Planes, trains, and stagecoaches
Cessna pilot scouts out the beds of abandoned railroads
By Sheila Harris
Five years ago, Jeff Cooney watched a video of a 17-year-old girl landing an airplane at the Gainesville, Texas, airport, near where he lived. Cooney, who was 58 at the time, says seeing someone so young and so close to home, tackling what had always been his own dream, sparked him to make what he calls one of the best decisions of his life: taking flight lessons.
“I’d always been interested in airplanes,” Cooney said, “but had never taken the time to learn how to fly them. But, that day, I realized that if I didn’t do something, the [flying] ship was going to sail without me, so I promptly enrolled in flight instruction at Ayers Aviation.”
Cooney completed his training within a year, then, a year later, he and a pilot friend invested in a 1984 Cessna 172.
The Cessna now serves another one of Cooney’s passions: railroad history. An avid collector of railroad memorabilia, Cooney has an overflowing shop building, plus a spare room, full of his treasures.
Cooney says he fell in love with trains and airplanes while living in Fort Scott, Kansas, when he was barely more than a toddler.
“Every time I stayed at my grandma’s house, she took me to the railroad depot to watch the passenger trains come in,” Cooney said. “Then, we would go to the airport to watch the airplanes flying in and taking off. The hook was set.”
After his family moved to Eldon, Missouri, when Cooney was a teen, stagecoaches were thrown into the airplane/train mix. In Eldon, Cooney discovered the rich history of the 1858 Butterfield Overland Mail route, which had its easternmost stagecoach terminus in Tipton, Missouri, just minutes from his home.
“I’ll spot an old railbed from the air, then go home and research it,” Cooney said.After graduating from high school, Cooney says his interest in airplanes, trains, and stagecoaches took a back seat to college, then to marriage and raising children. His old passion is front and center, again, though, and it’s one his wife, Debbie, shares.
“Debbie was very supportive of me learning to fly,” Cooney said, “and she logs her own passenger flight hours, just so she’ll have the record.”
With the Cessna now at his disposal, Cooney’s pursuit of railroad history has taken on new dimensions. Many of the 200 flight hours he’s accumulated since 2018, he says, have been spent scouting out the beds of abandoned railroads.
“I’ll spot an old railbed from the air, then go home and research it,” Cooney said.
His finds include an abandoned Frisco route between Sulphur and Scullen, Oklahoma; a track alongside Lake Texoma that goes into, then back out of, the water; and the railbed of the Gainesville to Wichita Falls, Texas, portion of the iconic “Katy Railroad,” that operated for 100 years.
Cooney also tracks the old Butterfield stagecoach route from the air.
“A high point,” Cooney said, “was flying over the historic Colbert’s Ferry site, where the Butterfield crossed the Red River, north of Denison, Texas.”
With the wealth of history waiting to be discovered beneath his wing tips, learning to fly, Cooney says, is the most fulfilling thing he’s ever done. Sheila Harris is a writer and aviation enthusiast living in Missouri.
Sheila Harris is a writer and aviation enthusiast living in Missouri.
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