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We're chatting about the people, places, events, and flavors that make Johnson City, Tennessee a lovely place to live. An interview show hosted by Colin Johnson.
Proud member of the Maypop Media family of podcasts.
0:00:00 - (Colin Johnson): It's a little bit damp here in East Tennessee today, and it's a little bit cold. The winter has seemed to roll in. I think it was like 36 degrees this morning, which was a little chilly. But enough about weather. You guys didn't come on to listen to weather reports for me. You came to learn about our community. And I've got the opportunity to introduce some just wonderful gentlemen that are doing something awesome in our community.
0:00:21 - (Colin Johnson): Welcome to the podcast. Fred and Carson with the Johnson City Railroad Experience.
0:00:26 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Thank you. Full steam ahead.
0:00:28 - (Carson Sailor): Glad to be here.
0:00:29 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, I'm excited. I'm. Our team put this together. Marissa put you guys on this. And I was excited to see this because I don't know enough about it. I did see. I drove by the location the other day. Where are you guys located?
0:00:42 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We're on the corner of Boone and King street, right. 207 northbound.
0:00:46 - (Colin Johnson): 207 northbound. I think Watauga Brewing's right across the street. And the library is a stone throw away, basically, and it's in a great spot, and so it's going to be. But you weren't there always. Where were you before?
0:00:59 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We were on the campus of East Tennessee State University, where I worked for 60.
0:01:04 - (Colin Johnson): Okay, tell me about the origin story of the railroad museum slash experience.
0:01:10 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, it's kind of an origin story that goes back beyond 2007 when we started at ETSU. If you said you were on campus quite a bit. If you remember the bottom of the Reese Museum, there was a Conestoga wagon, an old log cabin at a printing press. Well, Blair White, who happened to be the director at the time, had seen our layout. It was a modular layout that we only got to set up once or two or maybe five times in a year over a weekend.
0:01:40 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And everybody could find a space and we'd all come together. He said, would you put down in the bottom of the museum? I'm tired of the wagon and I'm tired of the log cabin. And we'll put the printing press out of the way. So we were down there for about four or five months. The president of the university at that time was Paul Stanton. Paul saw it, his motto for his administration was the Etsu Express.
0:02:05 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And so he said, once we left campus, if I can find a spot for you, would you come back? And he found a spot in the old student center down on one of the basement floors. And in 2007, we broke a champagne bottle, had speeches, and the Georgia Carter Railroad Museum was up and in business every Saturday for 16 years.
0:02:27 - (Colin Johnson): George L. Carter who is this fellow?
0:02:29 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): George L. Carter was an entrepreneur from a neighboring state who kind of started out in the grocery business as a busboy and put his money together. And eventually he was into timber, he was into coal. And he built the CCC, the 3C's railroad, which became the Clinchfield, which was one of the most modern railroads through the mountains at the time. And he also owned about 120 acres where an institution called ETSU is now sitting nice.
0:03:00 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And he lured the governor's committee that was looking to place three normal schools in the three grand divisions. He lured them back for a second time, pulled those road to the top of the hill where they could ride up and see his property, gave them 120 acres, had a hundred thousand dollars in 1909. And by golly, the school grew from there. And he still lived on the property for a long time.
0:03:27 - (Colin Johnson): That's super cool. I don't think I knew the origin of etsu. I mean, that's, that's pretty impressive.
0:03:33 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): He was a railroad man.
0:03:34 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool. Yeah, etsu. I grew up on campus and have a deer. It's got a soft, a soft spot in my heart for it for sure. I love it. And Carly went there. My wife, she has a couple degrees and now our youngest is a student there and the other one's down at ut. So we love, we love our universities nearby. Well, what did you guys. I mean, you just probably didn't grow up and say, I want to start a model train museum or whatever, right? I mean, like, how do we get into this gig?
0:04:04 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Let Carson tell you his story, then I'll tell you mine, which goes back maybe a little bit further.
0:04:08 - (Colin Johnson): Probably you're a little younger than Mr. Fred here.
0:04:12 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Sure.
0:04:12 - (Carson Sailor): So I got here through a Christmas tree is actually the story behind it. My background is in museum management. Management. I worked in the Boone, North Carolina area for about eight years.
0:04:25 - (Colin Johnson): Okay.
0:04:26 - (Carson Sailor): Moved over here because I met a wonderful woman and we got married and she is a physician at etsu. And Nice. Made sense for me to move over here because I was doing a lot of stuff remote. And then we have our wonderful downtown Candyland Christmas with all the Christmas trees. And I'm wandering through and I see a tree that has all these trains hanging on it that says coming soon. And I made a note that if they started hiring, I'd throw my hat in the ring because it's a topic area that I've always liked and it would be fun to build a museum from the ground up. And lo and behold, the job went live and about 15 people texted me the link saying they're looking for your skillset and your resume. And so, yeah, I got to the area through.
0:05:10 - (Carson Sailor): Into the museum through a woman in a Christmas tree is the story on it.
0:05:14 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, it's pretty cool. Well, we're glad you're here. And kindly in. Christmas is fantastic. That's coming up pretty soon. So it's amazing how many people come and visit because of that. That's just a huge draw. It's neat how one little idea will take off and can change a whole community.
0:05:30 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, it got so big that they had to have a different lot. Yeah. Which is the way we ended up with our first Christmas tree last year, the one that Carson saw on the new area, which was right across from the building that we already were renovating.
0:05:42 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, right.
0:05:43 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): There were right next door.
