Cake maker bakes edible replica of famed train station where her late father worked

There was no celebratory cake awaiting Central of Georgia Railway train No. 8 from Albany on that December morning in 1916 when it became the first passenger locomotive to pull into Macon’s new Terminal Station.

The occasion was, in fact — as this newspaper, then known as the Macon Daily Telegraph, noted in a front-page story the next day — “without any ceremony whatever” aside from the “thousands of Macon people in attendance.”

On Wednesday, in honor of the building’s 100th year, while there were no trains, there was cake — an edible replica, no less, of the venerable depot itself.

While other forms of transportation have long rendered the place — along with, for the most part, Georgia’s passenger rails — a relic, what have lasted are the memories: personal reflections, reminiscences, recollections of times or moments we might never speak of.

But places that last, ones still standing generations later, can conjure such retrospection. They can jog our minds to think back to, say, the time we met a train or hopped the Nancy Hanks, or, in Lisa Shepley’s case, visited our fathers at work.

Half a century ago, her dad, James “Jimmy” Leaptrot, who died in 2012, was a weights-and-inspections man for the railroad. He had once been a Central of Georgia telegrapher. His office was at the Terminal Station.

“As a kid, we came here all the time,” Shepley, who is 55, said. “When I come in here, I always look up to where my dad’s office was. … I walk in and I’m like, ‘I was here as a little tot.’”

As fate would have it, Shepley, owner of Lisa Mae Cakes in Byron, baked the 3-foot-wide replica cake that was served to guests at Wednesday’s centennial gathering.

A while back, someone who works for the Macon Transit Authority, now headquartered at the station, hired Shepley to make a wedding cake. The person liked Shepley’s work and thought of her when it came time to find a cake for the terminal’s 100-year anniversary.

Shepley, along with her assistant Brittany Miller, spent about a week crafting the cake. The replica front door and other parts, including the windows, were painted on with mixtures of food coloring.

“It had a real special meaning for me when I got asked to do the cake,” Shepley said. “This was a labor of love.”

As she painted on the cake’s windows, she couldn’t help thinking, “Yeah, my dad looked out these windows.”

This story was originally published October 5, 2016 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Cake maker bakes edible replica of famed train station where her late father worked."