Off the Rails in Cork Lane
- Thom Tracy
- Jun 11
- 8 min read
One Sunday night in 1981, I was in a bus station with my old buddy Ronnie. We had no money left after a weekend visit to State College. But various Penn State students had taken up a collection to send us home on a Greyhound: coach accommodations on a dog’s budget.
When we presented our tickets, the attendant thought we were students. She asked why we were going home. Always mindful of life’s absurdity, Ronnie told two somewhat harmless fibs. He said we were brothers (we look nothing alike). And he said we were headed home because a relative had died. Like Groucho's brother Harpo, I remained silent.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," the clerk responded. "How did it happen?"
"Train wreck," was all Ronnie replied before he walked away.
I had to bite through my lip to keep from laughing. It was a bit cruel. But we were young. And restless. And bored, I guess.
All this got me thinking because a long time ago, my family was in the hotel and tavern business. From the back window of the saloon on the first floor of the Keating Hotel, you could almost reach out and touch a train whistling by on the Delaware and Hudson passenger line.
There is now a house where the hotel used to be, and my mom, dad, siblings and cousins spent a lot of time in that neighborhood. So having one of my family members— or even me— killed in a train wreck wasn't outside the realm of possibility.
The hotel sat on the corner of Broad and Poole Streets in the Cork Lane section of Pittston Township where my great grandfather was born and raised. Known as The Squire, he lived next door and owned the business. A political steamroller, he passed in 1937, when my mom still sported pigtails.
The hotel took a fair amount of physical abuse through the years. In 1927, the ground above a coal mine caved in. It occurred nine years after my cousin almost lost her life a few steps from her front porch, when another giant hole in the earth opened, and she tumbled in before being rescued.
In ’27, a two-acre area in the neighborhood sunk about six feet toward the rooms of coal. The subsidence pulled the train rails and creosoted ties into the hole for almost a hundred yards between the parallel streets of Broad and Norman. Near the Squire’s home and hotel, large cracks in the ground opened to the mines below. An exterior wall pulled away from the foundation of the Squire’s residence. Windows shattered and doors were ripped from their jambs. The brick chimney separated from the house. The interior plaster cracked, and the floors buckled.
I would eventually live in my great grandfather’s house from 1993 through 2005. All our children were born there. And sometimes I feel cursed because we left the place where my mom’s family settled around 1851. But at least now I know why those wooden napkin rings rolled off the dining room table when we lived in the home. Our kids, however, were happy with things being out of level. They could let their Hot Wheels roll across the kitchen floor without even needing to give the cars a nudge.
The train station behind the hotel suffered no significant structural damage in ’27. But passengers must then walk slightly downhill to buy their tickets and board the passenger cars. The hotel incurred some damage to the foundation, and a protective concrete wall crumbled behind the building.
The show went on.
An excavating crew filled the depression beneath the tracks. Passenger and freight train traffic moved along, and the revenue continued to flow from the hotel and saloon. No one was injured or killed.
In 1940, my relatives realized similar good fortune. Hotel operations ceased at that time, and the property housed some family members. My cousin, Roscoe Mulcahy and his wife Margie, lived on the first floor. Like his grandfather, Roscoe entered politics and gained much respect from his Pittston Township and Luzerne County supporters. I received early lessons on politics through Roscoe’s campaign for a county seat. My developing mind validated a thought I’d heard my mother repeat a thousand times: Roscoe was too nice for politics. Affable and lively with a tint of red hair and dark-rimmed glasses, he always welcomed me into his home.
I spent a lot of time in the Mulcahy’s kitchen as a young boy. A lovely and uber-kind blonde-haired woman, Margie supplied me with cookies and candy that my mother ordinarily would not parcel out on a weekday summer afternoon. Their front door facing Poole Street led to the kitchen. To the right, a living area adjoined. Next to that room, a few steps descended into the saloon. The tavern’s side entrance on Broad Street walked out to a small concrete porch. Two people could sit on the landing and watch those locomotives roll by in metal majesty.
On May 17, 1940, Roscoe walked back into the house after sitting on that side porch with his newborn son Ned. A train approached and he knew the horn blasts and grinding steel would frighten the baby. He walked inside. Minutes after he left the landing, one rail car jumped the tracks and ripped through the former Keating Hotel’s rear wall while another did an about-face and shredded the connecting Broad Street partition. Our family avoided another tragedy. But luck runs out the longer it's pressed.
The train’s proximity to the saloon provided funny moments, also. Family members alternated in tending bar, and my dad took his turns at bat. A first-time visitor— an amateur boxer— entered the bathroom, which ran along the tavern’s rear wall. The train gates outside the bathroom wall were almost in spitting distance. As the boxer tended to his own business, the black-and-white diagonally striped gate arms descended from their upright position, and the warning bells clanged from the mast that supported those gates.