0:05:46 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:05:46 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): My story is a little bit longer. I loved trains when I was a kid and my mother's father had this little part time job of going down to the local depot. I grew up in Northern Kentucky and so the Louisville and Nashville, the LNN was the train I first saw. And he would pick up the mail two or three times a day in an old Ford pickup truck and take it to the post office. And I would. I would Scotch rides with him when I was 4 and 5 years old and I got to be such a regular, they would sometimes put me up in the baggage car while the train was stopped, unloading passengers and hand baggage or sometimes even in the locomotive. So I was hooked.
0:06:28 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So a Lionel train around the Christmas tree when I was older. An HO scale when I got even older. I was in college at the time. And so the transition here of finding that there was a club that was founded in 1993 called the Mountain Empire Modular Railroaders because each had a module that as I said before, when the occasion warranted and they had space, they could put it together for a weekend. Everybody could run their trains. And then it went home to basements and garages and storage areas.
0:07:01 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, I became a member of the club and lo and behold, after five or six years, I was no longer just a member. I was president of the club. And then the connection with ETSU, which got us into ETSU to begin with, 16 years there on campus, our building, the old student center, the campus center building was slated to come to the ground. Had an angel named Jenny Brock, who you may know.
0:07:23 - (Colin Johnson): I didn't know Jenny well. She's great.
0:07:26 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): City commissioner now had wanted us downtown where more people could see us. And off of that campus for maybe five or six years before it happened. And she, she found Sam Taylor's space and the rest is becoming history.
0:07:41 - (Colin Johnson): Ah, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I think Jenny's super sweet. She's done a ton of stuff for. She's been on the podcast. I think we had to do Zoom back during. Back during COVID and. But yes, she's done a lot for our area and she's really sweet. I grew up loving trains too. I think my dad loved them. And we built. We had a big four by eight sheet. We made trains, you know, the tracks and all that stuff. It was a blast.
0:08:07 - (Colin Johnson): How big were the different modules? Because you said different modules were in full foot increments.
0:08:12 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So there could be a four foot module or an eight foot module. Okay, well, that was about as big as you could pack in the back of a vehicle and get it somewhere. The club had set standards. It had to be southern Appalachia summertime, so it could be anywhere in southern Appalachia. And part of the modules were flat and part were mountain profile. So they had those things going for them. And it was. HO scale, which is half of Lionel, is a train that everybody.
0:08:41 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): A lot of kids used to get Lionels. And that's called o scale. Well, ho is half of o, so it's smaller. One foot equals 87 foot of a real car. So a one foot pasture car represents what, 87ft long. And that's the scale that we work with.
0:08:59 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool. So it's pretty good size.
0:09:01 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): It's pretty good size. It's pretty good size. But the smaller the scale, the more railroad you can get on a smaller space.
0:09:07 - (Colin Johnson): Right. What's the smallest scale model? Oh, geez.
0:09:10 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): There's one called TT Tabletop, where it's about an inch long for a car. Yeah, I've seen. I've seen the layout in a briefcase.
0:09:17 - (Colin Johnson): Oh, wow.
0:09:18 - (Carson Sailor): And we have all the major scales modeled at the. At the museum. The most common small ones, N scale, which is a lot of fun, but we go all the way up, all the way up to G. And you.
0:09:31 - (Colin Johnson): Can almost ride a G. Well, close to it.
0:09:33 - (Carson Sailor): Yeah.
0:09:33 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:09:33 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): GS the one a lot of people put in their backyards, right?
0:09:36 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, big time. That's cool.
0:09:40 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Now does both you guys. You.
0:09:41 - (Colin Johnson): Did you grow up in Boone?
0:09:43 - (Carson Sailor): I did not. I'm originally from North Florida and went to undergrad in St. Augustine and quickly realized that if I wanted to work in museums, I needed a master's degree, so went to Appalachian State for my master's. Lived in Boone for eight, nine years and then came over the mountain. Yeah, so I'm not from here, but I got here as fast as I could.
0:10:03 - (Colin Johnson): Fred, how about you? Where'd you grow up?
0:10:05 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): I grew up in Northern Kentucky, right on almost on the banks of the Ohio river, about 80 miles down the Ohio from Louisville, which is a town most folks know. They made baseball bats there, for example, the Louisville Slug.
0:10:18 - (Colin Johnson): Yes, I do know.
0:10:19 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): I. When I graduated high school I went to Austin be in Clarksville. So I became a Tennesseean at that point. Atta boy. Started out in fine arts and got a major there and then liked biology enough I got a double major and it was the biology scene that I followed. Master's and PhD at the University of Tennessee. First job here at the King Sports center in 1972 teaching biology. Eventually came over and chaired the Department of Biology for a while and I retired in December of 20 after 48 full time years and occasionally still teach a class there.
0:10:57 - (Colin Johnson): That's fun.
0:10:57 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): But as a retiree now I've got another job. I'm a. I'm directing a railroad museum that you just gotta come see.
0:11:04 - (Colin Johnson): I bet it's awesome. I'm excited, I'm excited to hear all about it and yeah, so tell us a little bit. You walk in, what, what hits you, what what's the main attraction?
0:11:14 - (Carson Sailor): So when you walk in, we want people to have a unique experience. So everything has been designed around guest experience. Our ticket desk isn't just a ticket desk. It's modeled after a ticket office from a railroad. And we've got the baggage car sitting out front. So when you walk in you really do feel like you're getting your ticket at a train station. And of course up front we have our Johnson City layout where we can point and say, hey, this is where Yeehaw Brewing is and this is where White Duck Taco is. And here's Bergen Barrel. And the visitor's center.
