Micah Pennington laid it in 1948, one and nine-tenths miles of track from our loadout down to where it tied into the Fern Hollow and Southern’s branch line. He bought the ground under it outright. That mattered more than anything else I owned. The railroad had the right to run trains on it. The dirt, the ties, the steel, the crossing, those were ours in fee, recorded, taxed.
Trucks could not replace it. I’d run the numbers twice. Hauling by road put four hundred dollars a load on top of every ton and put my price where Blue Ledge Concrete would stop answering the phone. And Blue Ledge was the whole year. They’d signed for forty cars of ballast stone, delivery complete before May first. Miss it and the contract terminated. No cure period, no argument. Forty cars was two-thirds of my revenue and all nine of those jobs. Without the spur, there were no cars. There was no other way to load them.
Here’s the part I should have thought harder about. Quarry work runs with the weather. We shipped heavy through summer and our last string went out on September eighth, fourteen loaded hoppers. And then the line went quiet, the way it went quiet every fall. No trains for five, six months. Rust on the railhead where nothing rode it. Nothing rode it except that stretch through the crossing where the wheels had polished the steel bright and kept it bright. I’d stopped noticing.
Foxglove Crossing Estates noticed. They’d gone up eight years earlier on the far side of my line, one hundred eighty-eight houses, brick columns, streets named after birds, built by an outfit called Brightwater Land Partners that finished the last roof and dissolved into a PO box. Brightwater had bought the ground from a farmer. Brightwater had never bought one inch of my corridor, which meant every person in Foxglove came and went across my crossing. Two thousand cars a day rolling over Pennington steel to get home to their granite countertops.
For eight years that had bothered exactly one person. Karen Brantley was the association president and she’d made herself chair of the streetscape committee at the same time, which is a thing you can do when nobody else wants the job. Her house sat at the top of the loop with a street view down to the road end. Every morning she opened her blinds and looked at my crossing, at the ballast, at the switch stand, at the brass plate my grandfather bolted on in 1948, and she saw a mess in her front yard.
She had a plan for it. She’d been selling it at meetings for a year. The grand entrance. Stone columns and iron gate, a guardhouse, uplighting, seasonal plantings, one point four million dollars of special assessment money, and her name on the plaque. The only thing in the way was a working railroad. So she got herself a letter.
Sometime that September, she wrote to the state rail division and asked about the Fern Hollow branch, and the state wrote back and told her the Fern Hollow branch had been abandoned in 1996. She had that letter photocopied and stuffed in every mailbox in Foxglove before I ever heard about it. One hundred eighty-eight copies, state letterhead. Nobody reads past letterhead.