04/10/2026
I enjoy reading what this guy writes. I guess that makes me a Reader!
Reader Railroad: A Story Someone Told Me to Look For
By K. Brad Barfield
Sometimes these stories do not begin in an archive.
Sometimes somebody just sends me a message.
A few days ago, Barbara Hagemeister wrote Ashley County Now:
“Would love to see a story on Reader Railroad.”
I knew the name only vaguely. I did not know the story.
So I wrote her back and told her I had started looking into it. It appeared to have begun as some kind of logging railroad and sawmill operation, and even from the first few searches I could tell that it had lived a much longer and stranger life than most of the little timber railroads that once crisscrossed South Arkansas.
Then I asked Barbara a simple question:
How did you learn about it?
Her answer was even simpler.
“I grew up around it.”
And that was enough to send me down the rabbit hole.
What I found was not merely the story of an old steam train.
Reader Railroad grew out of the same world that created so much of industrial South Arkansas: standing timber, sawmills, logging crews, crude rail lines pushed into the woods, and the constant problem of how to move enormous quantities of wood from isolated forests to larger markets.
But Reader did something most of those early logging railroads did not do.
It kept changing.
The railroad’s roots reach into the nineteenth-century lumber economy around Reader and Sayre. Different lumber companies came and went. The track pushed farther into timber country. Then oil development around Waterloo gave the railroad another reason to exist. In 1925, Reader Railroad was formally organized as an Arkansas common carrier.
That alone makes the story unusual.
Then it gets better.
While the great American railroads were abandoning steam locomotives for diesels, this little railroad in the woods of South Arkansas kept burning coal and running steam.
By the 1960s, railroad enthusiasts were traveling to Arkansas specifically to see it.
What had become obsolete almost everywhere else had become Reader’s attraction.
Passengers began riding.
Photographers arrived.
Tourists arrived.
Hollywood eventually arrived.
Reader locomotives and equipment became connected with productions including Boxcar Bertha, North and South, 3:10 to Yuma, Appaloosa — and There Will Be Blood.
And that last one pretty well guaranteed I was not getting out of this rabbit hole anytime soon.
Anybody who knows me very well knows that There Will Be Blood is quite possibly one of my favorite movies, and Daniel Day-Lewis is quite possibly one of my favorite actors.
So there I was, researching an obscure little South Arkansas railroad somebody had mentioned to me in a Facebook message, and suddenly it had wandered straight into one of my favorite films.
At that point, I was in.
But even that is not the whole story.
There were oil fields and asphalt operations.
There were receiverships and ownership changes.
There was a proposed expansion toward El Dorado that might have dramatically changed the railroad’s future.
There were families who lived beside the tracks, children who grew up hearing the whistle, railroad men who kept old steam locomotives alive, tourists who came from far away to ride them, and communities whose relationship with that railroad cannot be found completely in corporate records.
That last part is why Barbara’s four words matter:
“I grew up around it.”
Documents can tell us when a corporation was formed.
They can tell us who owned the stock.
They can tell us how many miles of track existed and how much money a railroad earned.
They cannot always tell us what it sounded like from somebody’s front yard.
They cannot tell us where the children stood to watch the train.
They cannot tell us which engineer everybody knew, what stories parents told at supper, or what it felt like when the whistle stopped coming through the woods.
Those stories live with people.
So this video is not the end of our Reader Railroad project.
It is the beginning.
I have begun a much deeper investigation into the railroad, its sawmills, lumber companies, owners, employees, oil-field years, steam locomotives, communities, tourism, movie history, preservation, and the people who grew up along its tracks.
There will be essays.
Probably quite a few of them.
But tonight, I wanted to introduce you to the railroad the same way it was introduced to me:
Someone who grew up near it simply said,
You ought to tell this story.
Barbara Hagemeister — thank you for sending me looking.
You were right.
This is one hell of a South Arkansas story.
Tonight’s video: Reader Railroad — Timber, Oil, Steam and Survival
Sources: This introduction draws on ongoing Ashley County Now research into Reader Railroad, including Interstate Commerce Commission records, federal court records involving Mansfield Hardwood Lumber Company, Arkansas geological records, regional historical materials, Reader Railroad historical materials, and archival collections. Additional research and oral-history work are continuing. Researched and written by K. Brad Barfield.
