The agency that runs Mud Island River Park is looking for a private partner to bring new life to the Downtown attraction.

The Riverfront Development Corporation on Wednesday will release a request for “creative and innovative” proposals from developers who have fresh ideas for the aging, city-owned park — and who might be in a position to attract private dollars to help make it happen.

RDC’s board approved issuing the request in July, and RDC president Benny Lendermon said both the city’s current and incoming mayors were on board with moving ahead.

“We’re in the go-mode,” Lendermon said Monday. “We’re happy to get to this day.”

The 50-acre park on Mud Island’s south end opened in 1982 to about 1 million visitors annually, but attendance has averaged 165,000 a year over the past five years. While it occupies one of the most visible spots on the riverfront, the request notes that many of the park’s features — which include an amphitheater, monorail, museum, event spaces and scale-model Mississippi River walk — are outdated or obsolete.

It costs RDC more than $1 million annually to maintain Mud Island River Park, Lendermon said, and the city dollars to support a new “mega-project” are running dry. But Bass Pro Shops and Beale Street Landing nearby are creating energy and opportunity on the riverfront.

“Mud Island’s sort of at its point in its life that you need to evaluate all options,” Lendermon said. “It certainly needs new capital dollars to help invigorate it.”

Earlier this year, businessman Andy Cates proposed a partnership to make Mud Island an outdoors destination, with a water park, zip lines and other attractions. Lendermon said the agency hopes to receive at least a couple more proposals from potential developers.

The deadline for responses is Jan. 15. After that, Lendermon said, there is no set timetable for the RDC to evaluate the proposals and no guarantee the agency will move ahead with any of them.

By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Associated Press

JOHANNESBURG (AP) – The eight suspected poachers stood under a tree, apparently unaware they were being tracked by 10 rangers from Congo’s Garamba National Park. But as the rangers approached, gunfire rang out from the tall grass nearby, where other heavily armed men were hidden. The dragnet swiftly turned into a desperate fight for survival.

The shootout last month, in which three rangers and a Congolese army colonel were killed, highlights the challenge of protecting parks in a part of Africa plagued for decades by insurgencies, civil war, refugee flows and weak governments. It shows how some conservation efforts resemble a kind of guerrilla warfare in which rangers and soldiers stalk – and are stalked by – poachers who are slaughtering Africa’s elephants and other wildlife.

Such violence is not confined to Garamba in northeastern Congo, on the border with South Sudan. Farther south, in Congo’s Virunga National Park, assailants killed a ranger last month and another died in a militia attack there in August.

More than 200 elephants have been poached in Garamba since a census in April 2014 counted 1,780 elephants – down from more than 11,000 two decades ago. The park is one of only a handful of sites in Congo with “a viable population of elephants,” despite the loss of many large mammals over the past five decades, said Bas Huijbregts, an expert with the World Wildlife Fund conservation group. Garamba was also once known as home to the last northern white rhinos in the wild, though none have been seen there for years.

An earlier generation of poachers in Garamba killed with spears. Today’s intruders carry grenades and rocket launchers, and in some cases, have even targeted elephants from helicopters. These gunmen have turned a world heritage site the United Nations defines as “in danger” into a spot where deadly skirmishes are likely to forestall significant tourism for quite some time.

“The threat is now completely militarized,” said Leon Lamprecht, operations director for African Parks, a non-profit group based in Johannesburg that took over management of the 1,890-square-mile (4,900-square-kilometer) park a decade ago.

Garamba’s 120 rangers, backed by up to 60 Congolese soldiers, are trying to ward off rebels from nearby South Sudan, as well as ivory hunters and militias from Sudan and the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group led by warlord Joseph Kony, who is accused of war crimes.

Kony’s fighters are killing Garamba’s elephants and trading the ivory tusks for ammunition, food and uniforms in Sudanese-controlled territory, according to a report released last month by Enough Project, a watchdog group, whose findings were based on interviews with rebel defectors. The U.S. military is assisting African forces pursuing the Lord’s Resistance Army, and a U.N. peacekeeping mission of about 20,000 troops is deployed in eastern Congo, where many armed groups operate.

