The questions to my workplace started coming about a week before, both by phone and in person, asking, “What time will the Norfolk and Western No. 611 get here?” There’s nothing strange about that, since the place where I work is the old Danville train station, now also the Natural History Museum of the Danville Science Center.

Questions came from many strangers, but solid information came from one person, my brother Joe, by both email and phone. (I have written in past columns about our father, Bernard Williams, working as a clerk in the old, no longer extant Spencer yard office.)

I had told one man that I would be checking with Joe on May 29, giving the gentleman my cellphone number so he could call me that afternoon to find out the latest; and to no great surprise, he called.

Usually, when someone says they will call back, you never hear from them again; but such is not the case when they want to know the ETA of the 611!

In the very wee hours of the morning of Saturday, May 30, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep for a couple of hours, my mind dwelling on the 611’s arrival. It was just like when I was a child, with a case of Christmas Eve insomnia, waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

The only similarity between my childhood wait for Santa and my senior wait for the 611 could be narrowed down to the similarities between a chimney and a steam locomotive smokestack. (In my childhood, we did heat with coal.)

When I arrived at our train station-science museum on the morning of May 30, people were already there. I wore my Southern Railway cap in memory of that railroad which (in partial, past tense paraphrase) “Served the South!”

More people began arriving, and the phone was beginning to ring off the hook. The whole scene would soon become a little “off the hook!”

Unlike those who had called and stopped by during the week before, the crowd in attendance on May 30 had a good percentage of women. I first thought (forgive the stereotype) that they only accompanied their “little boy” train-loving husbands, but soon learned that many “little girls” like trains too, and are quite knowledgeable about them.

My assistance to the rail-fan public (my mother, Lorraine Williams, enjoyed helping people, too) made me feel a little like a present-day railway station master.

Shortly after my son Jeremy joined me, our first clue as to the 611’s impending arrival was the presence of a helicopter (paraphrasing M.A.S.H.’s Radar: “Incoming 611!”). Joe had told me that a helicopter was filming the trip from Spencer to Roanoke. It had the look of some giant dragonfly attracted to the great engine’s “exhalations.”

Knowing that I sing, a friend asked me to sing “The Wreck of the Old 97.” But not wanting to jinx the 611, I did my impersonation of Hank Snow singing, “I’m Movin’ On.”

A few minutes later, we heard the 611’s melancholy, low-pitched steam whistle, seeming to come from a right angle to the tracks. I thought it odd and remarked on it, but later realized that at a distance, the track lies a little more in that direction from the station before dipping toward it.

The 611 slowed to about 15-20 miles per hour as it passed the approximately 150 people assembled at the old Danville train station. I didn’t get to see it in “full steam,” but its purposefully slower pace for the bystanders meant that the sight of it lingered a little longer, possibly making a little deeper groove in the brain’s neural pathway assigned to its memory.

The 611 passed by in restored shininess, steam and coal smoke, making me think, then shout: “That’s a beautiful carbon footprint!” (Some “got it,” some didn’t.)

I also thought to myself, without voicing: “On this day, ‘coal ash’ has done great work toward the redemption of its hitherto, unsavory public image!”

In a solar eclipse, only those within the narrower track of the moon’s deepest shadow experience the event in its totality.

On May 30, 2015, only those gathered within sight of a narrow length of railroad track between Spencer, North Carolina, and Roanoke, Virginia, personally experienced the “totality” of the Norfolk and Western No. 611.