died. I read their obituaries. The com- pany documents told me who won the monthly coal usage contests and who was written up for safety infractions. I have been in the cab of No. 98 hun-
dreds of times since 1981, but now the experience so much more meaningful. Now I am firing the engine that Al- burtus S. Trigg ran. Trigg’s son, Billy, served in the army during World War I and afterward followed in his father’s footsteps getting a job as a passenger engineer on the Mississippi Central. Billy was tragically killed in 1919 while running engine No. 101, a Baldwin 4-4-0, which rolled over due to washed out track near Hattiesburg. I learned about how Mose Tatum, Charles Butler, Major Westbrook, and a number of other “colored” firemen brave- ly signed a letter to management of the
RIGHT: The author poses in the cab of No. 98 on April 4, 2015. The locomotive is named for Thomas C. Marshall, Jr., who purchased the lo- comotive and then donated it to Historic Red Clay Valley. BOB SPENCER PHOTO BELOW: No. 98 is heading for the end of the line at Hockessin, Del., as it passes the closed National Vulcanized Fiber plant at Yorklyn. CHRISTIAN BENTLEY PHOTO
railroad in 1914 to ask for pay equal to that of their white counterparts. Five years later, Westbrook was killed in a tragic accident when firing identical twin engine No. 99. By 1923 Tatum, Butler, and their colleagues actually were earn- ing equal pay. Four years later Tatum
had a brush with death when No. 98 col- lided with a string of gasoline tank cars in Natchez. In December of 1930 Tatum won the fourth-quarter fuel conservation award for a passenger fireman. The men behind the machines were coming alive to tell me their tales.
42 JUNE 2015 •
RAILFAN.COM
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