Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 29, 1993 TAG: 9311290023
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BRISTOL LENGTH: Long
Sturgill, 79, died Oct. 5 just a few days before the release of his 144-page collection of more than 200 photos and clippings from his collection spanning 45 years.
The photos include steam locomotives roaring through locations throughout the nation, including places such as Roanoke, Christiansburg and Shawsville.
There is a picture of Norfolk & Western's Turbine No. 2300, also known as "Big John," N&W's last effort to use coal in a locomotive.
The description under the N&W Class J passenger engine provides as many details as anyone could want: It was 16 feet tall at the highest point, 61 feet 2 1/2 inches long (109 feet 2\ inches with tender), carried 20,000 gallons of water in its tender and 35 tons of coal, weighed 494,000 pounds (872,600 including tender), had boiler pressure of 300 pounds, a firebox of 518 square feet and much more.
"It is doubtful if this engine's actual speed and strength was ever tested," he says.
He also provides the facts on such rail legends as Casey Jones, whose real name was John Luther Jones and who got his nickname because he was from Cayce, Ky.
Sturgill was a retired railway postal clerk who dropped out of school in the sixth grade but was widely read, as shown by his writing on railroad history, how trains influenced the Civil War and, particularly, his chapter on railway postal clerks.
"This was the chapter he really wanted to do," said his son, Phil Sturgill, who printed the 8 1/2-by-11-inch volume on a 40-year-old Linotype machine in his printing shed outside Bristol in Washington County.
That chapter contains what is probably the book's longest sentence, but it evokes a picture of what it was like to sort mail on a moving train during the years when Sturgill was one of the postal clerks:
"The whisper of thousands of letters speedily being flipped into pigeon-holes, sometimes for a state distribution and other times for city distribution, the whip-like crack of a local pouch being snatched from the mail crane by the clerk performing catcher service on a speeding night express, the gibberish of the clerk at the door calling out pouches to the clerk-in-charge, the thumping of letter packages into pouches in a race against time to make the next dispatch, all of this along with the roaring, whistling, steam-spewing monstrous engine echoed through the night as the train wound its way through the countryside, regardless of weather or time of day, with a cargo of passengers, express, a railway post office car piled high with pouches and sacks of the peoples' mail to be sorted by the clerks as it sped over the rails, and car after car of storage mail addressed directly to the office of destination."
That chapter also covers events such as the wreck of the Old 97 - the 1903 crash of the engine and four cars of Washington & Charlotte (Southern) 97 over a 70-foot trestle near Danville - and the last great train robbery in the west in 1923, perpetrated in Oregon by three brothers, two of them twins.
"After more than a century of railway post offices, a period that included roaring gun battles with bandits, the postal service ended the sorting of mail on trains," Sturgill wrote.
Replacement service in the late 1960s would save about $1 million a year with no decline in service, the Postal Service said. "But clerks contend that mail sorted at stationary units or post offices can never be delivered as quickly as that sorted on the way," Sturgill added.
The book makes his love of railroading obvious.
"It would be difficult for anyone under 50 or 60 years old to understand the national love affair with the railroads. . . . It must also be written into the national memory, because most people alive today never had the chance to hear the beautiful resonant, moaning sound of the steam whistle. There has never been another sound to equal it as it echoed and re-echoed off the mountainsides, or as the wind wafted the sound across the flatlands," he wrote.
Sturgill also wrote two earlier books, "Crimes, Criminals and Characters of the Cumberlands and Southwest Virginia" (1970) and "Nostalgic Narratives and Historical Events of Southwest Virginia" (1991). "He was self-educated and he loved to read," said his son. "Maybe that's where I got my knack for words. Sometimes too many of 'em, Shirley says."
Shirley is Phil's wife and, along with his father, helped fold 2,800 sheets during production of the book.
Phil Sturgill started in the printing industry in the 1950s. Now retired, he does hobby printing on old machines in a converted barn - often with the assistance of a family cat, Casey Jones, who has been known to reach up and hit a stray key during the typing process.
Phil saw the steam railroad book as a fun project for him and his father. He had been working a few hours a day editing and typesetting his father's handwritten text when, for no reason apparent to him now, he became anxious to get the project done.
It was shortly afterward that his father was hospitalized.
Phil got the printing finished, but had to go to a firm in Charlotte, N.C., to have the covers put on. The work was not due for completion until mid-October, but Phil telephoned and asked for one completed book so his father could see it.
The book arrived Sept. 30, a Thursday. "They rushed it to me overnight. He got to see it, lying on the hospital bed. On Tuesday, he was dead," his son recalled.
The book is available for $19.95 (plus $2 by mail) from Phil Sturgill at P.O. Box 36, Bristol, Va. 24203 (telephone 669-1105).
by CNB