They also took the #16 on a test run up to Colgate Grove, where they have the wye and the picnic grove. From what I understand, that's as far north as they are going to go, since there is nothing really left up at Mount Union and the Mount Union yard has been sold off. The focus is on going west to Robertsdale.
Pretty amazing that #16 went from this...
to this in just three years.
Where on earth do you but a brand new, period correct, reproduction combine?
In reply to TheMagicRatchet :
They got them from a place called Hamilton Manufacturing in Bellingham, Washington, who built them to resemble the original cars. They look very similar to the original cars that EBT used, but they are a little bit bigger (I think four feet longer). Despite their vintage appearance, they are fully modern: the tongue-and-groove wooden paneling is actually a composite planking, they roll on brand-new trucks with roller bearings, and inside they have retro-styled electric lighting, an audio system, a modern toilet, and a Baker heater and baseboard ducts for cold-weather operation. The combine is also designed with power lifts on both sides for wheelchairs, making it American Disabilities Act compliant.
Hamilton Manufacturing has previously built quite a few similar passenger cars for the White Pass & Yukon, as well as for the St. Kitt's Scenic Railway (little Caribbean island) and some for a railroad in Massachussetts (not sure which, I just found a vague mention on WP&Y's website).
The Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington has to construct their own coaches because 24" gauge passenger equipment is, uhh, rare. Like pretty much all of the existing equipment is already accounted for, between the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Co & Museum, the WW&F, and Edaville. Basically all that's left is whatever Ellis D. Atwood managed to save, and even some of that was left to rot away and be cut up after it was relocated to Edaville. So if they want to add new passenger equipment (or really any sort of equipment, including locomotives) their only option is to build it themselves. They've been chipping away on a recreation of Wiscasset & Quebec coach #3 in their shops for a few years.
In reply to NickD :
I've been on the White Pass and Yukon. I don't have pictures but I do remember the coaches. I considered them nicely restored and well maintained originals. Never considered that they might be reproductions!
#3 is beautiful! They are doing a great job!
Lou Manglass
In reply to TheMagicRatchet :
I've thought about going up to the WP&Y, although, I believe it's an 18 hour drive from the airport to the railroad. Then again, an 18 hour drive through Alaskan scenery might be pretty cool too.
We went as a side excursion from our cruise ship. As I recall it was walking distance to the Skagway terminal and they took us right up to the Canada border. The scenery climbing the mountain was incredible, the reason I didn't pay much attention to the coaches. Of course, the scenery anywhere in Alaska is just amazing. Our cruise ship traveled up the inland route, it was Summer so it was light for almost 24 hours. We had a balcony and I left the curtain if not the door open most of the time; it was wonderful to roll over in bed and just watch the landscape glide by my window.
Lou
Some very rare color photos, taken by an unknown photographer, of Southern Pacific's City Of Los Angeles when it was snowed in on Donner Pass on January 13th, 1952. The winter of 1952 was marked by a ton of storms off both the east and west coasts, causing a number of incidents with ships and airplanes. The City of Los Angeles, and the 236 people aboard, were also unfortunate enough to get caught up in the storms.
The jointly operated train departed Friday, January 11th over the Chicago & North Wester. All aboard confidently anticipated a Sunday arrival in Oakland before 9 a.m. There were 106 sleeping car passengers, and coaches carried another 90. Quite a few of them were scheduled to attend the Republican National Committee meeting to be held in San Francisco on Jan. 17, 1952. Others were servicemen returning to units due to sail from the West Coast after holiday leave. A few of the passengers were Midwesterners trying to escape the winter weather. Most of the passengers, however, were families with small children, returning home after holiday visits to relatives and friends in the Midwest. All were attended by a crew of 40.