0:11:48 - (Colin Johnson): Did that used to be where the visitor center?
0:11:50 - (Carson Sailor): It sure did, yeah.
0:11:51 - (Colin Johnson): Station. I saw that. And that model's really well done.
0:11:54 - (Carson Sailor): It's a beautiful model. And then you get into one of our two main gallery areas where we have a locomotive simulator where you can drive trains throughout the country using authentic controls. We have a beautiful orientation film put together from ETSU's digital media department. We have a model of Knoxville. It's railroads, nice rotating exhibit cases. Thanks to the generosity of the Hardin family, we have a giant exhibit on the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina railroad.
0:12:26 - (Carson Sailor): And then of course, in that gallery we also have Fred's Baby, which is the largest model of the East Tennessee and western North Carolina railroad and the country.
0:12:35 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): It's tilled, under construction.
0:12:38 - (Carson Sailor): And as you move back through the museum, we have a railroad observation station. So we've got radio scanners listening to what the engineers and conductors in the train are talking to dispatch. We've got live webcams throughout the country where you can watch trains going by.
0:12:53 - (Colin Johnson): How fun is that?
0:12:53 - (Carson Sailor): So, yeah, lots of fun stuff. And then as you get to the back of the museum, more hands on interactives, think things for little ones, large children's room, touch table games. They can play, that kind of stuff.
0:13:05 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool.
0:13:06 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): The model railroad club that I was a member of for so many years now, the Mountain Empire Model Railroad Club, not modular because they're set up permanently, has redesigned their layout too. So they've got 60. 60ft more of running space than they. Than they had before. Or is it 60%? It's a, it's a much more impressive layout than they had. And Carson has generated a lot of information throughout. One about passenger trains are becoming more and more harder to find, especially in this country.
0:13:45 - (Colin Johnson): And on our side of the Mississippi, they're not as frequent. Yeah, it's just.
0:13:49 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And another one about women on the railroad, which a lot of folks didn't think much about women being on the railroad. Some of them during the second war even drove the trains themselves until the war was over. It's got a neat display when, when you first come in about how did Johnson City get here? And it was because of Henry Johnson building a water tank so trains would stop here and fill up those tenders on those themed locomotives in the railroad that came from Knoxville to Bristol, the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railway.
0:14:24 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We have, thanks to the Hardin family, a bench from a depot that is marked for that particular railroad that existed in the 1950s.
0:14:34 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool.
0:14:35 - (Carson Sailor): So 1850s, 1850s.
0:14:36 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): I'm sorry I said 19.
0:14:39 - (Colin Johnson): Still. Yeah, that's even more cool.
0:14:41 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): It's even more cool. But hobos are something that we don't think much about. But during the late 1800s and the early 1900s, especially during the depression years in the 20s and early 30s, a lot of folks went from place to place to place by not buying a ticket to get on the train, but jumping on the train.
0:15:00 - (Colin Johnson): Train jumping, yeah.
0:15:02 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): They had their own language. It's a language of symbols. Over 80 of them in the eastern United States, really. And Carson has created a place for you to follow Hobo signs. We've got little pickets all through and information on a nice big billboard that says, here's some of what they did. Can you find the signs? And here's what they mean. So there's a lot of cool stuff that is cool scattered throughout the museum. So it's not just trains running around on model railroad layouts are displays, but there's stuff where you can really get your hands on things.
0:15:39 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome.
0:15:40 - (Carson Sailor): It's going to be fun for everybody. And it's also filling a pretty important space with the hands on museum kind of moving out of downtown. This is where we're going to tell Johnson City's story through the lens of the railroad.
0:15:52 - (Colin Johnson): I love that. Yeah. People as I tour them around, showing them houses all the time, they're like, well, how did Johnson City get here? Or whatever. And I'm like, well, we had a little water and cold, basically water and tank that would fill up the steam engines when they were out of juice coming over the mountain or coming from Knoxville. So. And it's just funny how like things grow from there, right?
0:16:15 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, they grew from there. People started getting off the train, stretch their legs a little bit while it was taking on water and some of them were hungry.
0:16:21 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:16:22 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So Henry Johnson got together with a brother in law and they met that need providing things to eat. And some of us, man, it's a pretty area. I wish there was a place to stay for a day or two. We're not. Well, he provided lodging for them and they just went from there to there to there.
0:16:37 - (Colin Johnson): There you go.
0:16:38 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Yeah.
0:16:39 - (Carson Sailor): I mean, you get off the train and the first thing you see is Buffalo Mountain where the depot was going to be. It'd be. You'd be hard pressed to not stay. Right, right.
0:16:46 - (Colin Johnson): I mean, it's beautiful. It's just beautiful. It'd be interesting. I like to see it without the equipment on top of it that's up there now for radio and cell towers and all that.
0:16:57 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Yeah.
0:16:58 - (Colin Johnson): So talk to us about. I think education is a huge part of this deal. And yeah, I think you're partnering with some schools and working on some. Yeah, some modules, I think.
0:17:09 - (Carson Sailor): Yeah, absolutely. So we are working on education modules for field trips. So we're going to be working inside the state standards and working with the local, local school groups to make sure that we are going to be a field trip destination both locally and regionally. So we actually have our first field trip coming to the museum on Friday. So everything's abuzz. Getting crafts ready and activities Ready? But we are going to be a place where we not only hit all of the STEM curriculum that you could want, but there's also quite a bit of humanities that we've woven into everything.
0:17:44 - (Colin Johnson): That's cool.
0:17:44 - (Carson Sailor): You've got pretty much anything you could learn academically. We've got modules developed where you'll be able to experience that as a field trip. So we're really excited about that.
