Grassroots Railroad Sports?

Reading & Northern went live on Facebook today with #2102's first test runs at Port Clinton

Test run between Reading Outer Station and Port Clinton. First time under it's own power in 31 years and it's already running at track speed. Looks and sounds great, with a Reading single-chim freight whistle on it.

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to NickD :

Intriguing, I'd not heard any of that but it certainly explains the delay.

I'm not sure I buy the argument about freight traffic though. On a busy day we might have a half-dozen trains pass the house. Often there's less. 

Amtrak is now streaming on Twitch to show how little traffic is on the Gulf Coast Line that CSX is saying is too busy to accomodate two Amtrak trains a day. Delightfully petty.

https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/k7w9n9/amtrak-is-streaming-an-empty-railroad-on-twitch-to-beef-with-freight-rail-companies

NickD said:

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to NickD :

Intriguing, I'd not heard any of that but it certainly explains the delay.

I'm not sure I buy the argument about freight traffic though. On a busy day we might have a half-dozen trains pass the house. Often there's less. 

Amtrak is now streaming on Twitch to show how little traffic is on the Gulf Coast Line that CSX is saying is too busy to accomodate two Amtrak trains a day. Delightfully petty.

 

https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/k7w9n9/amtrak-is-streaming-an-empty-railroad-on-twitch-to-beef-with-freight-rail-companies

Epic 

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

NickD said:

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to NickD :

Intriguing, I'd not heard any of that but it certainly explains the delay.

I'm not sure I buy the argument about freight traffic though. On a busy day we might have a half-dozen trains pass the house. Often there's less. 

Amtrak is now streaming on Twitch to show how little traffic is on the Gulf Coast Line that CSX is saying is too busy to accomodate two Amtrak trains a day. Delightfully petty.

 

https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/k7w9n9/amtrak-is-streaming-an-empty-railroad-on-twitch-to-beef-with-freight-rail-companies

Epic 

I'm curious if it's an officially sanctioned action or a rogue Amtrak employee

YouTube already has a bunch of trackside videos of #2102 on her test run. They certainly weren't sparing the throttle any. I'm pretty certain she looks better than new.

So someone better explained the Amtrak/CSX feud over Gulf Coast Service trains. It's not the amount of trains that CSX is running, it's the length of the trains that they want to run. Basically, CSX, as part of Precision Scheduled Railroading, wants to run even longer trains on that line, but the passing sidings are already maxed out. CSX is saying that the longer freight trains that they want to run would not be able to fit into sidings to let Amtrak trains pass. So CSX is essentially holding Gulf Coast Service hostage to get the federal government to pony up for longer passing sidings so that they can run longer, and fewer, trains and reduce their amount of employees even more. 

Posts a few pages earlier about trapped trains brought this to mind:

In reply to NickD :

Ah, that makes sense. If only all the railroads hadn't ripped up their double-track mainlines 50-years ago...

Although the tracks through town do not appear to have ever been doubled, so it's irrelevant to the service here, it certainly would have made things better across much of the country. 

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

One of the few tales of locomotives sealed up in a tunnel that is known to actually be true. A bunch of years back, a group wanted to go in and recover the locomotive, ignoring the fact that after 80 years inside a flooded tunnel it's likely just a large pile of rust flakes, and they drilled a hole down and lowered a camera into the tunnel. They discovered that the tunnel is still full to the top with water and it was determined that attempting to drain the tunnel would likely cause massive sinkholes to form, so the project was abandoned.

There are countless stories of locomotives submerged in quarries or sealed off in tunnels, and most of them have been proven false or at the very least haven't been proven true. Bob Diamond found the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn, which people swore was long gone, and he had evidence that there was an 1830s-era locomotive sealed in there on the other side of a brick wall, but then the Long Island DOT evicted him from the tunnel and he could never get back down there to prove it. There's some that swear that a Denver, South Park & Pacific 2-8-6 Mason Bogie is still sealed off in a tunnel up in the Colorado Rockies, which would be quite a find if it was true, and there's also those who insist that there is a PRR J-1 2-10-4 buried in the now-NS yard at Pitcairn.

C&O #231 during happier times:

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

Its also a case of I think CSX is just being difficult to be difficult. If that line was a never-ending stream of freight trains, or if Amtrak wanted to run 6 trains a day, I could see them balking. But it's obviously not that busy and Amtrak is only asking to run one train a day each way. They could surely work out some sort of schedule.

Reading & Northern is doing more test runs with #2102 today. They've been live on Facebook with it too, and were inviting railfans to come on down and catch them running through. Once again, solidifying my belief that Reading & Northern is unlike any other railroad out there. Most would be testing in top secret and chasing people off, not livestreaming and inviting people down. Every time I think that R&N can't impress me any more, they go and prove me wrong.

NickD said:

Reading & Northern is doing more test runs with #2102 today. They've been live on Facebook with it too, and were inviting railfans to come on down and catch them running through. Once again, solidifying my belief that Reading & Northern is unlike any other railroad out there. Most would be testing in top secret and chasing people off, not livestreaming and inviting people down. Every time I think that R&N can't impress me any more, they go and prove me wrong.

This sounds amazing tho. I'm excited for it, one day I'll need to check it out in person! Maybe that's their plan, appeal to rail fans early so they *want* to come see it in person because their attitude and outlook is so positive. The world needs more positivity like this, its infectious really. 