The C&NW handled the train to Omaha (an agreement that would last until 1955, at which point UP changed the Chicago leg over to the Milwaukee Road due to complaints of C&NW service) and the Union Pacific then took the train to Ogden, Utah, with little issues. Southern Pacific took over at Ogden and the first sign of trouble was when they were delayed in Reno, which was experiencing its heaviest snowfall in 15 years. Eventually, the City of San Francisco edged out of town toward the Sierra, several hours behind schedule. It climbed the grade to Truckee paralleling U.S. 40 (now Interstate 80) and the Truckee River, and at Norden, just about the summit, the train was delayed again while SP section gangs and plow crews cleared the tracks ahead.
Moving again, they made it 13 miles west of Norden before drifting snow and a snow slide stalled the train. It was almost noon on Sunday, three hours after the train was due in Oakland. The train was close to U.S. 40, but that road was closed, accessible only to emergency snow vehicles of the power company. A parallel Southern Pacific track along the same right-of-way was unaffected by the slide, but those tracks were perched on an opposite slope. On Monday, the idling Alco PAs ran out of fuel and the heat and lights ceased and drifts began covering. the streamliner. As the water in the pipes froze, the toilets stopped up. The stoves in the dining car were separately fueled with charcoal, and were at least able to provide a source of hot soups and coffee, since the diner's water tanks didn't freeze.
Southern Pacific was aware that the City Of San Francisco was stuck and was trying to launch rescue efforts, but the winter conditions were hampering their work. A relief train from Reno was trying to follow the westbound track and breakthrough from behind but was making slow going. Another eastbound train from Roseville, California was blocked 35 miles from the stranded train by a derailed snowplow. The resources of the Sixth Army from the Presidio in San Francisco were enlisted and three M29 Weasels and their crews were placed on flat cars and sent east to the site of the rescue train. A section crew of about 30 Hispanic workmen, who had been clearing track before the train was stalled, were on site first and had aided the passengers and crew as much as they could. The section hands shoveled snow away from at least one window in every car to provide ventilation. They also kept a path to the mail car open. It served as the only entrance to the drift-covered train.
An outside group of rescuers arrived on skis from Soda Springs. They were led by a gentleman who went by Dennis Whiles, a ski instructor. The group brought 200 pounds of food, medicine and blankets. Dennis Whiles was actually Georg Gärtner, a German POW who had escaped from a POW camp in 1945 out of fear of repatriation to Germany and who had been on the FBI's most wanted list ever since. Ironically, Gärtner would end up being photographed by Life magazine as part of the rescue group and his photo would be published in the magazine. It wouldn't be until 1984 that he would go public about his true identity and would be allowed to stay in the US.
Southern Pacific Railroad Company managed to get a physician of its own to the site. Lawrence Nelson was dispatched from Truckee. He traveled by dog sled and snow tractor through 25-foot drifts to get to the train. He was welcomed by Walter H.L. Roehill, a physician from Middleton, Ohio, who had been en route to Honolulu. Roehill had been assisted by several military nurses who also were passengers. Roehill had his hands full and lacked medicine except for that in his small medical bag and what had been brought in by the first team from Soda Springs. When that team had made contact, it was clear that it would be some time before all passengers could be removed or the train itself moved. More outside parties broke through to the site with food and medicine, along with fuel for the stoves in the dining car.
Four servicemen took advantage of the comings and goings of outside rescue parties. They hitched a ride on a utility company tractor, then walked to the Nyack Lodge in Alta, CA. The 12-mile trip took five hours in visibility limited to 50 yards in daylight during the storm. Such conditions were braved by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Art Hoppe, and a photographer. Although both had been on skis before, they were not exactly experts at the sport. They managed to reach the train though, and Hoppe interviewed passengers and crew, then returned to the Nyack Lodge with one of the relief parties to file his story by telephone. His exclusive made the front page. The photographer remained overnight taking pictures. He subsequently had another front-page story and a feature spread.
