As far as I know we only went to Jellico twice, both trips on the same weekend. There was a little restaurant downtown with a sign that said they could seat a thousand patrons, 29 at a time. We had about 650 on the train.

What days were those?

4501 is undergoing a pretty extensive restoration in the Soule Shops at TVRM in Chattanooga. She's expected to be back in steam again later this year.

She is even getting a stoker. Until now she has sported the largest hand fired boiler on the road and was a real pain to fire.

You will notice too that she is no longer 'The Green Machine'. Between 1911 and 1964 she was a freight locomotive and only Southern's passenger engines received the traditional Virginia Green and gold livery. When she was rescued from mine service in Stearns Kentucky back in 1964, Graham Claytor with Southern, who loved steam, suggested the color scheme and donated the materials to TVRM to make it so.

4501 singlehandedly began the steam excursion phenomenon in the Southeast in 1966, a program that lasted until the deaths of our benefactors, the Claytor brothers, within a few months of each other in the mid 1990s.

Fortunately TVRM worked out an agreement with the Chattooga & Chickamauga Railroad in Northern Georgia to run trains on their system with trackage rights over a short connecting portion of Norfolk Southern through downtown Chattanooga thus continuing service that disappeared from the rest of the NS system..

I shot her performing this runby in Chickamauga, Georgia back in 1996 all shiny in her new black paint. You may want to crank up the audio a bit here because it is such sweet music.