Caboose Move Gets Town Council’s OK
Published 2:41 pm Tuesday, June 16, 2015
- A. J. Southall, of Farmville, takes a shady break from riding along the High Bridge Trail Friday afternoon. The red caboose will soon be moved from its Third Street site to a new site behind J. Fergeson Gallery off Farmville’s Main Street. (Photos by Rob Chapman)
FARMVILLE — The train whistle no longer signals an alert when locomotives cross Farmville’s Main Street. In reality, it’s been nearly 10 years since the last Norfolk Southern train bellowed through town.
The rail line spanning west from Pamplin and east to Burkeville was replaced by the High Bridge Trail State Park and has become a destination attraction. While the echo of whistles past have long dissipated, the town will provide a more permanent memory to the rail line when it moves the red caboose from its Third Street location to its new downtown home behind J. Fergeson Gallery off Main Street.
Farmville Town Manager Gerald Spates presented a cost estimate of $48,800 to Town Council members at their June 10 meeting. The estimate covered moving the caboose, adding pavers and setting up the plaza Christmas tree (which the town has purchased from Longwood University), and council gave the green light for the project to proceed.
“It will be very nice,” said Mayor David Whitus in advance of the action. “The placement, the tree, it’s very visible. And it’ll be nice at some point if we can even move on down and do more of the park in future years … But it will make that a very attractive area…”
“You don’t need to do all of it at one time,” Spates told the board. “I mean, you could phase it in.”
The funding is expected to be available in the current budget year.
Spates estimated Friday that it would be about three weeks for work to get under way. The plans include an extension of the brick and concrete pavers near the restroom area west along the trail past the new site of the caboose. The caboose, which has been at its current site since the early 1990s, will have to be moved by a crane, transported by trailer through town streets, and placed at its new site on a section of rails. A concrete pad would have to be poured at the new site in advance of the move.
The caboose will be moved from its current site off Third Street to an area behind J. Fergeson Gallery. Pavers in the foreground would extend along the section of High Bridge Trail State Park to where the caboose would be placed (beyond the parked cars).
It will be new life for the caboose, which is located just off of the trail on Third Street. Over the years, it has been designed as the Chamber of Commerce office and the town’s horticulturist used it as an office, as did a contractor working on the town’s water line.
Still, it hasn’t been used much and the new site could increase its visibility and utilization. Plans call for adding a stage that could be used for performances.
“I think it’s a good focal point,” Spates told The Herald. “That was one of the places we originally, when we did the streetscape plan, we were going to put it down there somewhere, but we never did move it.”
Its time has apparently arrived.
