Grassroots Railroad Sports?

NickD said:

Perhaps the strangest promotional train ever, the Rexall Train, parked at San Francisco

Was this a functional train or just a billboard after it required replacement? Would probably grab attention if it was seen anywhere. 

DjGreggieP said:

NickD said:

Perhaps the strangest promotional train ever, the Rexall Train, parked at San Francisco

Was this a functional train or just a billboard after it required replacement? Would probably grab attention if it was seen anywhere. 

Functional train. It was New York Central L-2c Mohawk #2873 and twelve heavyweight Pullmans that toured the country. The Mohawk was returned to NYC afterwards, had it's streamlining removed and was put back in regular service. The Pullmans were sold off to various railroads.

The L-2C Mohawk without the streamlining:

As an aside:

Anybody on GRM into Lego Trains? L-Gauge and the sort?

I took yesterday off to handle some stuff at the bank (and failed) and then, because it was nice out, I went to Little Falls to go for a walk on the old West Shore Railroad bed, now a very nice train. The ex-NYC Water Level Route was busy territory yesterday. It was literally a train every 15-20 minutes, and they were hammering. I really regret that I was too far away to get a photo of the one train, because it had a Canadian Pacfic GE on the head end, a long string of oil cars in between, and a Kansas City Southern GE on the tail end as a DPU. Living deep in CSX territory, I've seen a pair of BNSF locomotives at Little Falls, being used on a run-through grain train, and I've seen a pair of Union Pacific locomotives go through Utica with a tanker train, but I've never seen Canadian Pacific or KCS units in this area of New York. I did get a snap of a CSX mixed merchandise going past the former site of the Little Falls depot.

In reply to pheller :

Not for a while. My son had a pretty nice Lego layout when he was young but that was over 35 years ago. My equipment has always been Lionel but I've dabbled in N gauge and one minor attempt at HO. 

Lou Manglass

A westbound Northern Pacific passenger train, with the usual A-B-A set of EMD F9s, hustles past the small depot at Bonner, Montana in 1967. The train is heavy on headend cars, but a bit light on actual coaches.

A companion photo to the above photo, eastbound EMD F9A #6704A is going into the hole at Bonner to allow the #6706C to pass by

 The eastbound Mainstreeter is crossing Clark Fork Bridge at Bonner on this September 1967 portrait of the usual matched set of F9's doing the honors. The Mainstreeter was named after NP's slogan of "Main Street of the Northwest" and ran from Chicago to Seattle, but was less well-known than the competing Great Northern's Empire Builder, the Milwaukee Road's Olympian Hiawatha, UP's City Of Portland, or even NP's own North Coast Limited.

A station stop at Missoula, Montana for the Mainstreeter. Raymond Loewy was the man behind Northern Pacific's classy and understated two-tone green and white passenger livery. It's interesting that Loewy, the guy who was often rather outrageous with his styling on things like the bullet-nosed Studebaker and the PRR T1, tended to keep things pretty mild when it came to liveries. Look at the PRR Tuscan Red with gold pinstripes, the cream and silver and dark blue of the Missouri Pacific, or the two-tone blue, white and gold of Air Force One.

The North Coast Limited threads its way over the Continental Divide via Homestake Pass. This is technically a Burlington Northern train, since the merger went through a month before it was taken, but it's all NP in appearance.

In reply to NickD :

That was a beautiful train. 

I had something going on tonight but I swung by Holland Patent to catch Adirondack Railroad's dinner train headed north. They had MA&N #2042, their ex-BCRail MLW M420W leading the train, with Adirondack RS-18u #1835 in tow on the other end. The #2042 was in a 1999 TV miniseries called Atomic Train starring Rob Lowe back in it's BCRail days.

MLW M420s were actually the first wide-cab locomotives sold in the US. The Providence & Worcester was cast off from Penn Central in 1969 and became independent for the first time in over 7 decades. They originally made do with a batch of refurbished Alco RS-3s that were leased to them by the D&H, but in 1974 the P&W purchased five MLW M420s, tagged onto the end of CN order. P&W's were classified as M420Rs, since they used traded-in units in their construction and rode on Type B trucks, instead of the MLW Zero Weight Transfer trucks.

The first P&W M420R, #2001, actually still exists and is on the Southern Railroad of New Jersey and is painted in the New York, Ontario & Western livery.