Since Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis 576 is supposedly going to run on RJ Corman track, it would be nice if a deal could be struck to run 611 on the RJ Corman track that runs Myrtle Beach to Chaddburn, NC and return.

LS_BC8 said:

Since Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis 576 is supposedly going to run on RJ Corman track, it would be nice if a deal could be struck to run 611 on the RJ Corman track that runs Myrtle Beach to Chaddburn, NC and return.

RJ Corman is a hard one to predict. He bought that Chinese QJ 2-10-2 and imported it, ran it sparingly and then stuffed and mounted it with time still left on the boiler. After RJ Corman bought the ex-NS Oneida Line, he refused to allow the New River Railroad to continue to operate over the railroad, resulting in their RS-3 and a couple passenger cars rotting away in a siding, even though the RJ Corman group stopped using the line in 2013.

On the flip side, there is the situation with NC&StL #576 running over the Nashville & Eastern's former Tennessee Central rails when it's done, and there is a proposal to implement a tourist operation out of Myrtle Beach, SC, on a portion of RJC's line to Conway as well as another effort being promoted at Tabor City, NC, which is also an RJC freight operation. By these examples, one concludes that RJC isn't universally opposed to the notion. I'm guessing sufficient money is the determining factor.

The guys that run #611 did reach out to Andy Muller about running on the R&N, since it's only a hop, skip and a jump from Strasburg. Supposedly he wanted a pretty hefty cut of their ticket sales, and they balked at that. His response was to the effect that he owned the rails, and he had his own locomotives, and if he was going to allow them to run over his rails and steal the limelight from his stuff, it had to be worth his time. Harsh, but can't exactly argue against it either. Still, it would have been awesome to see #611 and #2102 together. Although it still could happen, since there has been no word on #611's schedule for this year. Theoretically, it could also go up to Steamtown, but I think the negative experiences from the NKP #765, MILW #261, and Andy Muller, have all poisoned that well. Also, Steamtown hasn't run any trains since 2019, steam or diesel-powered, and there were theories that they are using Covid as an excuse just to transition to an entirely static museum, which seems dumb, but, hey, it's run by the government.

More footage of yesterday's test runs. It's pretty fitting that #2102 returned to service in 2022, since it was originally I10-sa Consolidation #2022 before it was rebuilt. I believe they still have some paint work to do since there is no logo on the tender and I recall they said that they wanted to paint it in the Rambles livery.

I saw some people joking that they were surprised that #2102 didn't roll out of the paint booth in blue paint like R&N #425. For that, I am actually glad. I love how #425 looks, but I'm not sure that paint scheme would have worked as well on #2102. I also just noticed that the diamond-shaped plaque on the pilot deck reads Reading & Northern. The T1s had those plaques originally, but they read Reading Company. A neat little touch.

I'm also surprised at the amount of kvetching about the Reading freight whistle on it, with people saying "they need to put the Reading 6-chime on it." I like the freight hooter, it's haunting sounding and I'm sure it's loud as all hell. But also, it's historically accurate. The hooters were for freight engines, the 6-chimes were for passenger engines, and the T1s we're first and foremost a freight engine and reused the whistles off the I10-sas they were built out of. It wasn't until during the Iron Horse Rambles that the #2100, #2102, and #2124 were given whistles off of retired G3 Pacifics. The whistles were actually mounted on a manifold so that the crews had their choice of which whistle to blow, and on doubleheaded trips, one T1 would use the freight whistle, while the other would use the passenger whistle.

In later years, after #2102 passed into private ownership, it wore a very deep steamboat whistle owned by a gentleman named Al Shade. According to Shade, it had come off of New York Central Ten-Wheeler #1234, and he had bribed an NYC employee with a box of cigars to go remove it off the locomotive on the deadlines. Shade was known to let everyone within hearing range know that it was his whistle whenever it was used. Apparently it ended up being orphaned in the B&O's West 3rd St. roundhouse in  Cleveland at some point after about 1980, and the Midwest Chapter NRHS people operating Cuyahoga Valley/GTW #4070 had it donated to a "NYC Museum" somewhere. 

On at least one trip, #2124 also wore the whistle off of Baldwin #60000, the high-pressure 3-cylinder 4-10-2 prototype that Baldwin donated to the Franklin Institute.

A mix of Tennessee Central power at the Nashville, TN yard. To the left is the TC's sole Alco S1 switcher, then one of 13 ALco RS-3s in the center, and then #75 is one of three Baldwin DRS-4-4-1000 road switchers. Tennessee Central had a roster that was chockful of Alcos, aside from those three Baldwins. Those three DRS-4-4-1000s also made up a full third of US market production as well, with PRR buying the other 6 built.

Baldwin DRS-4-4-1000 #77 and RS-36 #302 at Nashville in '65. The DRS-4-4-1000 looked like a VO-1000 switcher from the long hood end and had a short hood on the other end. At this point, the Tennessee Central's end was just three years away.

Alco FA-1 #801 and two RS-36s enters Nashville yard.

An odd lashup of an RS36 leading an FA-1 leads a transfer cut of freight cars over to the L&N's Nashville yard

An Alco FA-1 gets the sandbox topped off the old-fashioned way, one bucket at a time, in June of '62.

TC Alco RS-3 #258 gets some work done to the lead truck (remember, the early RSs were designed to run long-hood forward) at the Nashville roundhouse. Looks like an Alco FA-1 in the background has the center of the body removed and the prime mover pulled out of it. Also, interesting how the roundhouse appears to be more of an open-air design. Probably because of that warm TN climate.