Spokane was a huge railroad hub in 1956. The GN, NP, UP, and SP&S railroads travelled Spokane right-of-ways. Downtown, Havermale Island had a large GN passenger depot (the depot clock tower remains). There were two major switch yards. Each had a shop facility that could rebuild a locomotive. One roundhouse was at Argonne and Trent. Hillyard had the other. We saw live steam engines, but those were fast giving way to diesel-electiric locomotives. My German immigrant grandfather, Diedrich Eberhard Lammers, spent his entire working life running a parts supply room at the GN Hillyard yards. He never learned to drive a car. He walked to work each day from their house on 1318 E Rich Ave, situated about 100 yards from the corner of the John R. Rogers athletic field.
My Cooper Elementary School class once toured the Hillyard Great Northern shops. I saw a nine-ton press squeeze a wheel onto a box car axle. Another time, my entire class took a train from Hillyard, past the western Spokane county line, and back. I have no idea how or who wrote off the expense. Back then, I didn't care or wonder about accounting. The GN just somehow took a locomotive and a passenger car full of us kids out 25 miles and back.
I lived three blocks from the Spokane river, across from two slaugherhouses, a rendering plant, and a Northern Pacific freight yard. We received sharp smells along with sounds of train cars ramming together to form a train. Our house was southeast, downhill from the Illinois Ave. / Market St bend in the Minnehaha district. That bend was at the top of a grade from the Great Northern Railroad line coming from downtown Spokane toward Hillyard.
Locomotives pulled long trains of freight up that grade. The diesels just got 'er done. The steam locomotives, however, made a fuss. "Choo ... ... choo ... ... choo ... rattle shake flame ... choo ... choo ..." The locomotive, or a pair of them, just barely moved that train up that hill. Periodically, the drive wheels would slip while the firebox flame increased brightly. Imagine over a half a million pounds of steel with rapidly slipping huge wheels and flames underneath ... at night. My little sister would wake up screaming.
Bob Parry and I once sat on the embankment below the tracks (near Bob Martin's house) as a more lightly loaded steam train came past at night. That was the closest to hell on Earth I'd ever experienced to that point. The Earth shook, the fire flamed. It was a life experience for my collection.
The summer of 1956, one John Nance and I, rode our bikes through the Hillyard yards. We came upon a steam loco just sitting there. It had steam up, but nobody was nearby. We climbed the ladder into the cab. It was hot! I recall the cab insides were painted institutional green. The seat was wooden. It was not a very cool place, in more ways than one. If we had been bad kids we would have tried to joyride that sucker. Instead, we correctly and quietly climbed down and out of the cab and moved on. In a month or two I started my four years at Rogers. The steam era ended for Spokane then. I do not recall seeing another live steam locomotive in actual commercial freight use after that day.
On my 35th Wedding anniversary, I took my wife, Carey, to our mountains to see the North Carolina Railroad, a tourist railroad that is part of a system owned by our state. We took a day trip under live steam. Afterward, the employees invited kids climb to into the cab of the live steam engine. I climbed up too! I have video. Another life experience collected; my second in the cab of a steam locomotive.
At age 67, I'm in the twilight of my software development career. I'm a 1099 independent contractor at a client corporation named Railinc, in Cary, NC. Railinc does shared data processing for the US, Canadian, and Mexican railroads and equipment owners. This commonality is necessary because the equipment is traded between companies on shared track. High-tech meets low-tech as computers meet trains: I'm tied to each. My adopted state runs its own railroad. I live one mile from a Norfolk Southern right-of-way and a siding. Grampa was a railroad guy. I commute to a cube each day to write computer software for trains. Life is good.