Volunteers are renovating the 1885 station after the town leased it from Bay Coast Railroad earlier this month. It is the last original station on the old New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk Railroad that has never been moved from its original site. The station was in use until the 1960s but has since deteriorated.

An open house will be held Tuesday beginning with a station tour at 6:30 p.m., followed by refreshments and an organizational meeting of the Society for the Preservation of the Onley Train Station at the Onley fire hall beginning at 7 p.m.

This week the retired railroadmen recalled the station in its glory days, when a yellow and red sign made of heavy cast iron identified the stop as Onley. That sign has since disappeared.

They also recalled the huge clocks, wound by key, that kept time at local stations.

The Onley station was where Bonniwell picked up his paychecks.

Both men remember trains of 100 cars or more loaded with coal rumbling through town, as well as freight cars loaded with produce and canned goods from the Shore's many canneries.

"I've gone south with a train of 180 (cars)," recalled Bonniwell, a former brakeman and conductor, this week. He also remembers seeing 100 cars of potatoes sitting on Exmore's six tracks.

(Bonniwell is a retired member of Local 1378, Wilmington, Del.)

During potato season, he said, "We used to run down to Kiptopeke (on a spur from Cape Charles). They used to run down there pretty steady years ago."

The trains were pulled by steam engines until the early 1950s, when diesel engines came into use.

Both men also remember passenger service, which stopped in the late 1950s and which provided a connection to northern cities for travelers coming by ferry from the south.

The ferry made three trips a day, they said.

"When a boat came in (from across the bay), the first train went to New York," said Cowan. A second passenger train would head to Philadelphia and a third train was loaded with mail, he said.

Almost all trains stopped at busy Lecato station near Oak Hall. "That was where all the sailors caught the train; the base (at Wallops) was huge at that time," Cowan said.

Cowan recalled in the late 1920s his father walking him down to the Onley tracks to see one of the biggest train wrecks that ever happened on the Shore, caused by a broken rail.

"That was a cold day; it was way below freezing," he recalled, adding, "The cars were lying on their side" and bodies of victims could be seen strewn about.

An Associated Press story from Dec. 1, 1929, reports nine people were killed and 25 were injured in the accident.

Cowan, who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and its successor, PennCentral, for 40 years before retiring in 1981, returned to Onley to the house where he grew up -- just a short distance from the tracks -- after a career spent working in Baltimore, Md., Ohio and New York as an inspector and supervisor for the railroad.

He started out working on signals and other communications and remembers climbing the telephone pole depicted next to the freight station in Onley's town logo.

"My job was a 24-hour-a-day job; when the phone rang, you never knew where you were going. If they had signal problems, you were called immediately," Cowan said.

Bonniwell worked 10 years beginning in 1960 as a brakeman and conductor on Virginia's Eastern Shore before moving on to other jobs, but he kept up his membership in the United Transportation Union and was awarded a 45-year membership card in 2005.

He would board the train in Cape Charles and go as far as Delmar, Del. Sometimes he worked in the trainyards across the Chesapeake Bay at Little Creek, getting up to take a ferry at 3 a.m. to get there for the 7 a.m. shift.

"It was either hot, cold or rainy," he said of working on the railroad.

Neither man has ridden on a train since retiring, but both said they are glad the old freight station in Onley is being preserved.

"I swear, you do it, you never forget about it," said Bonniwell of railroad work, adding, "I never could get it out of my blood, but I never did want to go back -- but I like trains."