Steam's reign on the Mississippian came to an end in '64, when a single Alco switcher replaced the two aging 2-8-0s. The #76 pingponged around various operations like Gettysburg Railroad, the Ohio Central, and the Steam Railroading Institute before ending up on display in Oakland, Maryland disguised as a B&O engine. The #77 is up on the Alberta Prairie Railway in Stettler, Alberta, where it is still operational.
In reply to NickD :
Huh, apparently the Mississippian is still in business.
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
I'm surprised that Genesee & Wyoming hasn't swallowed it up as well. The ol' Orange Plague has assimilated so many cool shortlines.
Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern "logger" Mikado #300 approaching a water tank.
Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern #300 "at speed". The profile shows the tiny little trailing axle that looks like an afterthought. Unlike mainline Mikados, where the trailing truck was to support a larger firebox, on a logging engine it was to improve how it tracked when running in reverse
B&HS #300 at Beaumont. After years of neglect on display at Hattiesburg, the #300 was recently purchased by Valley Railroad of Connecticut with intent to return it to operation.
The engine crew at the Twin Seam Mining Company in Kellerman, Alabama tops off the sand dome of Shay #5 by hand.
Twin Seam Mining Co. #5 loads coal cars at the tipple at Kellerman in 1959. The number plate is almost completely upside down in this photo.
Twin Seam #5 rattles past sister Shay #8, which had been retired and was being cannibalized to keep the #5 operational. A pair of worn-out diamon stacks lay in the weeds in the foreground.
Passing Twin Seam's third Shay, #17, which was also inactive and had been cannibalized to keep the #5 running.
The brakeman rides the footboards with a bucket of sand, perhaps the sander is out of operation, as they creep along a roadbed that hasn't seen a ballast train in quite some time. Ties? What ties?
Photographer J. Parker Lamb noted that the Twin Seam operation made two trips a day on a good day, which meant no derailments. By 1959, the mine was getting pretty played out and the whole operation folded in '63, after a wooden trestle collapsed. The rails and the three Shays were scrapped on the spot.
Exiting the summit tunnel at Kellerman. Again, more of that excellent roadbed grading.
Twin Seam #5 passes a track crew in a speeder before entering the summit tunnel at Kellerman. If I had to guess, the track crew's job was less performing track maintenance and more checking that the rails weren't too far out of gauge or that no large rocks had fallen from the ceiling of the unlined tunnel or that none of the bridges had given out. It certainly wasn't to cut weeds or replace ties or lay new ballast.
Tip-toeing through the weeds.
My journeys through the rabbit holes of the internetz have unearthed yet another obscure Electro Motive diesel locomotive; this time it's the "One Spot Twins" or "Amos and Andy". Built by EMC, they were a twin-unit box cab built for the ATSF to pull the new streamlined Super Chief. They were delivered in perhaps the most unusual paint scheme Santa Fe ever had- Olive Green with Cobalt Blue and Sarasota Blue stripes, and pinstripes of Crimson and Tuscan Red.
In reply to Recon1342 :
Interesting, I've never seen a photo of them in as-built configuration. They were an EMC design and used EMC components but they were constructed by St. Louis Car Company. They also originally had shrouds over the trucks, but they were quickly removed when they caused the bearings in the trucks to overheat. I've seen a few of them after a later rebuild where they were given a bulldog nose and the regular red, yellow and silver Warbonnet, as well as swapped out the B trucks for three axle trucks with the outermost axle unpowered, giving them a weird 1B-B1 wheel configuration.
ATSF in the '30s seemed to have a little difficulty with settling on a corporate image, because in '37 you also had the "Blue Goose", the streamlined 4-6-4 #3460, which was painted in light blue and silver, despite ATSF using dark green for their passenger cars. It didn't match anything that they operated before or after.
Always thought it was odd that ATSF saved one 3460-class Hudson but chose the #3463, and not the #3460, which was the only streamlined locomotive that ATSF owned. They also were looking at streamlining one of the 3760-class 4-8-4s, but the added weight of the streamlining was going to be too much, so they decided against it.
Two of Seaboard's Baldwin Centipedes bracket an early Alco RS on a train just east of Montgomery, Alabama on their way to Georgia. Like PRR, Seaboard had plans to run the big Baldwins in passenger service but found them too abusive to infrastructure at higher speeds and too unreliable, and so they were bumped to freight service.
A quartet of Alco RSC-2s, an A1A-trucked version of an RS-2, smoke it up in freight service near Montgomery. I can't see all the numbers, but one of those is potentially the RSC-2 that eventually ended up here in Central New York.
In reply to NickD :
It's a pity, because the Goose was a gorgeous locomotive. A Super Chief with that two-tone blue would've been beautiful. The as-delivered scheme on the twins was quite dashing as well.
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