Peter Burno, Locomotive Repair Shop    

“After a year, the Army gave up the idea of pulling its own troop trains in the U.S., but they still had locomotives operating overseas and on Army posts.  So, at 22 I ended up running the biggest locomotive repair shop owned by the federal government. 

Everything unrepairable overseas came back to Lee Hall.  We used to get locomotives with one side blown off.  With American locomotives we could get drawings and parts.  But we also got foreign locomotives, for which we had no drawings and no parts.  You just had to make what you needed. A lot of interesting locomotives came to Fort Eustis and just sat there, on the siding tracks.  

We had a one-of-a-kind German locomotive that was condensing and reusing its water.  It was built for the invasion of Siberia, which never came off.  We also had Hilter’s private train.  It was five cars, all with inlaid wood with scenes of the Black Forest.  Most locomotives are two-cylinder; the big ones are four.  Hitler’s was a ten-cylinder.  I steamed it up and tried it out. 

During that time, I was sent to the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad shops in Huntington, West Virginia.  At that time, it was the largest locomotive repair shop in the world.  For four months, there were 40 of us living in condemned hospital coaches on a siding track.  It was a post doctoral course in boiler work and repairing locomotives.” 

Excerpts from Peter Burno’s autobiographical “My Life, My Story”