He s worked with a man from Australia who spends his summer vacation in Bluefield to learn more about the town s history and its railroad past. Railroad fans are out there and they will travel any distance just to see the rusting hulk of a train. It has trees. It has space. It doesn t have traffic jams.
People can actually escape their life here among the land, the water and the mountains.
They don t have to worry about pagers, e-mail and cell phones. Heck, down there, cell phones don t work in most areas. America is tired of plastic theme parks that all look alike. We ve got the real stuff, and people want to see what really happened. But McGehee and Harpold aren t naive enough to believe that the heritage area can save the coal fields.