"I told them to roll that engine on Monday morning as usual and I would see what I could do to keep the railroad operating."
The ultimate solution to that black week in 1943, was that Howard Mathis took over the defunct line, assumed $26,000 in back dets and kept it running.
Was he declared president of the railroad, or chairman of the board? "Heck no," he chuckled. "I was just the guy who took it over and kept it on the rails. There wasn't any board of directors anyway. I was all of it."
Mathis kept the HY&T alive for 11 more years. Then in 1954, "The Dummy" made its last run.
"Lots of folks turned out for that last run." Mathis remembered. "It was kind of nice that it didn't just fold without anybody caring. Lots of folks cared and lots turned out to wish it farewell."
Mathis' next concern was for the stockholders. He could have legally folded the railroad and bankrupted the stock. "That was never my way of doing business," he said. "I bought the stock at $83 a share, which wasn't bad considering it was sold at $100 a share back when the railroad was thought to be a potential goldmine."
Little evidence of the HY&T exists today (1968). In places, the old roadbed shows briefly at the ragged edge of fields, behind buildings in old shipping points, and along the banks of a broad drainage ditch in Fairfield Township in Bureau County, which the crazy right-of-way followed until a friendly farmer let it cross the land.
A few, worn ends of cross ties show behind Mathis' elevator in Hooppole. A short length of its old standard-guage track can be found in the Tampico yards, where the old depot is now an ancient, crumbling shed.
But for these faint things, the little "Dummy" has disappeared from the face of the earth.
Its memory is now as misty as that long-ago dream that so inspired the people that an entire town was turned around to enjoy the lush prosperity of the boom that never came.
Moline Dispatch - Aug. 1968 (Transcribed from the TAMPICO CENTENNIAL YEAR BOOK - 1975)
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