Garamba’s rangers have old firearms and African Parks is waiting for permission from Congo’s government to import better weapons, said Lamprecht, who recently returned from a trip to the park.

“It’s difficult for our rangers to defend themselves,” he said.

The Arabic-speaking poachers, believed to be from north Sudan, were tracked to an area 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) outside Garamba’s boundaries last month because they were carrying the satellite collar of a poached elephant, allowing rangers to follow signals to their camp on Oct. 5, according to African Parks. After they were attacked by gunmen hidden in the grass, an unarmed park helicopter flew to the rangers’ aid and was fired on with belt-fed machine guns and withdrew, Garamba manager Erik Mararv wrote in an online account.

With rangers missing or still in the area of the shootout, African Parks asked U.N. peacekeepers and the U.S. Africa Command to send aircraft for a rescue.

U.S. troops were conducting operations with African forces in other areas at the time and were unable to divert aircraft to Garamba, the U.S. Africa Command said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. It also said its mandate does not include military support for Garamba’s rangers.

The U.N. made two helicopters available late on Oct. 7, but the pilots determined it was too dangerous to land at the site of the shooting, according to African Parks. On Oct. 8, rangers reached the site and found their dead comrades. U.N. helicopters assisted with the removal of the bodies.

The poachers had taken the dead rangers’ weapons as well as a satellite tracking device that a park aircraft followed for two days. At one point, the device was emitting signals from the center of a large group of cows, suggesting poachers were mingling with cattle herders to camouflage their movements.

Last month’s deadly shootout was only the latest to target those trying to protect Garamba’s wildlife. In June, poachers killed a ranger and two soldiers in an ambush and one ranger was fatally shot in April.

Garamba’s guards still head out on patrol. Despite the losses, Lamprecht said, “the morale is extremely good.”

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

There are easier ways to make money than building railroads. It’s true in the game of Monopoly; and it’s true in the world of mountains and machines, including the political kind.

You get a sense of the riskiness of the business while viewing a video at the Rural Heritage Museum’s “How the West Was Won” exhibit at Mars Hill University

“We’re standing at the top of Saluda Grade, the steepest main line grade in the United States,” Ray Rapp, the producer of the exhibit, announces in one segment.

He’s telling about how safety had fallen to the wayside when the Asheville Spartanburg Railroad had dropped its financial bottom line to a desperate level on the interstate route.

Back at the entrance to the exhibit, Rapp, as tour guide, pointed to a Climax locomotive — or rather a mockup of one created by museum director Les Reker to face the door on simulated tracks — and said, “See, it’s No. 3. I like to use that to point out that there are three ways to get into the mountains by rail.”

One way is “to go straight up and over, as they did in Saluda … Another way is to build loops,” as on the road to Murphy and on the Clinchfield route through Altapass; and a third is “to follow the river, as along the French Broad and Nantahala.”

Full steam ahead

“In railroading,” Rapp says, “engineers do not want more than a 2 percent grade.” That was also what Asheville Spartanburg’s engineers thought in 1878 when they’d reached Tryon and surveyed the way ahead.

But a 2 percent solution there would have to involve not only loops but also tunnels, and the builders had neither the greenbacks nor the green light for that. Up and over it would be — and on July 4, 1878, flags waved as a train chugged to the top of Saluda Mountain.

Not long afterward, Cary Poole notes in “A History of Railroading in Western North Carolina,” “the first fatalities occurred. In 1880, 14 men died on Saluda,” as a train lost its breaks and sped to a crash, “and other deaths quickly followed. In 1886, nine more died; in 1890 three died; and in 1893 another three lost their lives.”

It wasn’t until 1903 that someone came up with a way to abate the carnage.

Joining the birds

“The idea of truck runaway ramps was pioneered on Saluda Mountain,” Rapp relates.

