WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Outside the train station during a Sunday afternoon gathering in honor of Chris McKinley, a pair of diesel-electric freight engines sat idling. Every time the door opened, the rumble, crackle and hiss of the engines entered the station’s crowded waiting room.
Though unintentional, it was a fitting tribute to McKinley, who had devoted nearly all of his attention to railroads. He had lived in White River Junction, to be close to the train station, since 1990. After years of steady presence and making himself useful, he had been given the honorary title of “Yardmaster.”
People who knew McKinley knew him through “the countless small moments of working around trains and helping the people who love them,” Scott Hausler, Hartford’s director of parks and recreation, said at the memorial gathering on March 1.
McKinley died Feb. 19 at age 68. He collapsed while walking downtown.
“What I was told was that it was some kind of cardiac event,” McKinley’s brother, Glenn, said in a phone interview. Chris had an appointment scheduled to see a cardiologist, though it’s not clear whether it was for ongoing care or a new condition, his brother said.
From his earliest years, Chris McKinley was fascinated by trains. Even his three siblings, all younger, aren’t entirely sure where his love of the railroad comes from.
“I think it all started with the train set around the bottom of the Christmas tree,” Susan McKinley, the youngest of the siblings, said in a phone interview from her home in Connecticut.
Chris’ childhood years were spent in Cos Cob, Conn., part of the town of Greenwich. His grandfather founded McKinley’s Market, a grocery store in Cos Cob, and his father, Edwin “Ned” McKinley, co-owned and ran it with one of his brothers after serving in the Navy during World War II.
A sickly child, Chris struggled with a host of food allergies. He and his siblings were all adopted, and “I think he didn’t come home with mom and dad for a while, because he was sick,” Susan McKinley said.
In more recent years, his childhood illness “probably would have been identified as celiac disease,” she added. Back then, no one gave gluten a second thought.
Chris had close relationships with his father and grandfather, Glenn McKinley said. He helped out at the grocery store, and his father indulged his love of trains.
“I remember as a really young kid going to the train station to watch the trains come in,” Glenn said. Greenwich was a growing bedroom community for New York City, and passenger trains rolled into the station throughout the day.
In the introduction to a book he was working on, “Train Stations of Hartford, Vermont,” McKinley wrote that it was a family friend named Tom Balsamo, who worked at the post office in Cos Cob, who fostered his interest in trains. Balsamo had to get the mail to the train station and would take Chris, as young as age 5, on these errands.
Young Chris would help Balsamo by handing the smaller sacks of mail to a conductor, “and after giving him two bags or so, the conductor would say, ‘Thanks, buddy, for keeping us on time.’ “
Years later, he wrote, he heard the same line from a conductor on the Vermonter, the Amtrak train that passes through White River Junction, and felt a deep sense of connection. “This gave me the feeling and sense of community service, which today is hard to try to earn, a sense of doing something you felt good about doing, with no pay expected … and the feeling of being able to lend a hand to a friend.”
Railroad immersion
At school, Chris faced a learning disability that was ill-defined. This was in the years before the 1975 passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, so Chris’ parents found private schools for him, particularly to help with reading. He was a learner, and curious, but he learned more slowly than his peers, and struggled a bit socially, his siblings said.
“Hats off to my mom and dad, who went out of their way to get the best education he could get,” Glenn McKinley said.
He went to a public junior high school, but not the one closest to the McKinley home, as his siblings did, Dru Boyens, who was next oldest after Chris. The more distant school had a program that better suited his needs.
A family friend who was an elementary school librarian had a place in Thetford Center and encouraged the McKinleys to visit. They liked it enough that they bought a home a few doors down when it came up for sale, the first house on the left on Tucker Hill Road. It was a weekend getaway for a few years until the family moved north in 1974.
“My grandfather died and my parents wanted us to grow up in an atmosphere like they had, the way Cos Cob was when they were kids,” Boyens said.
Entering Thetford Academy as a sophomore was a bit of a shock to Chris, Glenn McKinley said. As a small, awkward kid in a new school, he struggled to fit in.