0:17:55 - (Colin Johnson): That's super cool.
0:17:56 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Yeah. My wife, Katherine Cummins, has a PhD from LSU, and it's in curriculum development. So she has been instrumental in doing some of the research to get us positioned where we can put these modules online and give teachers something that they can do in their school system, but also the carrot that you can come on in here and we'll follow up on what you're doing. So we hope to be interactive in that way as well and provide another possible destination.
0:18:25 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Just like the great fossils. I've just provided one and Bays Mountain Nature park for years and years that everybody likes railroads. Here's a place to come and learn something about how railroads work. Learn something about how does a steam locomotive work? How does. How does a train stay on the track? If you marched in a band or in a military formation, when you make a corner, the guy on the inside is kind of marking time, but the tuba player out there is running.
0:19:00 - (Colin Johnson): He's getting double time going.
0:19:01 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Keep the road straight. Well, you've got two train wheels on a fixed axle, and they're going around the curve. One can't really go faster than the other to catch up. What's keeping them on the rails to get. So we got a lot of neat things that. That they can do to test their knowledge and get them involved.
0:19:22 - (Colin Johnson): Fred. Now, I'm sitting here thinking about that, and I'm going to be totally distracted because I'm like, in a car, you've got a constant velocity joint.
0:19:30 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Right.
0:19:30 - (Colin Johnson): And so they don't have those on trains.
0:19:32 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): No. Yeah.
0:19:34 - (Colin Johnson): Okay. I'm going to come over there so I can learn. All right, so let's say I load up the family. What are your hours? When do we want to come to the. When is the experience optional? And do you sign up online? Do you buy your tickets? Talk to me, Carson.
0:19:49 - (Carson Sailor): You can buy tickets online, although you're also more than welcome to buy them in person after train station. At the train station. That's right. We'll get you taken care of there. And we are open from 10am until 4:30pm and we're there Tuesdays through Saturdays. We wanted to make sure that we're there on Saturdays, because we know a lot of people are working 9 to 5 Monday, Monday through Friday. So we wanted to make sure that we had a weekend day there to be open. And our pricing structure, we think, is pretty.
0:20:18 - (Carson Sailor): Pretty generous for where we're at. Adults are $10. Children, seniors, teachers, first responders, military, you name it, is $8. And then we also have all kinds of great memberships. A single membership to the museum starts at $50, and you get to cover the museum as much as you'd like. But the. Really, the best deal that we have going on is the $100 family membership, which covers everybody in your household all the time. And as we've talked about, we've got a children's playroom. So it's a great activity for moms and dads who are on kid duty to bring them in and get them out of the house, wear them out and let them come see something and learn a little bit and play with some other children. So we're trying to be a valuable resource for the community in that way as well.
0:21:06 - (Colin Johnson): That's super cool. So you can get a season pass.
0:21:09 - (Carson Sailor): For the whole season pass?
0:21:10 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Absolutely.
0:21:11 - (Colin Johnson): I love.
0:21:12 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We actually have a special going on because we opened on the 3rd of October to the public for the first time. And right on the heels of that, we had a hurricane that came through and really put a lot of people's lives on a completely different format. So any families from our five counties here that have gone through this kind of devastation, we want to provide a place, or they can come and maybe for an hour or two hours or however long they stay, they're taken into a different kind of world.
0:21:49 - (Colin Johnson): That'd be great.
0:21:49 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And those families just tell us when they come in the door. That's a free ride for them.
0:21:56 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome that you guys are doing that. I think if they could just escape the devastation for a little while.
0:22:02 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Right.
0:22:03 - (Colin Johnson): And go somewhere fun with their kids, I think that's awesome that you're letting that happen for free. So if you're listening and you know somebody that we could benefit from that, send them on down.
0:22:12 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Please do.
0:22:13 - (Carson Sailor): Absolutely.
0:22:13 - (Colin Johnson): Tuesday through Saturday, 9 to 4:30.
0:22:16 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): 10 to 4:30. 10 to4:30.
0:22:18 - (Colin Johnson): Don't show up at 9. And then there's a lot of stuff that kids can play with, right?
0:22:24 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): I mean.
0:22:24 - (Carson Sailor): Oh, absolutely. We have miles of wooden Thomas the Tank Engine track and the children's. We've got a caboose that they can climb through and play on. Storybooks, Galore and trained staff members that are in there to interact with the kids and play with them. We've got coloring activities, we've got touch tables, we've got trains that they can drive throughout the rest of the museum. The sky's the limit. If you're a little one of that museum, it's going to feel really special.
0:22:52 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, I think it's, that's going to be fun. It's going to bring anytime you can play with, you know, real life things almost on a different scale. It really brings history to life and those are some of the memories that just really change the course of kids lives. They may become conductors or you know.
0:23:10 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): They get to meet new kids too. I mean when you're building your railroad empire and there's somebody else there building, there's often railroads merge and friendships get formed and generally if we hear a child crying, we know that the parents said okay, we gotta go. And we try to whisper that. There are two words that may help. It's called ice cream. There you go.
0:23:35 - (Colin Johnson): Are you like Mr. Johnson, did you set up an ice cream shop around the corner?
0:23:38 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, we didn't, but Carson has become a rather celeb in the region now because of Mr. Carson's neighborhood.
