Jumping Train Cars in the 1950s

Burke resident Calvin Johnson remembers jumping train cars from Drexel to Morganton as a teenager in the 1950s to see movies in town. (Image of the Drexel train station was provided by R. Douglas Walker, Jr. for "Picture Burke," a digital photograph preservation project of the Burke County Public Library.)

Train cars are far too secure and closely monitored these days for most teens to consider sneaking aboard them just for the thrill of it. But in the 1950s, jumping trains in Burke County was a relatively reliable way of getting around.

Well, at least for the more gutsy and steely-nerved.

Burke resident Calvin Johnson, now 84, reflects on those daring memories fondly.

His great-grandfather married a Berry, the couple the first to build a house in Berrytown in 1890. He frequently rode the train that used to pass through Morganton, a route that was discontinued in 1975.

“In the summertime when school was out, between the years 1953 and 1955, when I was about 13 to 15 years old, my cousins Stoney Berry and James Johnson and I would take a path through the woods from Berrytown to the Drexel train station and jump the train and hitch a ride to Morganton,” Johnson remembers.

They often chose to board it in a daredevil way that you only ever see in movies anymore.

“The key to getting on the train was to wait until it stopped for mail, or slowed down enough for us to run and try to grab the handrail on a boxcar,” he says. “We’d leap into the boxcar if the door was open. If we missed the handrail, we'd jump on a flat car, lying flat to keep from being seen. As soon as the train began to slow down at the Morganton Depot, we would hop off to avoid getting caught.”

This wasn’t just for kicks, though. They had nearby destinations in mind.

“Most of the time,” the octogenarian says, “the reason we wanted to go to Morganton was to go to the Mimosa theater and watch a good ole Western movie!”

Occasionally, they misjudged their jumps or failed to roll off the train cars in time.

“Once Stoney missed the box car and had to jump onto the flat car behind us,” Johnson muses. “He didn’t see us get off when we were close to the Morganton Depot and just kept on riding toward Glen Alpine. We took off through the woods and caught sight of him coming down the track going out of town. We yelled for him to jump but it took him a few minutes because the train was picking up speed and he was scared, but he finally did it and only skinned his knee.”

This was during the early heyday of America’s car culture, so if they couldn’t nab a ride on an unattended train car, they’d resort to begging their parents or generous neighbors to get them home.

“To get back to Berrytown,” Johnson says, “we called Stoney’s dad and he would pick us up, or failing that, we’d hitchhike, much to our mothers’ dismay.”

Calvin and his wife, Harriet Johnson, in 2024.