Newspapers, Early Railroad Whyfors?, LaSalle Parish, La.
Submitted by Jack Willis
Date: 11 Oct 2004
Source: From the Jena Times - Olla Tullos Signal, Grass Roots and
Cockleburrs
Date: 25 Aug 2004

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Early Railroad Whyfors?

When William Buchanan started his timber acquisition march southwards from
Stamps, Arkansas in the late 1890's, he was one of the mechanization moguls
who recognized the importance of the railroad as the prime source of
transport to insure success in the lumbering business at that time.
After Buchanan first got his mills up and running at Stamps, Springhill and
Minden he was tired of the old outdated locomotives and poorly maintained
tracks he had inherited from the purchase of the Stamps, Arkansas mill, so
he personally took on the task of vigorously upgrading what would become the
Louisiana  & Arkansas rail system. In fact, he was so in love with the
construction of the L & A that he considered his sawmills of secondary
importance, and even decided to oversee the renovation of the old line and
the laying of the new rails himself, and becoming a familiar sight at end of
track, shouting orders from raised windows of his plush rail car named the
"Catahoula". Buchanan was considered a miser in other aspects of his Timber
Dynasty, but when it came to railroad construction and maintenance of his
rail line and equipment, money was no object, resulting in the line's
estimated worth in 1910 at over $10,000,000.
He might have been considered a horse's "arse" by his peers, but at his
death in 1923 the L & A was the best, most profitable, and most efficient
rail systems in the Deep South, and other railroad magnets like J.P. Morgan
and Jay Gould journeyed south to study his modus operandi.
Buchanan constructed one of the most elaborate, expensive machine shops,
complete with a roundhouse and turntable, in the United States. The Stamps
shop, by utilization of the turntable, could turn a locomotive and position
it over different bays where any and all mechanical problems could be
properly addressed.
Mr. Herbert Tannehill was Chief Construction Engineer until the line reached
Trout, and after laying out the mill town, Mr. Tannehill no longer wanted to
be dominated by the overbearing Buchanan clan so he simply quit their
employ. Needing to extend the line on to Jonesville, thus opening up a venue
to eastern markets, he contacted the Missouri Pacific Railroad Line
Officials and procured an engineer on loan in the person of Mr. E.J.
Lassiter, Sr.
When the line was completed into Jena with the first train arriving in what
was old Jena on December 31st, 1903, there was no depot and when attempts
were made to purchase land on which to erect one on, land sales were denied
the company. The stand taken by the good citizens of Old Jena was because
that they were fearful that establishment of a depot in their elitist
neighborhood would draw hobos, bums, and a generally undesirable class of
secondary rabble to their community and they simply wouldn't stand for it.
The company simply moved back up the line about a mile and hastily erected a
depot at what would become New Jena in order to have an embarkation point
for the first passenger train, which arrived in New Jena on May 1st, 1904.
By 1907 the line had traversed the Brushley swamp east of Rhinehart, La and
had been laid into Jonesville to tie into a pre-existing line called the New
Orleans & Northwestern Railway.
This tie-in enabled William Buchanan to then utilize his connection on the
western end to the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern railroads to give
valuable access to both northern and eastern markets. In 1917 he shipped out
enough board feet of lumber from the Good Pine Lumber Company mill to
construct the complete town of Lincoln, Nebraska.
When his engineers arrived in Jonesville with the L & A, they found that the
NO& N R.R. was a narrow gauge line with the smaller rails only three feet
apart, but not to be dismayed, they sent the line locomotives back up to the
Stamps machine shop where the steam engines and rail cars were fitted with
an extra set of wheels to enable them to travel the US standard gauge line
with a 4 feet, 8. 5 inches width between the L& A rails and then transition
to the narrower, smaller 3.0 width rails coming from Natchez.
Many questions have been raised as to why railroads being built today in the
US use the odd measurement distance between rails utilizing the US Standard
gauge and here is the reason why. The roads are built that way because
that's the way they were built in England, and the people over there who
built pre-rail-trams ways used that spacing, and these English émigrés to
the US used the same jigs and tools that were used for building wagons in
the US as they had in their native England. If the English wagon makers had
tried to utilize any other spacing the wheels would not have followed in the
ruts first made by the chariots of Imperial Rome during Julius Caesar's rule
of Britannia.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived
from the original specifications of a Roman war chariot. So the next time
you wonder why some horse's "arse" came up with such an oddball measurement,
it's because Roman war chariots were built just wide enough to accommodate
the rear ends of two war horses.
And you've been thinking all this time that being a HORSE'S ARSE was not
important, but William Buchanan would have probably argued in defense of
that calling.

GR&C (8-25-04)                                             JMW