The Trainyards

The Derry Trainyards, located at the end of Neibolt Street, were once a vital transportation nexus for the region, with six tracks converging from the Bangor and Great Northern Lines, the Great Southern and Western Maine, the Boston and Maine, and the Southern Seacoast. By the summer of 1958, however, the yards had fallen into a state of decay. The passenger trains had stopped running around the time of the Korean War, and the Southern Seacoast line had gone bankrupt, leaving only freight trains to rumble through. The gate at the entrance had blown over in a windstorm and was never replaced, and the guard-booth stood empty, its windows broken by stones. A nightwatchman made occasional rounds in an old Studebaker, but the yards were largely unsupervised, attracting tramps, hobos, and children seeking adventure or escape.

A Place of Danger and Encounter

For the children of Derry, the trainyards were a place of both fascination and peril. Eddie Kaspbrak often rode his bike out to watch the trains, particularly the northbound car-carriers loaded with gleaming Fords and Chevies, dreaming of owning one himself. But the yards were also where he encountered a drunken trainman who threw a crate of live lobsters at him, and where a hobo with a rotted nose crawled out from under the porch of the abandoned house at 29 Neibolt Street and offered to perform a sexual act for a quarter. This traumatic event, which Eddie later confided to Richie Tozier and Bill Denbrough, became one of the Losers' Club's earliest encounters with the monstrous, as the hobo's image would later be transformed by It into the leper that haunted Eddie. The trainyards were also the site of the apocalyptic rockfight's aftermath, when Henry Bowers and his gang chased Mike Hanlon through the yards, leading to the confrontation in the gravel-pit that solidified the Losers' Club.

A Gateway to the Barrens and the Supernatural

The trainyards formed a boundary between the town and the wild, untamed Barrens. The Losers' Club often used the yards as a landmark, and the area around the abandoned house on Neibolt Street, which bordered the yards, became a focal point for their confrontations with It. The yards themselves, with their rusting tracks and empty quonset warehouses, embodied the decay and neglect that permeated Derry. The decline of the trainyards mirrored the town's own stagnation, a place where the past lingered in the form of abandoned infrastructure and forgotten histories. The hum of the diesel engines and the clang of couplings were a constant backdrop to the children's adventures, a sound that was both familiar and ominous.

Decline and Legacy

By 1985, the trainyards had become nothing but ruins and rusty tracks. The freights no longer stopped, and the land was tied up in legal disputes over ownership, preventing any redevelopment. The yards had become a ghost of their former self, a testament to the passage of time and the town's inability to move forward. For the Losers' Club, returning to Derry as adults, the trainyards were a reminder of their childhood battles and the enduring presence of evil. The yards, like so much of Derry, had been left to rot, a fitting monument to the town's dark heart.