KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

Percy Wilkins and Linda Leone are planning the details of their June wedding down to the outfits the bride and groom on the cake will wear: tiny bibbed denims.

KYLE GREEN The Roanoke Times

Percy Wilkins and Linda Leone — pictured here in a "siding" filled with old railway cars and engines on 9th Street in Northeast Roanoke — got engaged Nov. 8 during a passenger train excursion to West Virginia. The couple plan to be married on a chartered, five-car train in June.

As Percy Wilkins and Linda Leone dated long-distance across spring and summer and into fall, he had a unique way of letting her know when he was nearby.

In fact, he let everybody in her town know, whether they realized it or not.

Wilkins of Blue Ridge is a locomotive engineer for Norfolk Southern, and his route frequently took him past Burkeville, where Leone worked at the Comfort Inn.

"There's certain ways you can blow the whistle to say, 'I'm in town,' " explained Wilkins, 53, who proposed to Leone on Nov. 8. She said she always knew when Wilkins was the author of the trains' signals.

"I can't explain it. People would say, 'There he goes,' and I'd know it wasn't him," she said. "I always knew when he was coming in because he would lay on that horn in a certain way."

Once, Leone rushed out to see his train as it passed. The conductor, who didn't know her, was startled to see an ecstatic woman running toward the tracks.

"He said, 'My God! She's going to flash us!' " Wilkins recalled, laughing.

A surprise for everyone

Although this will be Wilkins' first break from bachelorhood, he said he's "been married to the railroad for 35 years."

That relationship played a key role in his actual engagement plans -- six months after the April day Wilkins and Leone were introduced by a mutual friend, he proposed while they were on a daylong train excursion to Bluefield, W.Va.

The couple and their friend, Tommy Arthur of Narrows, rode with about 20 others in one of the train's glass dome-topped cars.

As the train returned to Virginia and approached Glen Lyn, Wilkins asked for the attention of everyone in the car before he popped the question. He offered her first a symbolic lump of coal and then an engagement ring.

"I didn't get down on my knees," he admitted, a little wearily, "or we'd still be there."

Mary Andrews, a teacher from Pembroke, was a passenger in the car and met the couple during the ride.

"I wish I could remember exactly what he said. He had a lovely, lovely way of telling her that she was really important to him," she recalled. "I'm just so tickled they could find each other.

"They both had tears in their eyes."

Although they had already agreed there was marriage in their future, Leone, who hails from New Jersey, didn't know when Wilkins was going to make it official. He told no one of his plan.

"I consider us good friends, and he didn't even punch me or say, 'Watch this'; he just stood up and did it," Arthur remembered. "I was half listening to him and half taking pictures out the window. By the time I realized what was happening, he was putting a ring on her finger."

C.B. Andrews, Mary's husband, said the scene was a shock to him as well.

"I was about upset because the battery in my camera went down, so I pulled out my cellphone and took pictures with that," he recalled.

Wedding plans on track

Wilkins' Botetourt County home is a modest shrine to the railroad. A Norfolk Southern system map hangs framed beside the front door. An 1899 telegram from the president of Norfolk & Western sits under glass on the mantle, near an old sign that was used by train foremen to mark the days without an accident on the line.

"Remember, it is better to be careful than to be crippled," warns script painted at the top of the sign.

Wilkins is constructing a playground for his model trains on a 24-by-36-foot layout in his basement.

"No mountains, just tracks," he explained.

In the meantime, Wilkins and Leone have set a June wedding date and plan for it to take place aboard five chartered railroad cars pulled by a vintage GP7-EMD diesel locomotive. The small train can carry 250 passengers.

"I think you've exceeded that already by inviting everybody," Leone told her fiance last month.

Wilkins hopes to park his private train on a bridge above the James River for the nuptials, and to signal their union with horns supplied by him and his friends.

"The river will light up to the sound of locomotive whistles," he predicted, and said the bride and groom on the cake will likely wear tiny bibbed denims.

"If we can pull it off," Leone said, "It's something we won't never forget."