Joey Kerr has a black-and-white photo of his great-grandfather, I.G. English, who’s looking out the window of a steam locomotive he operated from Jacksonville. It was probably taken around 1940. Isaac Goodman English would be dead by 1944 after suffering lung injuries when a train engine’s boiler exploded.
The Kerr family’s not sure when he began his career, but given that he was 59 when he died, they figure he’d probably been on trains for at least 30 years.
He would be the beginning of quite a family legacy . It began with I.G. English, whose son and two grandsons worked on the rails. There was also his son-in-law, Robert Kerr, whose sons Bob and Dan (Dan died a couple of years ago) also got jobs operating trains.
And then the latest generation: Bob’s son Joey, along with Dan Kerr’s son, Danny, who worked in the business.
That means four generations of the family have operated trains based out of Jacksonville , most likely beginning more than 100 years ago.
“I kind of believe in fate. Maybe it was always my fate,” said Joey, 54, who played music in bands growing up and had a rock-star dream. He was one semester into a master’s degree in English literature when he tired of school. On his 25th birthday, almost 30 years ago, he too joined the railroad and became an engineer.