I
In 2012, James Porterfield launched the
Center for Railway Tourism,
the nation’s
first educational program devoted to pro-
moting America’s railway heritage as a
tourism and economic opportunity. The
center is located at Davis & Elkins College,
Elkins, W.Va., where it is a component of
the Recreation Management and Tourism
major in the Business and Entrepreneurship
Department.
Elkins is the natural setting for the
center and for Porterfield himself. Railway
tourism is thriving in the former railroad
town, which boasts a popular rail-trail—the
Allegheny Highlands Trail—as well as the
beautifully restored Western Maryland
Depot, several excursion trains and the new-
ly opened West Virginia Railroad Museum.
Porterfield is the author of
Dining by
Rail: The History and Recipes of America’s
Golden Age of Railroad Cuisine
and con-
tributing editor of
Railfan & Railroad
magazine. Recently, we met on the bucolic
campus to discuss his love of both rail heri-
tage and rail-trails.
by older people who grew up around
trains and have fond memories of what
it was like to ride them, and these people
are passing [away] now. There is no next
generation that experienced trains as an
integral part of their lives.
In a class I taught here last spring, I
learned that the young students who grew
up around here, where more than 700
people worked for the railroad until the
1970
s, were not aware that this histori-
cally was a railroad town—not to men-
tion the fact that they had never ridden
a train.
So part of the purpose of the Center
for Railway Tourism is to encourage
young people to consider this as a career
field and to make them aware of how
extensive the railroad industry was, and
is. The industry has a longer history than
any other major industry except min-
ing. At [its] peak in the 1920s, there
were more than 40,000 train stations in
America, and the railroads employed 2.2
million people.
How did you become interested in
railways?
When I was a child, my dad was a model
railroader and rail fan. He had Lionel
trains. He would secretly build a train
layout in the basement at Christmas.
After my brother and I went to bed on
Christmas Eve, he would put the layout in
the living room and put the tree on it. We
grew up believing Santa brought the trains.
Also, we used to vacation on Lake Erie,
in Conneaut, Ohio. Those were busy rail-
road years. Instead of going to the lake to
swim, we’d go to the nearby Nickel Plate
Railroad yard and watch the trains.
Today, I represent the railway tourist’s
point of view. I have an interest in travel,
history, preservation and railroading, and
that’s what led me to do something like
this, to take this perspective.
What is the Center for Railway
Tourism, and why is it important?
The railway travel and preservation indus-
try is in sort of a crisis. It is dominated
James Porterfield:
Promoting
Railway
Heritage
Nanci bross-Fregonara
By Therese Cox
rails
to
trails
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spring/summer.14
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