Pullen Park kiddie train gets repaired

As a kid, Dave Williams would hop a bus to Pullen Park and ride the antique kiddie train.

On Monday, sitting atop a bulldozer, he got it running again.

A week of blistering June weather heated the track so intensely that it knocked the steel rails out of alignment going around the far bend.

“We call it a sun kink,” said Williams, whose Clayton-based company repairs all manner of track. “Heat causes a lot of problems.”

Every day hundreds ride Pullen’s locomotive, a replica of an 19th century engine, on its loop around the duck pond.

But the route had grown bumpy, and city workers noticed the kink on their daily inspection.

Along with the kink, some of the rocks and gravel had slipped down the banks, and some of the old pine cross ties had grown rotten.

After work on 100 feet of track and new oak ties, the train should start running again today after a two-week hiatus, said Richard Costello, the city’s director of lakes and amusements. Total price tag: about $2,500.

“Everything’s been beefed up,” Williams said.

Most of D.A. Williams’ Construction’s work happens on industrial rail lines, spurs that feed the main tracks.

“Everything you buy comes by train and gets loaded on a truck,” he said. “You just don’t see it.”

But fixing the Pullen track is special, he said, because he sees the old thrill he had show up on the face of his own 5-year-old.

If the railroads and the state could get together, Williams said, the Triangle might get a workable commuter train line and people could see some real savings on gas.

But he digresses. There’s a train coming, after all.