More local to me, the New York & Lake Erie in Gowanda, NY has FPA-4 #6764. As the Erie-inspired livery might give away, they operate former Erie trackage from Gowanda to South Dayton, NY.
NY&LE FPA-4 #6764 is also frequently paired up with NY&LE #6758, which is the last surviving Alco/MLW FPA-2. It was actually upgraded to FPA-4 specs, including replacing the 1600hp 12-244 with an 1800hp 12-251, by Canadian National, along with another FPA-2 and two FPB-2s. After the upgrade was completed it was reclassified as an FPA-2u, although it's often just referred to as an FPA-4, since the carbodies were identical to begin with.
New York & Lake Erie FPA-2u #6758 exiting the tunnel at Dayton, NY
NY&LE #6758 at the ex-Erie depot in Cherry Creek, NY. Gowanda to South Dayton has long been the extent of NY&LE operations but they've been working on extending the line to Cherry Creek and last year ran a couple special trains over it. There are hopes to eventually get as far as Buffalo and Jamestown some day through repairing old out of service trackage
Olympic Railway Inn, Sequim, WA. Pretty nice B&B where each room is a caboose.
Happy Independence Day
The Red Caboose Motel could sure take some lessons from the Olympic Railway Inn!
Lou Manglass
In reply to 914Driver :
There was also the Izaak Walton Inn in Essex, Montana, right next to the old Great Northern mainline to the PNW. They had a gutted EMD F45 shell and multiple cabooses, all of which you could rent out, as well as 33 rooms. And the inside of the lodge was full of railroad memorabilia, art, and photographs. Big railfans destination and it even offered flagstop service for the Empire Builder. Then at the end of last year, it got bought by some big hospitality corporation and railfans started getting nervous. The new owners came out and made a statement that they were aware of the lodge's history and reputation and they would be respectful of it and nothing was going to change. Yeah, you know how that goes. A month or so ago they shut the place down, auctioned off all the railroad memorabilia and decorations, and are in the midst of an extensive remodel. People were livid. No word on the F45 or cabooses but people are waiting for the axe to fall on those too.
Well, I miss out on all the cool stuff. According to the local Facebook railfan group, CSX #1973, the Chessie System heritage unit, rolled through Rome yesterday. Someone got some good photos of it though.
CSX has also unveiled their third heritage unit, CSX #1982, the Seaboard Systems unit. I'll be honest, this one is pretty meh. If you don't see the Seaboard Systems logo and lettering, it just looks like it's in CSX Yellow Nose 2 livery. And also, there's something off with the shade of yellow on the upper S of the Seaboard Systems logo. It's too pastel.
A Seaboard System C30-7 showing the shade of yellow that the S should really be
NickD said:CSX has also unveiled their third heritage unit, CSX #1982, the Seaboard Systems unit. I'll be honest, this one is pretty meh. If you don't see the Seaboard Systems logo and lettering, it just looks like it's in CSX Yellow Nose 2 livery. And also, there's something off with the shade of yellow on the upper S of the Seaboard Systems logo. It's too pastel.
And a YN2-painted SD80MAC just for comparison. Like I said, at first glance, you'd think that #1982 was just a YN2-painted unit, unless you notice the Seaboard logo.
New Jersey Transit has donated ABB ALP-44M electric #4424 to the United Railroad Historical Society of NJ as part of NJT's 40th anniversary. Ordered in 1989, the Swedish-built ASEA-Brown Bovari electric locomotives were the first new electric locomotives ordered by NJT, retiring the hand-me-down GE E60CHs purchased from Amtrak, which had retired the used GG1s also purchased from Amtrak. Closely related to the ASEA AEM-7s that Amtrak had ordered earlier, which had retired the E60CHs that NJT had ended up with, they were rated at 5793 hp, continuous, and could generate 7000hp in brief spurts. The first fifteen were classed as ALP-44O (for Original), followed by another five in 1995 that were classed as ALP-44E (for Extended), and then the final 12, delivered in 1996, were classed as ALP-44M (for Microprocessor, which featured a microprocessor control for functions such as braking and the then new EPIC brake control stand).
In 2008, NJT was supposed to begin a rebuild program, but after deliberating on who to handle the rebuild, decided it was financially wiser to replace them with more ALP-46s. There were also issues with the ALP-44s not being able to handle the 9-10 car sets of the new bilevel commuter coaches that were arriving on the property. By late 2011, all NJ Transit ALP-44O, E, and M locomotives had been retired, having been replaced by the ALP-46 and ALP-46A locomotives. During 2012, most NJ Transit ALP-44s were prepared for storage in groups of at most five at a time. This work included the removal of pantographs and having the cab windows covered with steel plating. These units were then moved to Port Morris Yard and the Lackawanna Cutoff stub track for storage in Stanhope, NJ, where they are now stored today, victims to vandalism and the elements. Four ALP-44M units remained stored at the Meadowlands Maintenance Complex, of which the #4424 was part of, which helped keep them in better shape. NJT ended up having to pay the federal government back over the retirement of the ALP-44s, because the FTA recommended useful life of the ALP-44 electric locomotives is 25 years, and NJ Transit deemed the ALP-44s at the expiration of their useful lives after 22 years, it left a federal interest against the grants received to purchase the equipment that NJT had to pay back.
