Did you ever ride the Nancy Hanks? A lot of us did back in the day. Driving up Highway One the other day, I replayed my memories of hopping on the train at the depot in Wadley or Tennille and riding to Atlanta through the calm beauty of untouched miles of back woods rural Georgia. It was certainly a more peaceful form of travel than the demolition derby we face on I-16 and 75 nowadays.
Back before there were “two Georgias”, train travel tied most of the state together, and scheduled passenger service could get you to most of the large and smaller cities daily. You could even go to Jacksonville, Atlanta or Charleston on "shopping excursion trips" with a 2-day or 3-day turnaround or less. When passenger trains no longer served Swainsboro and the depot here was abandoned, a major part of our transportation system slipped quietly into history, along with the old green trucks of the Railway Express Package Service, the daily delivery of newspapers from all over, and the same day mail delivery from Augusta or Savannah. The Nancy Hanks never directly served Swainsboro, but many folks around here still considered it a part of life and shared the disappointment when service was discontinued in the early 1970s.
In the midst of all these railroad recollections, I started wondering how the Nancy Hanks train came to be called that. The first Nancy Hanks was christened back in 1892. She was a fine steam locomotive. But the first Nancy came along in the hard times of the post-Civil War years. Despite her speed, she was not a financial success and was taken out of service in 1893. Interestingly, the first NH train was named for President Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks. Much later, a more successful naming was given to the second Nancy Hanks in honor of a famous racehorse of earlier days. This honor was in consideration of the blazing swiftness associated with that four-legged speedster and shared by the “second” Nancy Hanks which was a streamlined beauty that served The Central of Georgia Railway and Southern Railway whisking passengers between Atlanta, Macon and Savannah until April 30, 1971.
I guess that just goes to show you that all names don't always fit their circumstances and situations. Kinda like that little hurricane that came wobbling up out of the Gulf of Mexico or America (whichever you prefer) this past weekend. Now I don't have any idea who the United States Director of Naming Names might be, but I would recommend to him that he get another list of hurricane names drawn up before we have another hurricane. Obviously, coming up with names for hurricanes, hunting dogs, running backs, and barbecue grill masters is not something everybody can do. So, it might be smart to come up with some hurricane names more suitable and identifiable with the people and places where they mostly happen; something like Hurricane Buford or Idabell. Hurricane Billy Bob has a nice ring to it, and if you heard Hurricane Cousin Elrod or Hurricane Aunt Ethel was coming ashore tomorrow you probably would get packed up and get right on out of town a lot quicker. We just don’t need any more names that result in people getting confused and spraining their tongues trying to say unnatural things like ISAIAS. Heck, for that matter, why don't we just keep it simple and just say, "Here comes the Nancy Hanks!" whenever the weather channel spots trouble. That's easy enough to elocute, and folks would sure enough pay attention and get out of the way. Just a thought…
