At one end of the West VIrginia Greenbriar "Rails-to-Trails" bike path is the Cass Scenic Railroad State Park. Located on the east side of West Virginia, not far from the Snowshoe Ski Resort, the state park includes the former West Virginia Spruce Lumber Company town of Cass and 11 miles of track from Cass up into the highest points of the Back Allegheny Mountains. West Virginia has some very nice state parks and Cass is one or the more unique.
We arrived in Cass after riding the Greenbriar Trail for 25 miles from Marlinton WV. The train pulled into the station shortly after we arrived, dumping a trainload of tourists into the town.
It was early afternoon on a bright cloudless day, which made photographing the train very difficult. The black engine and the white company store building behind it were two extremes in tonality. I wanted to get both, plus the yellow tree and the blue sky. It took several tries, each time checking the histogram on my camera and adjusting to not blow out the whites while maintaining details in the dark areas.
I didn't take too many of the engine and train. The engine was attached to the train
backwards, which just didn't look right.
A little ways up the tracks from the town was a water tower, repair yard, the old saw mill and this caboose. I was hoping to catch the red caboose with bright fall colors behind it. We had missed much of the fall color on this trip and the colors in Cass were still a few days away from peak.
The state has maintained the town of Cass pretty much like it was when it was a company town. There are streets lined with white company houses, white stores, and white churches. In fact, I think every building in the town looked like it came from the same plans and was painted with the same white paint. The exception is the old saw mill.
The saw mill was once the largest double-band sawmill in the world. Today, some of the buildings remain in ruin just outside town. The ground around the mill is littered with old equipment from the mill. They have done a good job with signs telling about the mill and about the remains spread out all around. Unfortunately, we could not get close (for obvious reasons) and had to be satisfied with taking pictures from several hundred feet away.
While trying to find a short cut back to the Greenbriar Trail we ran across some old abandoned train cars from Cass Scenic Railroad's earlier days. These are sitting on a siding with grass and bushes growing up all around. The windows are all broken out and the cars are slowly rusting away.
I used Adobe Lightroom to give these photos the edgy look that enhances the texture and colors in the old cars. I was still struggling with the extreme light conditions and had to do some editing in Lightroom to bring out the details inside the cars without blowing out the brightest parts.
I think I could have spent a couple hours climbing around the cars taking pictures, but it was time to head back to Marlinton so we could get there before sundown. It was another 25 miles back after all.