Heading south from Scranton toward Wilkes-Barre, a diesel engine announced its presence in three quick bursts and one exaggerated toot as the train rolled past the Broad Street crossing. The new customer zig-zagged with short, restricted steps from the bathroom. He hurried— as much as anyone in his position could— out of the Poole Street entrance. His boxers or maybe his briefs were properly positioned but his trousers were draped around the ankles. He would not return. My father received generous tips that evening, anchored by the cash the patron left behind on the bar.
I turned five years old in 1968. The saloon still existed, and my dad still tended bar there. My brother, Mike, had a December basketball game in Carbondale versus St. Rose. My mom hitched a ride to the game with a friend. She had no choice. She never drove an automobile again after smashing her father’s Packard into a telephone pole on her first try behind the wheel.
My dad, always in need of a few extra bucks, kept his shift at Roscoe’s Saloon, as we knew it in those days. I tagged along with him. After spending much time with my grandparents, who now occupied the Squire’s home, the rhythmic ta-tink of steel wheels gliding over glistening steel rails lulled me to sleep on many nights. I was forbidden from playing on the tracks but was drawn to them in ambivalent wonder like a lemming to a ledge, laying pennies on their surface and hoarding rusty spikes once used to bind rail to tie.
My dad and I sat by ourselves in the saloon that night when the crossing bells sounded. The red warning lights flashed midway up the masts and atop the gate arms. I had known the train’s typical approach, and something seemed off to me. Light beams shone through the rear windows of the building, the rays bouncing from the dark interior side wall to the ceiling and back again like a searchlight gone mad. The train cars screeched, as if being dragged along the surface of a chalkboard the size of a football field.
My dad grabbed my hand. “We gotta get the hell outta here.”
Adrenaline rushed from my scalp to the arches of my feet. We ran outside through the Poole Street door and a first-snow hush had fallen over the neighborhood until we heard a final crash. A coal car toppled over next to my dad’s powder blue Ford LTD.
Our car sat in glum repose under luminous pieces of Anthracite reflecting shimmers of lilac moonlight. My father ran to assess the damage to his car. I fled in the opposite direction and into the house across the street from my grandparents’ house. My cousins, Dee Dee and Annarose slapped Coca-Cola in my hand and patted my head before they exited to get their bird’s eye view of the uncoupled train cars that then considered the indigo sky from their mangled bottomside.
The sisters liked to know anything about everything happening in the neighborhood, and this wreck was mammoth news. They’d talk to me about the derailment for years afterward, twisting and kneading the story’s details like the dough of Irish soda bread.
My family lived on lower Broad Street in a white double-block dwelling, less than a mile from the train tracks. I’m not sure how we got home that night but then I almost wished we hadn’t.
I read this line in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in which a character said one moment he was afraid he was gonna die and then later on he was afraid he wasn’t. I knew the feeling as a kindergarten kid.
Sometimes sleeping it off ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The nightmares started in a day or two. My dreams involved characters who placed me in harm’s way. I didn’t recognize some folks parked inside my subconscious. There was a grinning train engineer dragging me by the collar toward the railroad tracks. He wore a blue pin-striped conductor’s hat and joined a seemingly benevolent caboose attendant in a crimson jumpsuit. That guy held a lantern with violet-blue flames licking through the top and bottom edges of the beacon’s glass panes.
My grandmother also factored into the equation. “How could she possibly do anything to hurt me?” was what I would eventually think.
My most vivid recurring nightmare had my grandma—we called her Cookie—placing me on the beige floral-print couch in her parlor, across from her upright, old-west style piano. She joyously played Alley Cat for me on that thing in waking life. And now what?
“You stay right here, Tommy,” my grandma said in my dream, sitting me obedient and still with her serene blue eyes. My name echoed eerily five or six times as her voice trailed off. “I’ll be right back.”
After she exited to the adjacent dining room and vanished, train bells rang in triads like a frenzied peal of the Angelus. Yet there was little hope of salvation. The blinking red lights appeared, and train gates lowered to block the parlor’s doorway. A diesel engine’s headlamp carved a disc of waxen maize light in the otherwise undisturbed blackness a few hundred feet from where I sat paralyzed.
Et tu, my dear grandma Cookie? Et tu?
The deafening horns accompanied by some strange song on the piano appeared to be the last sounds I’d hear on Earth.
Shooting awake and managing to close my eyes again, the nightmare resumed within seconds. The train drew closer still. But it never reached me. Dreams of that nature persisted for years. They faded away at age seven or eight until decades later, when reality would hit me harder than any bad dream I’ve ever had.
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