“There was an engineer who took a train down the Saluda Grade in July 1903. His name was William Pitt Ballew, from West Asheville. He lost a train going down that 5 percent grade. You lose a train, you’re not going to stop it. You jump. And he jumped.”

They called that “joining the birds.”

Ballew was in the hospital in Asheville for about four months after the accident.

“But at the end of July,” Rapp says, Ballew “woke up in the middle of the night and he was shouting, ‘I got it! I got it!” And the nurses came running in. They thought he was in a fevered state and there was something wrong with him.

“What he had was the idea for safety tracks on the mountain.” Ballew then called the superintendent in the Asheville yard, who advised him he needed to heal and could then come back to work.

“August, they had a second wreck on Saluda,” Rapp continues. “September, they had a third. And the superintendent called Pitt Ballew and said, ‘What was that idea you had about those safety tracks?’ By December 1903, two safety tracks were installed on Saluda Mountain. This is in Melrose. You can see the 10 percent grade.

“Now, you can never stop a runaway train. But the whole idea was to minimize the damage in destruction.”

Railroad history

The Asheville Spartanburg Railroad became part of the Southern Railway in 1894, which functioned as a huge engine in our economy until 1982, when it merged with Norfolk Western to become Norfolk Southern. The other big rail transportation provider in the region today is CSX, into which the Clinchfield Railroad had merged in 1983 when CSX had been called Seaboard System Railroad.

Today, we see railroads and yards closing, such as Norfolk Southern’s roundhouse in Asheville and CSX’s terminal in Erwin, Tennessee.

But from the 1830s through World War II, the competition for lines and connectors had been epic. And then, after 1950, when ridership went from its zenith to its nadir, the business became cutthroat again.

One of the legendary figures who emerges from this outsized story is Dennis William “Bill” Brosnan, Southern Railway general manager in 1947 and president and then board member from 1962-83.

“Between 1949 and 1954,” Rapp says, “Southern completely dieselized. They eliminated steam locomotives. Brosnan said, ‘We don’t have steam locomotives, we don’t need firemen’; and he began the layoffs.”

The union sued him and won in court, and Brosnan responded by hiring janitors to sit on the firemen’s seats and do nothing. Eventually, Brosnan and the union renegotiated the role of the firemen, but it was clear: labor-saving was going to be a ruthless strategy.

“When all the other railroads were going belly up in the ’60s and ’70s, the one profitable railroad was Southern,” Rapp relates. Brosnan invented a tie replacement machine that trimmed a 17-man track crew down to three.

Brilliant and hard

Brosnan had a place on Fontana Lake, in Almond, to which he would bring his superintendents every fall to review performance and technology.

“He had a siding by his house out there on the Murphy branch,” says Rapp, “and he would bring new equipment out there.”

One time, he brought a cherry-picker, just invented, to see how it might be integrated into railroad operations.

During cocktails, Rapp recounts, “a couple of his superintendents were standing there, watching this operator move the bucket. This is in Charles Morgret’s book, ‘Brosnan: The Railroads’ Messiah.’ One superintendent said to the other, ‘I bet you Brosnan doesn’t have the guts enough to get in that bucket.’ He didn’t realize that Brosnan was standing right behind him.”

Brosnan ordered the bucket to be lowered at his feet, climbed in, had the arm extended to its full height and then had it lowered at the superintendent’s feet.

“You didn’t think I had guts enough to get in there,” he told his superintendent. “And you don’t think I have guts enough to fire you. Get your ___ off Southern Railway property.” The guy had to hitchhike back to Asheville to catch an airplane home.

Next week: a look at the workers — convict laborers, engineers and porters — on the railroad.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Contact him at RNeufeld@charter.net or 505-1973.

THE EXHIBIT

“How The West Was Won: Trains and the Transformation of Western North Carolina,” an exhibit of films, artifacts, images, and text, can be seen in the Rural Heritage Museum, Montague Hall, Mars Hill University, through Jan. 31. For group tours, call (828) 689-1400. Museum hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. daily (except Mondays) and by appointment. Admission is free. Also visit www.mhu.edu/museum.