecue train.
“I want to rediscover my state,” she says. “And I’ve found I don’t need to leave the state of South Carolina to find something interesting. It’s all right here.”
Howe has spent the past 22 years leading the U.S. Army Basic Combat Training Museum at Fort Jackson in Columbia. Favors and her husband, John, help operate The Newberry Museum. So, they appreciate the efforts of the 100 railroad museum volunteers.
“You can see the effort that lays ahead of them. They have a lot of work to do,” Howe says. “But it’s good to capture the history now while you have it rather than when it’s no longer available.”
Those who love history The South Carolina Railroad Museum formed in 1981 when the Charleston chapter of the National Railway Historical Society was looking for a new home for its rolling stock of engines, passenger cars and cabooses. Martin Marietta Aggregates, the company that owned the Rion Quarry, donated 12 miles of track, as well as the rail yards, to form the basis of the museum. Excursion trains began running on the line in the 1990s.
In 2023, the museum sold 8,500 tickets, a 10% growth over the previous year, says administrative assistant Brian Jolly. The biggest draws are their Santa Trains in December, which see up to 1,000 visitors daily, and the fall-themed Pumpkin Patch Express and the Easter Bunny Eggspress trains.
The museum includes 12 locomotives, 18 coaches, six cabooses and two open-air cars. A gallery features items showcasing the history of South Carolina railroads, as well as the history of the quarry and its famous Winnsboro blue granite. The attention-getter is the steam engine Hampton and Branchville #44.
The locomotive, which was built in 1927 and weighs nearly 250 tons, spent its entire working career in South Carolina before it was taken out of service in 1959. Kovacs and LaCons both have dreams of the locomotive running again, but Weber isn’t as sure. “It’s doable, but you have to look at the reality,” he says. “It would require $3 to $4 million in an endowment just to keep it running,” and the museum has more pressing needs. Still, the steam engine is dear to their hearts.
“She is our pride and joy,” says Kovacs.
Telling the story
It’s dark now, and Kovacs begins loading passengers for the return. On the ride back, Kovacs will tell them more about the golden age of railroads, and maybe they’ll close their eyes and hear the clack-clack-clack of the tracks and smell the freshly mowed hay and think of earlier days and simpler times. That’s his hope.
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Get There
The South Carolina Railroad Museum is located at 110 Industrial Park Road in Winnsboro. The museum’s gallery, display train, ticket office and gift shop are open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets for the BBQ Dinner Train are $38 each for those ages 3 and above. They also offer many special event train rides throughout the year, as well as school and private charters. For more information or to book online, visit scrm.org or call (803) 635-9893.