Mullins Station

[Bill Richardson]

I looked up Mullins Station on here and found nothing.  Not too surprising.  It is in CSX territory, in Rockcastle County.  Trains are trains.  I like to see different colors and road names.  I have seen tons of the usual black NS engines.  Now and then I see a different NS engine.  Anyway, in 2018 the name of Mullins Station came up again and I looked it up.  There is an old limestone mine there, aka limestone quarry.  There is an active mine across the gravel road.  It is all fenced off with a bridge over the creek along the road, Sinks Of Roundstone Creek.  At the old mine/quarry, there is an open area between the high rock wall and the road, with an old siding track along the road.  A pair of active mainline CSX tracks goes along the wall and through a very short tunnel, crosses the creek on the other side, and continues northerly.  My wife and I drove out there to have a look.  There was a murder out there a few years ago.  I read about that online.  There was another incident about a missing man turning up there, dead.  I think that's correct.  Anyway, it is an interesting place.  Not long after my wife and I went there, a friend and I went to go in the cave nearby.  We also went to the mine area to look around.  People go there to shoot at bottles and junk.  We did a little of that.  We walked into the mine too, and made photos.  It is laid out in a tac-tac-toe grid.  Very high ceilings.  One of those days there a CSX train came along.  I made some photos, but wasn't in a good enough position.  The track is down below the ground level by a little, so I couldn't get the wheels in the photos.  They move briskly along there, even through the tunnel.   I didn't have time to get closer to the tracks.   I got something.  One engine was a rebuilt GP30, and the other was a a GP40-2.   Old engines.  Interesting.  One day my friend and I visited we met a guy who goes there a lot to get train photos.  It is a good scenic backdrop for train pictures, with that high wall.  Don't go in the tunnel.  It is short, but trains area faster than people, and one day I saw two trains passing each other in the tunnel, going in opposite directions.  Not a good place for a human to be.  Anyway, I thought I would tell of this place on here.  Maybe some other people in the region, who don't know about this place,  might want to get some train photos there, even if they are "foreign power".  This road is south of Mount Vernon, off Hwy 25.