I was sleeping in my bed in Philadelphia, one morning, years ago, when my alarm radio turned on, and I heard a voice say, “Yeah, it was really great to wake up in the morning hearing the train whistle as it came through Fayette Station.”

More than once I played croquet in Aunt Sybil’s side yard in Lansing, WV, with Charlie McCoy, and my two cousins, Keith and Shirley, in 1951 and ‘52.  Charlie lived “next door,” in the big farmhouse down the road from Aunt Sybil’s house a tenth of a mile away. He grew up to become a legend in country music. Keith and Shirley were older than me, Charlie was a year and a half younger than I, and still is, I guess. Until I heard him on the radio, I did not know that the Charlie I knew was famous. I had watched him on TV, heard him play on records, but I didn’t know that I had played croquet with him. 

I lived with my grandparents in 1952 and ‘53 in Ramsey, WV,  about fifteen miles away from Aunt Sybil’s, who lived in Lansing, a tiny little town above the  station where the trains came through several times a day, some hauling passengers, some hauling coal, and some hauling chemicals to the Dupont plant down-river in Belle.  In the forties and fifties, rail traffic was heavy, and when a train crossed the road that led from Lansing to  Fayetteville, about eight miles away from Aunt Sybil’s, Charlie and I, and maybe twenty-eight  other people, could hear the steam engine’s train whistle as it echoed through the valley. 

The Fayette Station area is now called The New River Gorge. It’s becoming famous, and travel magazines and YouTube articles feature the Gorge and the new bridge.

I’ll never forget the old  eight-mile road down the mountain, across the river to Fayette Station, where the trains blew their whistles, and up seven or eight miles on the other side to  Fayetteville, the county seat of Fayette County. Fayetteville doesn’t have a railroad, so the town was served by Fayette Station, a very small train station that sat beside the New River, (That’s a strange name for the river, since it is one of the oldest rivers in the world according to geologists.)  I don’t remember if passengers got on there or not, since there was another depot a few miles away at Cotton Hill on old route 19, and where I got on the train with my Mother to go to DC. Now with the new bridge, Rt 19 crosses eight hundred feet above Fayette Station.

When I was very young, downtown Lansing consisted of an elementary school, where Aunt Sybil taught, a small store with one gas pump, and the post office in the store, along with a barber shop, where  I got my first haircut. (I did not like it.) Very little is left of the town now.The bridge is still there but has been rebuilt. The river rafters usually end their river adventure ride there and ride special buses to Fayetteville. 

In the old days going down the mountain and up the other side you drove on one of the snarkiest roads anyone has ever driven on. It is still snarky to a flatlander. It took forty-five minutes to drive the fifteen-miles down one side of the mountain, cross the bridge, and drive up the other side to Fayetteville. The road was a two-lane narrow strip of pavement eight or nine feet wide.  If two cars  met, they pulled the right side of the cars off the pavement, and depending on where they were, one either stopped or proceeded slowly until the oncoming car passed. 

Some of the turns were, (and still are), 180 degree turns and the angle requires you to navigate very correctly or you will have to stop and back up to make the turn.  There was no guardrail on your left side going down or on your right side going up.  Standard guardrails are there now.  In the old days rocks would jut out of the mountain and could gouge cars.  My Mother baptized our new ‘48 Oldsmobile on a  rock sticking out into the road. When I drove it, years later, my youngest two children, who were under seven years old, cried in terror when they looked out at the drop-off from the road.  When the Federal Government made it into a National Park in 1978, it was widened, and is one-way from Lansing nearly all the way to Fayetteville,  but even today RVs and trailers are not allowed on it.

 In 1978 the highway system finished the new bridge across the river that stands as the symbol of the New River Gorge National Park, and is featured on the West Virginia quarter issued in 2005. From Aunt Sybil’s kitchen I could see the bridge as they built it. It is from mountaintop to mountaintop now, allowing traffic to cross from Lansing to Fayetteville on the three-thousand-foot long bridge above the river in forty-five seconds, instead of forty-five minutes.

The bridge was record-breaking when it was built, by being the highest bridge in the world that carried vehicles, and it was the longest single arch bridge at its unveiling.  It was, and still is mind boggling. On the third Saturday of every October, the four-lane bridge is closed to vehicles, and visitors can walk across, and observe or participate in parachuting from the bridge to the shore over eight hundred feet straight down. The height of the bridge is more than one and a half times the height of the Washington Monument in DC.

It is estimated that on the Saturdays that the bridge is closed to traffic, one hundred thousand people come to walk the bridge and watch one hundred people BASE jump, that is, parachute from a fixed location. With the bridge jumpers, and the bridge walkers, when the highway is closed, the hikers, the rock climbers, the bicyclists, the RVers and campers, and the river rafters, the hunters, (Yes, you can hunt in the 70,000 acre park during the proper seasons if you have a license.), Fayetteville now has taken on the atmosphere of a destination tourist town with the restaurants and small shops. There is a small park in Fayetteville named Charlie McCoy Park. On any given weekend, in Fayetteville traffic is slow, and parking is at a premium. There are a hundred or more videos on YouTube about New River Gorge National Park, the bridge and Fayetteville. I recommend you watch one or two. The whole place is amazing.