What else do you do when you’re 91? Besides running a steam locomotive as an engineer, if you’re Harold Borovec, you publish a history on a long-defunct railroad.

Borovec, a railroad fan from his early childhood, worked for Edmund Lambert on the Cowlitz, Chehalis & Cascade Railway in the 1940s, and listened to the older man share stories of his years working on railroads. He remembered those stories and wrote them in a book that he published this summer: “I Was No Nutsplitter! Railroad Machinist Recollections of E.R. Lambert as recorded by Harold Borovec.”

By the way, in railroad jargon, “nutsplitter” is a slang word for “machinist.”

I started working with Harold to publish his book about seven years ago. He meticulously wrote and edited page after page of text. He paid me to scan the photos and design the book, which Gorham Printing in Centralia printed. Gorham’s talented Kathy Campbell, who helped paint one of Centralia’s first building murals, designed the cover.

As I read the stories of Mr. Lambert, as Borovec refers to him, I wanted to know more about our local CC&C Railway, which was abandoned in the 1950s. To that end, Borovec is working on his second book, a history of the old logging railroad. The line was later owned by the Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, Northern Pacific and Union Pacific.

But his first book focuses on the history of the Gilmore & Pittsburgh, which operated from 1910 until 1939 in Beaverhead County, Montana, and Lemhi County, Idaho, with headquarters in Armstead, Montana. Lambert worked on the G&P from 1910 to 1914 and again from 1923 until it shut down in 1939.

Lambert, who was born in January 1882 in Kentucky and died in Chehalis in May 1972, shared his photos of the G&P with Borovec. He is buried at Claquato Cemetery with his wife, Ethel. They married June 5, 1912, in Bear Lake, Idaho.

If anyone knows about railroads, it’s Borovec. He and his wife, Alberta, followed the abandoned G&P tracks through the mountains and plains of Idaho and Wyoming as he researched this book. They also traveled together to railroad conventions throughout the United States. Woven throughout the books is a sweet story of the love Borovec shared for Alberta, his childhood sweetheart and wife for 67 years. She passed away April 22, 2013. They were the parents of three sons and a daughter.

In the mid-1980s, she spent most Saturdays alone as her husband and other volunteers devoted countless hours to restoring the CC&C 1916 locomotive No. 15, which began pulling the Chehalis-Centralia Steam Train over former Milwaukee Railroad tracks west out of Chehalis in 1989. Harold has served as an engineer on the train for nearly three decades.

In 2012, the last page of the March/April issue of AAA’s “Journey” magazine featured Borovec on the steam train’s No. 15 locomotive. A year later, in 2013, Borovec received the South Sound Heritage Association’s Heritage Award for his excellence and service in local historical preservation.

Harold and his brother, Byron, purchased Central Fuel Co. in 1955 and delivered coal throughout Lewis County. They sold their business to their sons in 1990.

 Borovec’s book is available for sale at the Lewis County Historical Museum and the Chehalis-Centralia Railroad & Museum. The cost of the 242-page book is $27.