By Wednesday, January 16th, the fourth day of the ordeal, the snow had stopped and the sky was clear and sunny. A snowplow had cleared U.S. 40 from the Nyack Lodge to Yuba Gap. A convoy of passenger cars and trucks had been organized at Nyack Lodge. A Southern Pacific special rescue train was able to make it as far east as Emigrant Gap. There, eight Pullman cars, two dining cars, a club car and a coach awaited the stranded passengers. Pershing Jay Gold drove the first snowcat to reach the train and evacuated the first four passengers. He died of a heart attack less than a week after the rescue, becoming the second fatality of the disaster. The first had been Roland R. Raymond, an engineer with Southern Pacific, who had had his rotary snowplow stall on the tracks as he pushed east toward the train, trying to clear the track. He stepped out of his cab and was standing alongside the plow when an avalanche swept him away.
The passengers had to walk to U.S. 40 at Yuba Gap, a distance of about a half-mile. Six litter cases were carried to the waiting convoy of cars and trucks. Once in the vehicles, the survivors were taken five miles on the cleared highway to Nyack Lodge. There, they rested while the baggage and mail were brought from the train for transport to Oakland. Almost 81 hours after their ordeal had begun on Sunday, January, 13, the 196 passengers and 40 crewmen climbed aboard the relief train at Emigrant Gap. Steaks and fried chicken were provided. For people whose last decent meal had been breakfast three days before, it was most welcome. Another relief was being able to smoke again within the train. Smoking in the stranded streamliner had been banned lest the small amount of ventilation be fouled. At 3:30am on Thursday, January 17th, the saga of The City of San Francisco came to an end. The passengers arrived at Oakland to be met by loved ones and a host of newsmen. As a footnote, on Saturday, January 19th, the train itself was finally retrieved off of Donner Pass and was dragged to a yard for repair.
Speaking of Donner Pass, Union Pacific actually fired up their ex-SP rotary snowblowers (they even still wear Southern Pacific MoW reporting marks) and ran them over Donner Pass for the first time in four years. Apparently they've been seeing massive snowfall out there, which is funny to me because here in central New York, we haven't had appreciable snowfall since before Christmas. The rotary snowblowers were built with steam power, but in the 1950s, SP modified them to use an F7B to generate power for converted traction motors out of the F7B mounted to drive the blower shaft.
In reply to NickD :
That's an interesting detail about Georg Gärtner. I'd watched a vid about his story a year or so ago, but they never mentioned anything about this.
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
Pretty funny that a guy who was on FBI's most wanted list just goes and leads a volunteer relief effort, then poses for a photo in Life magazine and then gets away with it. It's also interesting how once he finally turned himself in, the US was kind of at a loss to actually do with him. Gärtner was not an illegal immigrant, since he had been brought to the United States against his will. He had not really escaped from prison since all German POWs were to be repatriated to their original homes, and he had escaped after the war had ended, so there was some question of whether he was even still a prisoner of war. And he hadn't escaped to act as a saboteur or commit crimes, he just didn't want to go back to Communist Poland.
My grandfather had served in the Pacific Theater, and near the end of the war his father was dying of cancer, so he was given leave to return home and get affairs in order. Shortly after he died, the war ended, but my grandfather still had time to go on his enlistment, so they shipped him down to Texas to finish out his time as a guard at one of the POW camps. He said that all the Germans knew that A) their country had pretty much reduced to rubble and B) parts of it were under Soviet control, and so they were all on their best behavior, very polite and obedient, in hopes that they would be allowed to stay in the US. They'd take them out to local farms to work in the field and it'd be just two Americans with rifles and sidearms "guarding" dozens of Germans, because they knew the Germans wouldn't try anything. He said the only issue they had with them was when marching them to and from the farms, they'd get goose-stepping and they'd have to yell at them to knock it off.
In reply to NickD :
There was a German POW camp in mom's hometown & she'd said many of them stayed around after the war for the same reasons.
Reading & Northern made their official announcement of the start of Pittston-Jim Thorpe service. I'm guessing this is what the new RDCs are for, but it wouldn't surprise me if they ran the occasional trip with steam or diesel power on conventional coaches.
The more I read about the excursions makes me want to get my passport to drive down and check one out one day.