0:23:52 - (Carson Sailor): Yes. We have a wonderful social media person, Candid Media, Candace Yates. And she came up with this wonderful marketing idea that we would do Mr. Carson's neighborhood. So I love it. Mr. Rogers had the trolleys and the train coming through and so we've been doing behind the scenes videos and interviews with people and. And now walking around there's quite often. You're Mr. Carson. I'm like, yes, that's right. I've seen your videos. And I'm like, I'm so sorry. But no, Candace Yates is the genius behind that. So if you're looking for some social media help, Candace Yates is great.
0:24:26 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): That is awesome. He rolls those selfies. Sometimes he'll sign an autograph.
0:24:30 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, you gotta pay extra for the autograph. Yeah, I could see that coming from him. What are you most excited about that you guys are working on at the, at the, at the railway now?
0:24:41 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We're most excited. We're open.
0:24:43 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. How long did it take for the transition from TSU here?
0:24:48 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We started packing up in 2023 right after our annual big train show. So 8 June we started packing and about six weeks later everything was packed. Which meant that layouts that we never thought we'd have to take apart got sawed in pieces and then they were put in storage because we weren't ready to move from the campus directly into a building. And they stayed in storage from August until the middle of December.
0:25:18 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And remodeling was still going on, but our leases on our storage areas were running out as well in January. So we began moving just before the Christmas season. And it took a lot longer than we thought to get to a point where if we're going to ask the public to pay good dollars to come and see us, we need to have something that they can really, really see and experience and feel like this was worth it.
0:25:42 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And so, as I said before, we opened on the 3rd of October on a Thursday without much fanfare again. But we plan to have some chess, pumping that up, a real cut the ribbon kind of thing sometime before Thanksgiving. Once we're a little more settled and the community is a little more grounded, a little more healed, their lives are going to be like, yeah.
0:26:03 - (Colin Johnson): And I think you've got a track or treat.
0:26:06 - (Carson Sailor): Yeah. Yeah. So we have our first big public event on October 29th and it is from 6 to 8pm and we're calling it Tracker Treat, Tracker Tree. So it's a, it is a museum Halloween themed party. So we're going to have cost. Folks are going to be invited to wear costumes. We're going to have tons of candy to give away. There's going to be crafts. I'm bringing in a wonderful storyteller who's going to do jack tales and spooky railroad stories.
0:26:35 - (Carson Sailor): We plan all kinds of fun music and it'll just be, just be a good open house to come out, get some candy, see what we have to offer. And if you haven't been down to the museum yet, this would be a really fun thing to stop in and see what we have going on.
0:26:47 - (Colin Johnson): I love it. That's going to. That sounds like a great time.
0:26:49 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): It's going to be fun.
0:26:50 - (Colin Johnson): Mitch will be able to dress up and Thomas is, he loves that outfit he wears frequently. So that'll be fun. Fun. Let's talk about the train industry. Colleen and I, my wife, we went over to BU to help out a little bit over there. My, our son was cutting trees and we were trying to take food to them and dropped off some stuff over there. But literally down through one of the gorges, the track which was up, you know, 30ft from the river is washed out. It goes down into the river and comes back out. And I don't know that they ever be able to rebuild that. I don't know what.
0:27:23 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): I think there are plans to rebuild.
0:27:25 - (Colin Johnson): It because there's no other route, right?
0:27:27 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, when George L. Carter built the Clinchfield, that was the shortest route north to south through the mountains.
0:27:32 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:27:33 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And he capitalized on it being that it is still one of the primary routes for csx. And I think they'll do everything in.
0:27:41 - (Colin Johnson): Their power to get that back up going.
0:27:44 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): One real reason is that for a while, when they decided to pull out of Irwin, which had been their headquarters since Clinchfield. Well, almost since Clinchfield started, George L. Carter put it here first and then didn't like some of the politics that were going on so he moved it to Irwin. That was George L. Carter. When they started routing it around all of their shipping, then the price went up and a lot of the folks that were using the railroads to ship all kinds of goods and commodities said why you've got this shorter route. So they have gone back and engaged the old Clinchfield route and I'm sure they'll try to put that back together as soon as they can. Just like TDOT and the Feds are trying to put the Interstate 26 and the Interstate 40 back together.
0:28:35 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): They're major important corridors.
0:28:37 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, that's good to hear. I just had no idea, you know, how big an impact that is.
0:28:43 - (Carson Sailor): And to speak to the vision of Carter, a lot of the infrastructure on the old Clinchfield line is still original.
0:28:53 - (Colin Johnson): Isn't that amazing?
0:28:54 - (Carson Sailor): They didn't spare an expense. So where a wood trestle could have done, we get steel girders put in instead.
0:29:00 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, like a Boones Creek. There's a huge metal bridge there that's been there for 50 years.
0:29:05 - (Carson Sailor): Exactly. When it was built, it was the most expensive railroad per, per mile in the country. Just because it was so overbuilt. And it's, it's really impressive that it took an event of this magnitude to disrupt service.
0:29:23 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. I mean, because this was a 5,000 year flood they're saying. Exactly, Absolutely. Just unbelievable. So talk to us a little bit about railway commerce because I'm just curious myself. Like, you know, you see these trains rolling around all the time and being Johnson City right downtown, you, we have lots of trains through here and that's why we're here. And so yeah, I think it's pretty important. If you want to speak to a little bit, that'd be.
0:29:49 - (Colin Johnson): You can educate me and our listeners about the railways that run through our areas.
0:29:52 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, you've seen things change a lot as far as the types of cars. And now you're seeing basically deep, well, flat cars, three cars hooked together in tandem. So they're Two cars are sharing the same axles or with the middle car. And what you're seeing are containers on them. And containers now don't have to be unloaded. If you're taking them from a harbor where you put them on a ship, you don't have to take the contents out and do something else with it. You can transfer it to a train, are the train to a truck, or vice versa.