“I feel like he was pretty much thrown into the fire there, and it was tough at times,” he said.
But Chris wanted to be involved and found a way. He was not athletic, but kept score for the basketball team. And he got involved in the Boy Scouts.
He also had picked up photography, an interest that meshed with his fondness for trains. In Cos Cob, he set up a darkroom under the cellar stairs, Boyens said.
After Thetford Academy, he attended the Doscher School of Photography, in South Woodstock, for a year. He did a little commercial photography, including some weddings. While he was good at taking formal, posed portraits, he struggled to take candid photographs, Boyens said.
When he first lived on his own, McKinley shared a house in Norwich, and worked at Dan & Whit’s, the Norwich general store. At the time, he was also an avid bicyclist, devising long routes for himself and traversing miles of country roads.
But the trains called to him and he moved into a small apartment above a barber shop in White River Junction. He could see and hear the trains from there and it was a short walk to the train station.
As much as train traffic dropped off after the interstates came through in the 1960s and ’70s, the railroad is still a defining characteristic of White River Junction. The switching of cars and the lowing of horns at crossings punctuate theater performances, and art lovers and restaurant patrons are regularly befuddled when trains switching cars block Joe Reed Drive, which connects Main Street to Railroad Row. It can be fun to witness.
To say that McKinley immersed himself in railroading is kind of like saying “Vermont has a lot of trees.”
McKinley wrote down on a piece of folded paper the details of nearly every train that passed through White River Junction. The numbers on the engines, what kinds of freight cars it included — tankers, hoppers, boxcars — and any other details he found interesting. He once photographed the Vermonter’s baggage car in 2001 because it had new doors.
“You try to document it when it’s up here,” he told the Valley News at the time.
He also tried to find and photograph every Central Vermont Railroad boxcar numbered from 402,000 to 402,999, which were built from 1962 until the early 1970s.
McKinley, who never married or had children, died without a will, so his estate has to pass through probate. His profuse documentation fills his apartment and two storage units, his siblings said.
At the train station are two milk crates full of his research, including a binder containing his notes for “Train Stations of Hartford, Vermont.” It’s unclear what will happen with all that material.
A store of deep knowledge
The last full-time ticketing agent, Bill Brigham, retired from the White River Junction station in 2002. Amtrak then went to a system where a single person looked after multiple stations, but the person in charge of White River Junction lived in Bellows Falls, too far away to be of much use.
Throughout that muddled time, McKinley was at the station, as he had been with Brigham in charge, and helped out confused travelers who’d bought tickets online but didn’t know much beyond when the train was supposed to come.
Eventually, Amtrak contracted with the town of Hartford, which hires “caretakers” to open the station and assist passengers. The part-time job pays Vermont’s minimum wage, though some caretakers volunteer.
Through his persistence, in caring for the trains and the people who rode them, McKinley was eventually bestowed the caretaker title he’d held all along. And the town paid him. He fit the work in around his primary job as a custodian at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, in Hanover.
He was on a first-name basis with all the Amtrak conductors, Gayle Ottman, a former Hartford Selectboard member who serves as a caretaker, said in an interview in the train station’s office, which seems unchanged from the 1960s or ’70s.
Through his constant presence, McKinley became a store of deep knowledge of the station and of the trains that pass through it. Anytime someone from the state Agency of Transportation had a question about the station, they would find McKinley, Ottmann said.
Years ago, when it was time to move the restored Engine 494 into its place, it derailed en route, Tad Nunez, then head of Hartford Parks and Rec, said at the memorial for McKinley.
“Sure enough, Chris comes up, pulling on my sleeve,” Nunez said. ” ‘Tad, the leapfrog,’ ” McKinley told him. “‘That’s good,'” Nunez told him, “‘I have no clue what you’re talking about.'”
The leapfrog, it turned out, was a tool for shunting a train car’s wheels back onto the track, and the station had one handy. McKinley had saved the day, because he was observant.
The two engines on the track outside his memorial service included one from New England Central Railroad, No. 3015, and one from Buffalo and Pittsburgh Railroad, No. 3511. If Chris McKinley had been there, he’d have written it down.