The smell of kerosene still takes Vernon Wigfield back. Back to Friday nights at the Chaska depot, where he would wait to catch the train back to his home in Carver. He would see a movie at the old Rex Theater and then head over to the depot where there were two lanterns always burning – one to let the train know to stop and another to send it through.
“So much nostalgia,” said Wigfield.
Soon nostalgia will be all that remains of the railroad. Union Pacific, the last operator of the line, had its request for abandonment approved this past March following a trestle collapse just upstream from Carver. Now, 138 years after it was first built, the line is a silent reminder of a bygone era.
Wigfield, a 78-year-old Eden Prairie resident, grew up around the railroad. His family, many of which already had established ties with the railroad, came to Carver from Iowa in 1935 when his dad, Vernon Wigfield, Sr., took a job as the depot’s station agent. During his 14 years of service in Carver, Vernon, Sr. had a chance to share his love of the rails with his four sons.
“He told us he didn’t have money to send us to college, but he’d teach us a trade we could work for the rest of our lives,” Wigfield recalled. “And he did.”
By the time they found their own work with the railroad, Wigfield and his brothers (his sole sister didn’t forge a career with the rails) were well-versed in the duties of the station agent. They had spent years watching their father copy communication from the dispatcher for the crew. They had witnessed him taking packages from the train and delivering them to various businesses in town. And they picked up Morse code from his work as a Western Union telegraph operator.
“I was a telegraph operator by 14,” said Wigfield. “It was like learning a foreign language.” And it’s a language that hasn’t left him. “I still find myself thinking in Morse code,” he said.
Wigfield recalled how busy downtown Carver used to be, with 12 scheduled trains a day running through town – four passenger and eight freight trains. “All the steam locomotives stopped for water in Carver,” he said.
That’s one of the last standing railroad water tanks in Minnesota,” he noted of the restored Carver tank. “It’s a real landmark.”
Lifeline
On occasion, a young Wigfield would go down and talk with the engine crew when they were in town.
“Sometimes they’d put me on the train and give me a ride to Jordan,” he said. “And then on the other end, someone would put me on the train back.”
Wigfield described the rail as a “lifeline” for Carver, carrying everything from cheese, butter and mail to lumber, cement and even new automobiles. “Anything you could imagine was shipped by rail,” he said.
The depot in Carver was often bustling with activity. Wigfield recalled the buzz that would fill the depot on election nights when the station agent would keep the building open so people could get results from the telegraph operator.
Chaska’s depot was equally active. In high school, Wigfield got a job at the Chaska station working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift.
Demands of a busy sugar factory kept him employed seven days a week. But the sugar factory was just one of many customers on the line, including a canning plant, a feed mill and the brick yards. The rail was also a popular way for people to get to downtown Minneapolis.
And while the railroad remained an important transportation option in the first half of the twentieth century, even being used to transport troops and military equipment through town during World War II, the advent of the national highway system and the increase popularity of automobiles, ultimately changed everything.
“Suddenly trucks became readily available,” he said. “They call it progress.”
But though it appears Carver and Chaska will lose their downtown tracks, Wigfield still believes railroads have a place in the nation’s transportation system.
“The country is so vast,” he said. “We need rail. I think it will return.”
-Mollee Francisco, staff writer
TELL US: Do you have a memory of the railroad in Chaska or Carver?