0:30:29 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So it goes sealed to wherever the destination was with very little loading and unloading, almost none in between. So that's a major change that we've seen in the railroads, that a lot of the different kinds of cars that were for special uses really have outlived their use. And railroads are modernizing all the time. There's a. A shop in Knoxville that upgrades diesel locomotives to make them much more efficient. The Knoxville Locomotive Works. Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
0:31:04 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Where as the technology becomes better and better, I mean, trains can drive themselves now, just like airplanes could fly themselves. But we want to have an engineer or a pilot there in case something does. Right, Right. Just in case. That's the last line of defense. I think one exciting thing is Amtrak, because a month or so ago, Amtrak published their report of what their highest priority is, and that's getting a railroad from Houston, Texas, to Boston, Massachusetts.
0:31:36 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): But that would come right through Atlanta, it would come through Knoxville, it would come through Johnson City, with an overnight in Johnson City, and all the way up to connect to what is one of the most used corridors from Roanoke on up to Philadelphia and onto D.C. and New York and onto New York. So we have high hopes that if they start building that, it's already the Roanoke. It can't take long to get to Bristol and maybe onto Johnson City.
0:32:05 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So folks could get on a train just like they used to right here in Johnson City and go to almost any place that they want in the country.
0:32:13 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome. Yeah.
0:32:14 - (Carson Sailor): Fred and I had the privilege about a month and a half ago of attending the National Railroad Historic Society Conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. So we got to ride Amtrak trains all through the Northeast Corridor. And we had the opportunity to hear an Amtrak executive speak, and it was really interesting because he'd been with the company for 20 years, and he said he's never seen this much public funding for Amtrak.
0:32:38 - (Carson Sailor): And every single station we went through had construction going on. So Amtrak is really serious right now about building up their infrastructure and. And getting it right. There's been some criticism of Amtrak over the years, but they realize that they'll Never be as fast as airplanes, but they're moving to make it be much more enjoyable than going to an airport.
0:33:01 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, that was one of my questions. Is it going to be a high speed train from.
0:33:05 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Probably not high speed here just because the quality of the track and the fact that these are diesel locomotives on the northern, the northeastern corridors where the locomotives are electric, they put much more into the infrastructure. And Amtrak has its own tracks. They're not sharing them with freight railroads. And that's allowed them to have speeds. On our route from Harrisburg back to Philadelphia, for example, we exceed 125 miles.
0:33:36 - (Carson Sailor): An hour and we weren't on a high speed train. A standard regional, just zipping along.
0:33:45 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Amtrak was excited. And the same person that we heard speak from Amtrak said they won't quite have a bullet train, but they're, they're about to put a prototype on the tracks that's much lighter and it should have much faster speeds in their northeast corridor.
0:34:03 - (Colin Johnson): So that's cool.
0:34:05 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So we don't care how slow it is. If they get it on the Johnson City, we'll be, we'll ride it. That's right.
0:34:10 - (Colin Johnson): For sure. That's super exciting. I'm, I'm excited. You got some insider news right there with Amtrak.
0:34:15 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We're talking about coming to the museum, but the museum's had some outreach programs for years and years. If you've been in the, in what's called the mini dome PTSD campus. If you walked in there when nobody else is around, there's nothing on the floor except floor. It's 64,000 square feet. We have filled that. This will be the ninth consecutive year with a big train show, which usually is the last weekend of May, first weekend of June.
0:34:48 - (Colin Johnson): Okay.
0:34:49 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): This year it's May 30th and 31st. Our ninth year, not ninth consecutive. We missed for Covid and we missed for renovation. We have vendors that are coming from 15 states. We have yet 77 vendors last year. It's becoming one of the biggest train shows. And it's local.
0:35:08 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome.
0:35:08 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Right there in the minidome. Yeah, all kinds of trains and massages, trains. I mean, you can buy any kind of train T shirt that you want or a train hat or mug or jewelry. There's. And there are layouts. There's a group called Sippin and Switchin'it's. A modular railroad club.
0:35:26 - (Colin Johnson): I love it.
0:35:27 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): They brought in 12,000 square feet of railroad last year and they want 15,000 next year.
0:35:32 - (Colin Johnson): Holy cow.
0:35:33 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): If you want to see the biggest modular railroad ever set up in Tennessee. May 30th and 31st next year, come to the Mini Dome. Price is low to get in, and it's a wonderful opportunity. And it supports. It supports the museum.
0:35:50 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:35:50 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We also take people to places where they can ride real trains. So we do two or three rail excursions a year. That includes the Smoky Mountain Railway down in Bryson City. We load folks up on buses here and we take them there and we ride trains all day long. The Three Rivers Rambler Railroad in Knoxville is a favorite one because it takes an hour and a half or so to get to Knoxville. We get on the train, we have a ride of about an hour and a half.
0:36:18 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): They drop us off at the boat dock. Instead of taking us back to the station, we get on paddle wheeler, call the Star of Knoxville. Then we have a luncheon river cruise for an hour and a half down the Tennessee river and back up. And we can see VOL Stadium.
0:36:33 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:36:34 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And lots of the UT campus as we go. We also sometimes go to Stearns, Kentucky. We ride an old Kentucky and Tennessee railroad up there that was primarily a mining railroad. And we plan Labor Day trips where we're going for two or three days to places like Elkin, West Virginia to ride railroads. There are down to Chattanooga. Right. Some of the railroads that go up and over the hump and down to Blue Ridge, Georgia. So we want people to enjoy railroads. We want people to be able to experience railroads that have never ridden on a train.
