Chris McKinley carries stepping stools used to help passengers up into the Amtrak Vermonter this past summer. All photos © Eric Francis
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION - It’s hard to imagine the Amtrak station without Chris McKinley, but it’s a sad reality the village will have to face following his sudden death Thursday morning, shortly after he left his home and began walking to the historic depot his life had revolved around for over three decades.
McKinley, 68, collapsed on a South Main Street sidewalk and was pronounced dead at the scene after a sustained effort by Hartford’s emergency services failed to revive him.
“He was White River,” said Karen Goss, one of the dozens of local residents used to stopping and speaking with McKinley as he made his way back and forth to the Amtrak station, often several times a day, either in his official role as one of the half-dozen caretakers who assist passengers of the Amtrak Vermonter train or just to satisfy his own endless curiosity about the freight trains and rail maintenance activities downtown.
McKinley photographs the destruction of the antique locomotive turntable in 2010 following the fire that destroyed the old Central Vermont Roundhouse.
“He was just a fixture. He was everywhere and involved in everything,” said his fellow Amtrak caretaker Carole Haehnel. “He was reliable and friendly and he loved to talk to the passengers and let them know what was going on.”
McKinley was endlessly interested in all aspects of local and regional railroading. Train crews were so used to seeing him pop up in unexpected places around the tracks with a camera and a logbook to scribble down their movements—along with the numbers of their locomotives and boxcars—that by the 1980s they’d given him the nickname “The Yardmaster.”
“He was born interested in trains,” his younger brother, Glenn McKinley of Fairlee, recalled Thursday afternoon. “Even as a youngster in Connecticut he was into them.”
McKinley and former Amtrak conductor Mike Kujala kept an eye on the renovations to the White River Junction platform last summer.
Before Chris McKinley moved to Vermont with his brother and two sisters as a teenager, he’d worked in his father’s general store in upscale Greenwich, Connecticut—which led to kind of a cognitive dissonance: Whenever the name of just about any major motion picture or television star from the 1960s or ‘70s came up, Chris would invariably say “Oh, I met him/her” and his friends and fellow rail enthusiasts would ask, “How? How is that possible?” Between his father’s store and a long stint after he graduated from Thetford Academy, where he’d worked at Dan & Whit’s General Store in Norwich, McKinley had in fact had occasion to bag groceries for a veritable Who’s Who of mid-century celebrities.
McKinley documented almost every aspect of rail activity in and around White River Junction, from the trains themselves to track construction and bridge infrastructure improvements over the years.
While McKinley had only a passing interest in the famous, he cared deeply about the history of White River Junction’s depot and the railroad lines that rose and fell over the past 179 years, ever since the first track was laid down to Bethel in 1847. He spent years researching and gathering material for a book about the five successive stations that have been built on the same site in the heart of downtown White River Junction, as well as smaller depots in places like Wilder and West Hartford that have long since disappeared.
Chris McKinley talks to bystanders near a railroad incident in Braintree in 2015. He travelled to wrecks and washouts all over the region, striking up friendly conversations as he went.
Hartford Parks and Recreation Director Scott Hausler, who oversees the station caretaker program, noted that McKinley not only kept extensive records of how many passengers used the Amtrak Vermonter each month, but also documented even minute changes to the station itself over the years. He kept the Hartford Historical Society abreast of developments, amassing a vast collection of local railroading ephemera in the process.
Over the decades, Chris watched literally thousands of trains roll in and roll out of downtown White River Junction.
“He was so excited to photograph the station platform renovations this past year. He was pretty proud of how it came out,” Hausler said. “This is certainly a sad day. He was the record keeper for the station and in a way he was the station.”
