Ticket to the past.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: UPFRONT - Shop buildings

Arriving via vintage firetruck, Santa has boarded the train, now crawling along one of the tracks that once lined this place like the wrinkles the sun etches on a farmer's face. Fat men, even those endowed by magic, are not known for speed, especially with kids clinging as camera-clutching moms plead for one last pose. As he slowly maneuvers his girth down the aisle of the restored passenger car, all eyes are on him. All except mine. I'm watching the ghosts outside. They aren't of Christmas past, or any other tense, but of the workdays that for more than 60 years came between.

My wife had talked me into taking our grandsons to ride the Santa Train at the North Carolina Transportation Museum. It's on the site of Spencer Shops, the Southern Railway's largest steam-locomotive repair complex. Opened near Salisbury in 1896, it employed nearly 3,000 people at its peak: boilermakers, machinists, blacksmiths, pipefitters, electricians and other craftsmen and laborers. For many years, the town--like the shops, named for the man J.P. Morgan picked to run his rail empire--had the highest per capita income in the state.

The train, slowing to pace Santa's progress, slides past the brick bulk of the back shop. Nearly 600 feet long, once the largest industrial building in North Carolina, it's where they overhauled locomotives. Ahead is the roundhouse, its 37 stalls fed by a 100-foot turntable, where routine maintenance was performed. In the days of steam, railroads switched engines every 150 miles for refueling, inspection and, if need be, repairs. Roughly halfway between Washington and Atlanta, Spencer Shops stayed busy.

"For every thundering freight train wheeling textiles, tobacco and furniture out of North Carolina, hundreds labored in the cavernous Spencer back shop," wrote Duane Galloway and Jim Wrinn in Southern Railway's Spencer Shops: 1896-1996. "For every one of the 22 daily passenger trains rolling along the Southern Railway main line between Washington and...