0:37:14 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And since trains are not running through here, we can ride. We're going to take you to places where you can.
0:37:19 - (Colin Johnson): That's awesome. I think that's really cool. I've had the pleasure of riding a few trains in my life. And Carly and I just came back from.
0:37:27 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We were.
0:37:27 - (Colin Johnson): We got to ride from London to Paris on the. The SH T Shuttle train. Oh, full. That thing was moving. I think we were around 1:50 or something and. But the thing I loved was seeing the countryside. And you don't, you don't get that in a plane. I mean, you know, you. You just kind of zone out. But I was sitting there like a. Like a kid at the window, like, look at that. Look at those cows. Look at that. But it was flying. I mean, it was moving so fast.
0:37:51 - (Carson Sailor): And you're not stressed, like when you're driving. Because when you're driving, you gotta keep track of everybody else on the road.
0:37:58 - (Colin Johnson): Agreed.
0:37:59 - (Carson Sailor): You can kick back.
0:38:00 - (Colin Johnson): And it's probably a super, super safe way to travel as well. Abely.
0:38:04 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): There are lounge cars, there are dining cars. I mean, there's all.
0:38:08 - (Colin Johnson): It was fantastic.
0:38:09 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Overnight. You got a sleeper.
0:38:11 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah. I'm excited about the SAM track train. Let's go. Who do we need to call to get it in here?
0:38:15 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Let's get it going.
0:38:16 - (Colin Johnson): That's that. What's something I forgot to ask you guys about the train track railroad experience that we should have that you may want to share. I think we've covered a ton.
0:38:29 - (Carson Sailor): Absolutely.
0:38:29 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, then the major thing, I think, is when we were on campus, which was a great place to be, we filled up the space we had, which was about 5,000 square feet, and we were only available to the public for five hours on Saturdays, when the campus is working Mondays through Fridays, there's no place to park. Right. Uh, so we had the opportunity of providing something on campus as part of ETSU for 16 wonderful years.
0:39:01 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We didn't want to see the building come down. We. We thought we were permanent.
0:39:05 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:39:05 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): But it gave us a new opportunity to take a look at ourselves. And it also gave us an opportunity to take a look at Johnson City in the region. And with the help of Jenny Brock. And not just Jenny. Brenda Whitson is also on our board. There's some great people on our board. David Timms is on our board with the local school system. He's the one that's bringing 45 first graders in for a trial run on Friday.
0:39:30 - (Colin Johnson): I have a phone.
0:39:31 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): We have Ron Roach from Appalachian Studies, who has an Appalachian connection because of George L. Carter.
0:39:39 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah.
0:39:40 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And we have other wonderful people, some from our model railroad club and others that make up a board that's not only interactive, but it's imaginative and it's working hard to bring folks in. Josh Smith, who used to be the anchor on wdhl, is a board member. And so we have all this expertise from different facets of life all focused on one thing. Let's provide a regional experience not only for the city of Johnson City, but the citizens of the region and folks from other places will come in.
0:40:19 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): The last couple I saw today, I asked them where they were from. Two of them were from Washington, D.C. and the couple with them were from Kansas. And they met at Brenda Whitson's shop this afternoon, and they said, what are some neat things to see? They got sent to the Johnson City Railroad.
0:40:37 - (Colin Johnson): There you go. Yeah, that's it.
0:40:38 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So it's a great interaction between the city and the university. The university's still involved to some extent. So we've got some great partners, and we've got a great board, and we're hiring great People like Carson.
0:40:50 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to check it out. How are you guys funded? Is it mainly through ticket sales or you have grants?
0:40:57 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, we signed an MoU with the university when we left. As for some privileges, like still having access to the mini dome, still working through the library for some of the things that we needed. And Brenda Whitson's shop, the tourist bureau said, if you will come down here, we'll provide you some funding for three years. Well, the three year funding, we're in our second year now. Also kind of the university said, the city's giving you this.
0:41:31 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So the university said, we'll match them for two years, which was great. So now we've got some funds to start with, with all the remodeling and then most of the money going out the door and not much coming in. And while we were on campus, we had folks that donated. We didn't charge while we were on campus, but we had donors. So we were able to move a sizable six figure amount from our foundation account once we were a 501C3.
0:41:57 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So we, we had seed money to start with. But there's been generosity from the university, there's been generosity from the city because they see the investment that they're making for this region.
0:42:08 - (Carson Sailor): And if I could get on my museum management soapbox for about five seconds.
0:42:14 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Okay. Yep.
0:42:15 - (Carson Sailor): There is not a.
0:42:18 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Sorry, sirens.
0:42:21 - (Carson Sailor): Yeah.
0:42:23 - (Colin Johnson): All right, go back to if I can get on my.
0:42:25 - (Carson Sailor): If I could get on my museum management soapbox here for a just a minute. There is not a museum, theater or arts organization in the country that pays its bills off ticket sales. What pays the bills in these focused organizations are not just grants. Public funding coming in is always wonderful. But as PBS likes to say, viewers like you. So if you have an organization that you think does meaningful work in this community, whether it be the Humane Society, whether it be our museum and arts organization, whatever you can give them, whatever amount means major, major, major things to the people organizing those programs and what kind of outreach they can do. So as someone who's worked in nonprofits his entire career, I always like to make that plug. $5 helps.
0:43:18 - (Colin Johnson): It does. It adds up. It all adds up.