That's one of the ex-Erie-Lackawanna GE U34CHs that was funded by the NJDOT, and then became part of the NJTransit roster, in the background. Its the sole surviving U34CH and is also undergoing restoration by URHS of NJ
I like how the AEM-7s/ALP-44s looked actually, although the nickname of "Toasters" was rather fitting. The big vents along the side at the top of the roofline were the major spotting difference between the two, with the AEM-7 lacking them.
SEPTA also ended up with a single ALP-44M, the only other operator of the ALP-44 design. ABB fell behind schedule on delivery of the N5 single-unit high-speed electric cars, and SEPTA sued ABB. As part of the settlement, ABB handed them a single ALP-44M, SEPTA #2308. It operated alongside their AEM-7 as an unloved single unit, not helped by the fact that the ALP-44M variant's microprocessor controls were known to be troublesome.
Here's a really odd/confusing one: A pair of Yugoslavian tank engines based on an American design have been preserved in Canada after decades hidden indoors. Wait, what? During WWII, the US Army Transportation Corps came up with a series of locomotive designs that could be used in the US or could be shipped abroad to help prop up railroads belonging to the Allies. Included in these designs was the S100 0-6-0 tank engine (not to be confused with the S115 0-6-0 tender engines that stayed here in the US), which were produced by Davenport, H.K. Porter, and Vulcan Iron Works, and were a very European-looking engine. Three hundred and eighty two were produced in total and most of them went to Europe and stayed there after the war.
The Jugoslavenske željeznice, or Yugoslav State Railways, bought many S100s after the war and designated them as their Class 62. The Yugoslav State Railways then had the Duro Dakovic Locomotive Technica construct additional locomotives to the S115 design from 1952 to 1961, eventually bringing their total of Class 62 engines to 129. So how did two end up in Canada? John Holer, a Slovenian immigrant, had founded Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario in 1961, and had visions of including a railroad around the perimeter of the park for people to ride, similar to at Disneyland or Greenfield Village or Edaville. In 1981, he purchased two of the Duro Dakovic-built Class 62s shipped over from Yugoslavia, which the Yugoslav State Railways completely restored to like-new condition (Holer even went over to see them operate after the restoration), and stashed them in a warehouse. Until yesterday, the only known photos of these locomotives were from when Holer was having them unloaded at the port. They were otherwise completely out of sight, and pretty much forgotten about, and the railroad, along with several other proposed portion of the park, never materialized.
John Holer died in 2018, and the property the two locomotives were stored in was sold off, since it wasn't used by Marineland. The engines needed to go, and Holer's family contacted Ken Jones of the Niagara Railway Museum to see if the museum would be interested in them. They outright said that the locomotives needed to be removed quickly, and if the museum didn't want them or couldn't get them out quick enough, the alternative was the torch. In less than 2 months, the NRYM scrambled to get together the resources and plans to move the locomotive. Making things even more difficult was that they were not able to discuss the move or the acquisition with anyone, and they weren't allowed to be announced until they were on the museum's rails at the shop.
As the photos show, the decades of indoor storage has resulted in them being in absolutely terrific condition. They look like you could pour water in the boiler and light a fire and go. They even came with crates of spare service parts and the original maintenance manuals.
John Holer posing with one of the tank engines whiole it was being unloaded. This was one of very, very, very few photos of these locomotives after they arrived in Canada, since they were immediately whisked away and tucked in the warehouse and remained there, with no visitors, for over four decades.
There aren't any photos of it out yet, but there are a couple of videos, and Canadian Pacific unstreamlined Royal Hudson #2816 is back together and operational again. It's been largely parked since 2011, when Hunter Harrison took over CP and mothballed her, other than a brief move around the yard for the Holiday Train At Home that CP did in 2020. This overhaul had the boiler and frame lifted off of the drivers, the first time that that has been done at the CP shops since the end of the steam era. This is all being done in preparation for a trip from Calgary down through the USA and on to Mexico City, to celebrate the Canadian Pacific Kansas City merger. Hopefully, with them doing such an extensive and expensive overhaul, we get to see CP #2816 travel the CPKC system (hint, hint, run it down to Albany on the old D&H)
As CSX continues to clear out all the old stuff that Pan Am had squirreled away, they are donating some of it to various causes. Raven Rail LLC, the Alco 539 gurus and operators of the Saratoga, Corinth & Hudson, have been gifted several ex-D&H ilmenite hoppers that were used on the same D&H Adirondack Branch that the SC&H operates on, as well as an old L&N coach, an unusual flatcar with half a boxcar grafted on (destined to become a combination open air/bar car), and even an ex-Maine Central Jordan spreader.
Those D&H ilmenite hoppers were really distinctive when new. They were little two-bottom hoppers painted bright yellow with blue lettering and logo. National Lead owned the titanium mine at Tahawus on the north end of the Adirondack Branch, and while titanium had been shipped out for wartime use during WWII, afterwards they were moving ilmenite, a titanium-iron oxide mineral, to their plants at Sayerville, NJ and Saint Louis, MO, for use as paint pigment. The shipments out of Tahawus were a pretty profitable for the D&H, and the first diesel locomotives, Alco S-2s, were purchased specifically for hauling ilmenite trains down the Adirondack Branch.
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