Van Buren-to-Winslow train takes travelers back in time

story and photos by Marla Cantrell
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Thirty-eight people sit in car 106 waiting for the Van Buren A&M excursion train to start its 35 mile journey to Winslow. On this Saturday, passengers from as far away as Texas, Nevada and Illinois sit in the green velvet seats. It may be a long way to travel for a train ride, but not nearly as far as the day before when a rider from South Africa boarded the steps and sat in this same car.

It is one of three cars carrying passengers today, and only a few seats are empty.  Tickets range in price from $20 for children to $72 for a first-class adult fare.

The cars have a long history, one going back as far as 1899, and the train has been used in three movies: Frank and Jesse, Biloxi Blues and The Blue and the Gray. The diesel engine is somewhat newer, having been built in 1960. Last year, more than 20,000 climbed aboard for the ride through the Boston Mountains.

The doors close and the train chugs along the tracks, past the town’s library where it blasts its whistle four times. Soon the town disappears and car 106 is surrounded by oak, mimosa, cedar and pine. In the field beyond, a flock of cattle egrets, white as a wedding dress, hovers above a herd of black Angus cattle.

The train is headed to Rudy, with a population of just more than 70, on to the small town of Chester and finally to hilltop hamlet of Winslow. At Rudy, a dozen people dot the banks of Frog Bayou. Another six splash in the stream, fending off the 95-degree weather.

“Around here,” Conductor Charlie Lacefield says, pointing to the swimmers, “we call that Arkansas wildlife.”

Lacefield, with the A&M Railroad, is one of two Charlies working the crowd. He and Conductor Charlie Jimmerson walk the aisles, talking to passengers, telling jokes, and at times using the sound system to relay historical facts and railroad folklore.

As the train ascends through the Boston Mountains, car 106 rumbles along, its concrete floor rocking on the rail. In Chester, Jimmerson, points out the historic Chester House Inn.

“There’s a ghost that lives there,” Jimmerson says. “A long, long time ago a man named Clarence was staying in room 4, but he got locked out and it was a cold night. Fifteen below. Now this is a family train so I won’t say what he’d been drinking.”

A woman near the back of the car asks, “Moonshine?”

Jimmerson accounts how that might be so. “So he goes to sleep on the porch and freezes to death. Now, when the inn changes hands, the old owners tell the new owners to look out for him.”

He turns off his microphone and scratches his forearm, where an old tattoo spells out “BARB.” He switches it back on and says, “And then there’s Pearl and Ruby. They haunt the place too. They stayed at the inn between World War I and II and they always waved at the men going by. Every one of them.”

Jimmerson tips back his conductor’s hat and grins, “It wasn’t always a bed and breakfast.”

A man on the third row says, “We got it.”

Just beyond the sordid past of the Chester House Inn, the first and highest of three trestles wait. It is 125-foot high. The incline is approximately 113 feet per mile. From the window, the tops of the trees look like a clumps of broccoli. It’s the most precarious spot on the trip and catches the attention of a wide-eyed girl, no older than eight, who stands on tip-toes, cups her hand over her mouth, and peers out the train’s window.

“There was a TV commercial made right here,” Jimmerson says. “Two helicopters flew above to get the videotape.”

Just outside Winslow, the 1,702-foot long tunnel appears. It was originally built in 1882 and enlarged in 1969. The car goes black for the 35 seconds it takes to get to the other side. The effect is lessened somewhat by those snapping pictures, the cameras’ flashes sparking against the darkened car. The train is now at 1,335 feet above sea level.

At Winslow, the engine circles the three idle cars, then takes its position at the helm. 
On the ride back, the air-conditioner stalls. Crews open the windows, letting the afternoon heat fill the car. The smell of honeysuckle blows inside, outside white yarrow and orange trumpet flowers wave in drifts of Johnson grass.

“Now I feel like I’m on a train ride,” a woman in a red lace blouse says.

The 38 passengers sit back, watching the succession of creeks, some where leaves float on the slow surface, others where boulders big as a cars split the rushing water.  As the train moves on, the traffic on nearby Interstate 540 rushes by. Not far away, a blue tractor grunts along in a field where hay is being baled. A buck, the color of honey, jumps across a barbed-wire fence and disappears into a clutch of trees.

A man in overalls says, “I sure like it better with the windows open.”

When the train pulls into the Frisco depot in Van Buren, passengers descend the iron steps, a few holding toddlers who’ve fallen asleep on the 35-mile ride home.

Saidee Holmes, 10, is from Greenwood. It’s her second ride in less than a year.

“I love this train,” she says. “It makes you feel like you get to go back in time. I really love that.”