Article by Angie Klink
Published in the Indiana Preservationist Magazine
The spirits of railroad men lurk ghostlike amid the decrepit Frankfort Indiana roundhouse where they once worked in soot and grinding noise. My grandfather, Ross Lawhead, was a fireman for the Clover Leaf-Nickel Plate Railroad. On Christmas morning 1926, when my mother was eight, her tall violin-playing father was on the Leaf engine returning to Frankfort roundhouse to head home so he could celebrate Christmas with his wife and seven children. But it was not to be.
During the furious snowstorm, the engine collided head-on with another outside of the roundhouse. Ross, 36, attempted to jump to safety, but the coal tender overturned, crushing him. He was the only fatality in the horrific collision.
My father, Jack Lipp (shown on the left side of the bottom photo, leaning against the handrail in the lighter coverall, a leather notebook sticking out of his pocket), also worked for the Nickel Plate in Frankfort, although I never knew him as a railroad man. Trains were his life before I was born. He started as an apprentice boilermaker in 1940.
Diesel engines replaced steam, and my father's boilermaker trade became obsolete. So, six years before my birth, he worked the railroad by day and attended Purdue University at night to become a different kind of Boilermaker - one with an electrical engineering degree.
Although my father became a desk job, clean-white-shirt engineer, his hands remained those of a railroader, with knuckles enlarged from 18 years of servicing boilers.
After my grandfather died, The Times of Frankfort printed his last, foretelling words believed then to allude to his snowy train run but today glow as a mystical prophecy. Moments before death, my grandfather said: "Well, it will soon be over.
The roundhouse is on Historic Landmarks' 10 Most Endangered list. If we save the roundhouse, the narrative of the railroad and its men will never be over.
-- Written by Angela R. Klink, a writer residing in Lafayette.
-- Top photo by Tommy Kleckner: bottom photo from Angela Klink's personal collection.
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