In a way, Chris McKinley’s true home is the train station and the rail yards that surround the art galleries, shops and restaurants that have popped up in White River Junction over the past 20 years.
Twice a day, at late morning and early evening, McKinley opens the station for Amtrak passengers. On a recent evening, he sat in the station agent’s office while a lone passenger waited for the northbound Vermonter.
“Back in 2008, we were getting close to 20 a day,” he said of the trains passing through White River Junction, the vast majority of them hauling freight. But the Great Recession quickly took a toll. “It went from 15 down to six in an awful hurry.”
These are the details — the number of trains, the number of cars, the times of arrival and departure — that McKinley has lived for and that brought him to White River Junction in the first place.
“I moved to White River to be able to research and write about trains,” he said.
In March 1990, he got a job at Dartmouth Printing and shortly thereafter found an apartment above a barber shop on South Main Street.
Just as he documents the rails, McKinley lives by paperwork, so he still has copies of his rental agreements.
“I started out at $410 a month, and then it went up from there,” he said.
Over the years, the building has changed hands seven or eight times, he said. But the rent stayed affordable; over the past five years, he’s paid $750 a month.
His three decades in the apartment have come to an end. Earlier this fall, Real Property Management Beacon, a Lebanon-based franchise of a national property management firm, asked him to be out by Dec. 12.
The building’s ground-floor tenant, Tourist Gallery, opted not to renew its lease, which was up at the end of December, said Chad Etting, who runs the gallery with his wife, Heidi Conner, in an email. They’re looking for a new space but don’t plan to reopen until May.
McKinley struggled to find another apartment in his price range. It’s not clear whether he’s found one. He moved farther south on South Main, into an apartment that rents for $1,000 a month. The jump from $750 to $1,000 feels like a big increase, McKinley said.
His old apartment is going to be renovated and rented back out, building owner Bobby Oakes said.
“Our main goal is to improve everything and make it look better,” he said.
Two other apartments in the building have already been renovated, said Kim Chewning, director of operations for Real Property Management Beacon. The apartment McKinley is leaving badly needs it, she said.
“They’re pretty good,” McKinley said of the current owners. “They brought it all up to code for me.” Under a previous recent owner, McKinley was without a working stove for five years, he said.
McKinley’s income derives from a few sources. He works as a custodian 12 hours a week at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover, and he has his train station gig along with partial disability.
Those sources make him a modest living, but too much to qualify for Section 8, the federal low-income housing program, he said.
From the station, McKinley can see a new apartment building across the tracks and across the street from his old place. Too expensive for him, he said.
“A guy like me, we can’t hack it,” he said.
He remains uneasy about his new, higher rent, but the trains, which come and go on a fairly predictable schedule, keep him busy. He’s been pleased to see the number of passenger cars increasing on the Amtrak trains, with six cars traveling in each direction around Thanksgivng.
In the station office, McKinley sat at an old Steelcase desk, surrounded by items that have accreted over the decades. He used his smartphone to call an automated line to find out whether the northbound Vermonter was on time. It turned out it was 22 minutes late leaving Bellows Falls.
He’s still working on a history of Hartford train stations, most of which are now gone. Near the White River Junction station, a freight engine idled on a siding with a steady rumble and crackle.
Though he stays in town for the most part, the trains move him.
“When they take off I like to be outside, because you feel the push from when it gathers force,” he said of the Amtrak trains.
It’s a force, unlike the housing market, that he can experience without dread.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