In reply to DjGreggieP :
Jim Thorpe is also a really cool city to visit. Neat architecture, bunch of cool places to visit. Which is a key part of why the R&N passenger department is so successful. You can't run trains just to run trains, you'll fail every time. You have to have some sort of hook, a destination, or scenery, or experiences. And Jim Thorpe is a great destination. Plus, traffic and parking are typically a nightmare, so the train just bypasses all that. You hop aboard in Reading or Tamaqua or Pottsville (or now Pittston), ride through some nice scenery, hop off right in downtown, spend a couple hours there, then hop back aboard the train and go back.
It's also a pretty symbiotic relationship. R&N contributes heavily to Jim Thorpe's economy. A few years back, the city council got scrapping with Andy Muller, trying to hit him with all sorts of extra taxes, and so he told them "Fine, I just won't run passenger service to Jim Thorpe anymore." Within a month or two, the business owners were all telling the city council "Listen, you gotta make it up with him, because our business dropped off substantially."
A win for preservation in the PNW, with the Inland Northwest Rail Museum scoring two rare pieces for their collection.
The first is Spokane, Portland & Seattle EMD F7A #804. The SP&S was a jointly-operated railroad controlled by the Northern Pacific and Great Northern, and GN and NP tended to buy Alco equipment and dump it on SP&S. They were worried about Alco going out of business and EMD having a monopoly on the locomotive market, and Alco-GE also shipped a lot of non-railroad products over the rails, but neither wanted to actually own Alcos, so foisting it off on the SP&S was the easy way out. That meant that SP&S owned fairly few EMDs during it's existence, and as a result they only rostered three F3s and four F7s. SP&S #804 is the sole surviving SP&S F-Unit, and was operational at least as late as 2007 on the Minnesota Zephyr Dinner Train before that ceased operation. It was purchased in 2015 by Ed Ellis for one of his Iowa Pacific Holding's operations and shipped down to Colorado, and has been sitting there facing possible scrapping after IPH imploded a couple years later. Inland Northwest Rail Museum said that the F7 retains its original 567B prime mover, which reportedly can be turned over, and it will be moving by rail soon following work that includes installation of new wheelsets and traction motors.
The other acquisition is Great Northern SD9 #599, which will be reunited with GN SD9 #598, the only other GN SD9 with dynamic brakes, previously donated to the museum by BNSF. The two were ordered in 1958 as the last of 27 in the GN SD9 fleet. GN assigned the pair to the Oregon, California & Eastern, which was jointly operated by SP and GN. The #599 was originally donated to the City of Skykomish, where volunteers had begun returning it to Great Northern paint, but were threatened with eviction and the possibility of scrapping in 2019. Contacted for assistance in saving the engine in 2022, museum members were able to arrange for BNSF to “redonate” it to the museum. The museum plans to use parts from #599 to restore #598 to full operation, then do a cosmetic restoration of #599 and use it as a dummy unit, paired with #598 as they were in their time on GN.
OF course, everyone is publishing photos of the East Broad Top Winter Spectacular from this weekend. This was the first steam-powered Winter Spectacular since 1981. After 1981, East Broad Top moved their railfan weekend to October and began holding the Fall Spectacular. When EBT reopened in 2020, they did start having the event in the winter again, but they were using Brill doodlebug M-1 and GE centercab M-7. All of the morning photo freights with #16 were sold out, all passenger trains with #16 were sold out, all trips aboard doodlebug M-1 were sold out, and the trips along the line south with converted 1928 Nash M-3 weren't sold out, but were well-attended. The Rockhill Trolley Museum was also running trips in conjunction with the event and had most of their operational equipment up and running for passengers.
One one hand, I wish I could have been there for the occasion. But then, on the other hand, I read these lines in some of the coverage "Crowds were large on both days. Local authorities placed flares on the centerline and on both sides of U.S. 522 for a quarter-mile to remind train-chasers to drive safely. The highway parallels the track for about 3 miles. At one spot, cars were parked bumper-to-bumper on both sides of the highway," and I think I'll wait a little until some of the newness wears off. I recall reading the comment of "I enjoy the hobby, but I can't stand 90% of the people that do it", and, boy, does that resonate with me.
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