0:43:20 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And you know, we're a 501C3 now, so it's a tax deduction. And we'd love to have donors of any size, minor or major. We'd love to get more corporate sponsorship. We'll put signs up that said you sponsored this. So there are a lot of things that I think are possible avenues for folks to invest in what we're trying to do.
0:43:44 - (Colin Johnson): I agree. I agree. And I'm excited for our listeners to come check it out. And I'm excited to check it out. How can our listeners connect with you guys online or just come back? Absolutely.
0:43:56 - (Carson Sailor): We have a great Facebook page. You search Johnson City Railroad Experience, we pop up. We have a Hampton Instagram page as well. And we've got www.johnsoncityrailroad experience.org. so if your hand doesn't cramp, type of that in, you can find us, find us on the, or find us on the web.
0:44:14 - (Colin Johnson): Now you just voice, you hit the voice button and just read it out. So, yeah, that's awesome. So I usually hit our listener or our guests with a question. What? But I usually first question, but I left it to the end for you guys because we just jumped in on the train stuff. So what is your favorite thing about Johnson City? Go ahead, Fred.
0:44:35 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Well, I've, I've become, I never was actually a resident of Johnson City. I've lived outside right behind Milligan College, but I have a Johnson City address. I think what attracted me for twofolds, one, the friendliness of the people here, the eagerness of my students to learn because I'm a field biologist, the opportunity to take them outside and let them see things they had walked past all their lives but hadn't really looked at.
0:45:09 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And for an ornithologist, a birder, this is a wonderful part of the country. In the five county area we have here there, we recorded over 300 species of birds, which is three eighths of the ones that occur in all of North America. So biologically, it's a rich area. People wise. It's a rich area.
0:45:31 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, yeah. People are the number one answer, Fred. So you did good. You did good. Birds hasn't made the list. Well, that's pretty exciting. We got that.
0:45:39 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): What's wrong with the people you're interviewing?
0:45:41 - (Colin Johnson): I don't know.
0:45:41 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): I don't know. Is it a train thing? We can't keep them on time?
0:45:44 - (Colin Johnson): I don't know. You know, Chloe and I, we have a little bird feed her right outside of our window. And we love, I mean, that's a highlight of our day to see all the birds. And then we downloaded the, the app from somewhere you, and you can just set it out there and it'll listen and tell you the species of bird that's tweeting or chirping or whatever and.
0:46:03 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Download Merlin and Merlin. Merlin will tell you from Cornell.
0:46:06 - (Colin Johnson): Cornell. That was where I was going for.
0:46:08 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And it was so cool. So as an ornithologist, I haven't written any books on trains, But I've written 18 books on birds. On birds, including some published by the sm.
0:46:19 - (Colin Johnson): Cool.
0:46:20 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): There was my other hat. This supposed to be a hobby. There you go.
0:46:23 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, that sounds like a full time gig almost. Maybe you can get a train book in before you no way. Retire deeply. What about you? What's your favorite thing, Carson, about Johnson City?
0:46:33 - (Carson Sailor): Johnson City is every bit as good as any mountain town that you could possibly visit. I spent nine years living in Boone. I've visited Asheville very frequently. And anything that you would find in Boone or Blowing Rock or Bryson City or Asheville, you have here in Johnson City. But what it has more than those other places is an authentic community. This is a place where you can come and contribute and be a part of a really beautiful, involved community. And I think that's a great thing.
0:47:08 - (Colin Johnson): Yeah, I agree 100%.
0:47:10 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): And if I could add one. Yes, sir, Johnson City continues to grow. The university continues to grow, and a lot of that growth here from people coming from somewhere else and discovering Johnson City and discovering the mountains. Just like the ones who got off the train at Henry Johnson's depot.
0:47:27 - (Colin Johnson): That's right.
0:47:29 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Part of what we want to do with the Johnson City railroad experience, as Carson mentioned earlier, is tell the origin of Johnson City through the lens of the railroad. Because we don't want all the new folks coming into Johnson City who are bringing their own cultures, who are bringing their own past, who are bringing their own townships with them. Not to understand how Johnson City got here and what the importance of the railroads were to this town and still are.
0:48:01 - (Colin Johnson): Oh, a hundred percent. I love that. That's a good, good wrap up there, Fred. Well, you guys have anything else you need to share before we, we sign off?
0:48:09 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Come see us. We're open five days a week. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturdays.
0:48:13 - (Colin Johnson): I'm excited. I'm excited for the seasons we're coming up into whether we got track or treat coming up. We're going to have Thanksgiving and then it's going to be Candy Lane Christmas. And that's why we got Carson. So that's a huge blessing. So. Well, thank you guys for being on the podcast and I super enjoyed this conversation. I love trains, I love learning about stuff and I love being able to be able to interview you guys because I had a blip of a dot of an idea when I drove by there. I was like, hello to experience. And then it just, it's gone and now I feel like we're friends. And I'm excited to see it and promote it. And so I hope all of our listeners get behind Fred and Carson and let's blow this thing up. Let's get everybody in town to come. Not on the same day, but maybe we'll get a lot of kids there to learn about trains and fall in love with them like I did and like you guys have over the years.
0:49:01 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): So, Carson, what does Jeff Stoner say at the end of our.
0:49:06 - (Carson Sailor): Oh, yes.
0:49:06 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): Oh, yeah.
0:49:07 - (Colin Johnson): All aboard.
0:49:07 - (Dr. Fred Alsop): All aboard.
0:49:08 - (Colin Johnson): All aboard. Till next time, I'm Colin Jos? With the Colin and Carly Group. If you want to move here and meet these nice gentlemen, give me a holler. We'll set you up with a nice house around here and we'll put you on a train somewhere.