YOUNGSTOWN — Erin Neiheiser has found the strength not to allow the fact that she lives less than a half-mile from the Feb. 3 train derailment in East Palestine to stop her from moving forward in more ways than one.

“I took a train to Texas,” she said with a chuckle.

On Saturday, though, Neiheiser and several other family members and relatives from East Palestine took a much shorter train trip — about a half-mile, to be more precise.

She and the others were among those who took a few rides aboard a J&L Narrow Gauge 58 steam locomotive at the Youngstown Steel Heritage Museum, 2261 Hubbard Road, on the East Side.

The rides will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each Saturday this month as well as September and October. None will occur in August because the museum is scheduled to receive a new locomotive shipped from Colorado to be loaded and prepared.

“I’m OK with it,” said Neiheiser’s mother, Lynn Guy, who lives slightly more than 2 miles from the site. “(The derailment) didn’t affect me personally, though it did affect a lot of townspeople.”

Among the relatives along for the fun-filled journeys up a small hill and into a wooded area near the museum were Neihieser’s children, Ivory, 4 months; Alayna, 3; and Kamrin, 5, along with the children’s cousins, Henry Guy and Calep DeLarosa, both 2, and Calep’s mother, Lyndsay DeLarosa.

The J&L Narrow Gauge 58 locomotive was used largely by the Jones & Laughlin Steel Co.’s South Side Works in Pittsburgh to transport ingots and other similar steel products, Rick Rowlands, superintendent with the J&L Narrow Gauge Railroad, noted.

Many major steel companies used such trains for that purpose, largely because they were able to fit into small, cramped spaces between buildings to pick up and move steel products. Today, though, standard gauge cars have largely replaced the steam locomotives, he explained.

“There’s not much of this stuff left anymore,” Rowlands said, adding, “There’s something about a steam locomotive people seem to like after all these years of not using them anymore.”

The key attraction in the museum is a large stationary rolling mill engine that the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. used from 1914 to 1979, the year the Sheet & Tube Co.’s Brier Hill Works closed, idling about 1,400 workers, about two years after the Sheet & Tube Campbell Works was shuttered Sept. 19, 1977, a day known locally as “Black Monday.”

When the Brier Hill operations reopened in 1937 after the Great Depression, much of its production was made up of tube rounds for the seamless tube mills in Campbell. During this time, the facility received rail shipments of molten iron hot metal from Campbell.

The rolling mill engine, which also has an accompanying flywheel, was used for about 65 years, Rowlands continued.

Serving as conductor for Saturday’s rides was Josh Cohen, 24, a lifelong train aficionado and longtime steel mill history buff who works part-time for the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad near Akron. He began volunteering for the J&L Narrow Gauge Railroad in 2017.

“I love steam. I’ve traveled down south; I’ve been east a lot. I travel and photograph them,” said Cohen, who also has a photography business and volunteers for the War Vet Museum in Canfield.

Given his family history, perhaps a love of all things trains was inevitable. His father’s best friend got the young Cohen his first Lionel model train, and he recalled having sat with his grandmother along sets of railroad tracks to watch trains pass.

“My mom remembers when I was a kid and I had a Thomas the Train engine in my hand 24/7,” Cohen fondly recalled.

When not acting as conductor, he spent part of Saturday preparing the museum for the National Narrow Gauge convention that will be in September 2024 in Pittsburgh, with plans to travel to the local museum.

Specifically, he was working on a New York Central Switcher locomotive that was built in the early 1940s. Eventually, it will serve as a dispatcher’s office, Cohen said, adding that he and other volunteers are trying to get an additional steam engine ready for the convention.