This fall, my father and I took my nephew to a model train show, and while we were there, he spotted a book about the West Shore Railroad, which is not a subject too frequently covered. They were asking $50 for an unopened copy but my father didn't want to spend that much money at the time. With his birthday coming up, I thought I'd buy him a copy. Uhhh, apparently that book, Along The Old West Shore: From Weehawken to Buffalo goes for $250 a copy. 

Well, this couldn't have come at a worse time: Canadian Pacific workers are going on strike after negotiations over increased wage and pension benefits and more rest times failed. With shipments of grain and potash (for fertilizer) from Belarus and Russia cut off, Canada looked like a good source. Now, with CP on strike and the the truckers, rightfully or wrongfully, royally pissed off, plus large amounts of US farmland either converted to solar fields or growing corn for ethanol production, I feel like bad times are ahead. I'd also imagine that this strike could jeopardize the CP-KCS merger, depending on how long it stretches.

WKTV ran a weird article concerning the Adirondack Railroad. They said that trail construction has begun on the 34 miles between Tupper Lake and Lake Placid, and the "and the 119-mile segment in the Remsen-Lake Placid Travel Corridor is projected to be finished by 2025." First of all, the settled deal was that the trail people would get the tracks between Tupper Lake and Lake Placid, and in exchange the state would help rehab the line north of Big Moose to Tupper Lake as well as construct an engine repair facility at Utica. Second, it's 90 miles from Remsen-Lake Placid, 119 miles would be from Utica-Lake Placid, and while the state owns the line north of Remsen and can do what they please with it, the Utica to Remsen section is owned by Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern and the state has no say over.

So, is WKTV just spouting facts out of their ass? Or did they slip up and reveal something they weren't supposed to? The trail folks, who are really being used by several wealthy landowners who don't want anyone in the woods, have made no bones about the fact that they want everything north of Remsen. I don't have much doubt that the trail people will try mightily to get the tracks between Tupper Lake and Big Moose, and then between Big Moose. Their war cry is "underutilized" which gives them the justification in their mind to tear up a active Railroad that is being used. They used that excuse successfully to get rid of the Tupper Lake to Lake Placid section even though the line between Saranac Lake to Lake Placid section was being used. Tupper Lake isn't the kind of end destination that Lake Placid was or Thendara/Old Forge is, and Big Moose is even less so.

The railroad put themselves in a bad position the second that they basically threw in the towel on the Saranac Lake-Lake Placid line and accepted the compromise. The one thing that might work in their favor is that the state just sank a bunch of money into ties and ballast for the section north of Big Moose and might be reluctant to tear all that up. But then again, New York spent millions on building a film studio out in the Finger Lakes, then after it sat unused for a couple years (literally not a single second of film was ever shot their) sold it to Onondaga County for $1. So, stupid financial decisions are not out of the realm of possibility.

Adirondack Railroad GP9 #6076 at Ray Brook, NY in 2016. This was part of the Saranac Lake-Lake Placid segment that was torn up last year. The GP9 was a real boomer, having been originally a PRR engine that then went to Penn Central, Conrail, St. Regis Paper, Champion Paper, and Deferit Paper, somehow dodging having it's nose chopped anywhere along the line. The #6076 was affectionately nicknamed Rosie, after the silver and pink paint job it arrived on Adirondack property in, and while she was a leaky old tub, she held down the north end operations for years without fail. The silver and pink was replaced pretty quick with black paint with white fleur de lis and Adirondack & St. Lawrence lettering, in reference to the 4-mile Adirondack & St. Lawrence that operated until 1912, and then was later given a modified NYC lightning stripe livery. After the north end was shut down, she brought all the equipment south to Utica, and then was sold off.

Rosie at Saranac Lake, a scene never to be repeated.

Rosie at Lake Placid. I've said it before, but I much prefer when Adirondack Railroad was going for the New York Central look over the new green/yellow/black look.

Rosie, in the paper mill livery that gave her her nickname.

And the last photo of her leaving Utica on the tail end of a CSX freight. She went south to the Northern Central (formerly known as Steam Into History). In her last year or so on the north end operations of the Adirondack, she suffered several indignities at the hands of saboteurs, likely affiliated with the snowmobile clubs, that included a bunch of sand dumped in the axle journal boxes, water in the crankcase, and cut wiring on the control stand. Those involved with that operation said they got very thorough at checking her over before starting and moving her.