Grassroots Railroad Sports?

So a few years back, a PRR N6b caboose, oops, I mean cabin car, popped up on eBay for $2500. It was rough, to say the least.

This is what an N6b was supposed to look like. The ad said "Needs rehab", which is a slight understatement.

The general consensus was, it was maybe worth the asking price to salvage the trucks off of. But the saving grace was that unlike some cars, the N6b has a steel full frame and the body and floor are just wooden add-ons, they don't provide any structure. So, a gentleman has purchased the car, moved it and has begun rebuilding it. 

So, the next time you look at something and think its a basket case, think of this thing.

Learned about an odd one today: locomotives that wore the NYO&W paint scheme after the NYO&W went bankrupt, but never belonged to it.

When the New York, Ontario & Western dieselized, they chose an attractive gray, orange and yellow paint scheme for their EMD NW2s, FTs and F3s. Their GE 44-tonners had been painted a dark red, black and white, although some were later repainted to the gray, orange and yellow. The EMD F3s were the newest locomotives purchased by the NYO&W in 1948, as they were in poor financial shape and went bankrupt in 1957. So they never owned a single road switcher.

So, then, how do you explain the photo of a GP7, a locomotive that NYO&W never owned, wearing what appears to be NYO&W paint?

When the Candian line Quebec, North Shore & Labrador purchased GP7s and GP9s in the 1953 rather than chose their own livery, they picked from EMD's design scrapbook. EMD kept a collection of liveries that they had applied to customer locomotives that new customers could use instead. And the QNS&L decided to use the O&W's paint scheme, rather than come up with their own. Since the O&W never purchased a road switcher, it seems like EMD adapted the paint scheme either A) expecting/hoping the O&W would buy GPs (they were a faithful EMD buyer after all) or B) adapted it for the QNS&L. In a similar vein, the Algoma Central used the DL&W's gray, yellow and red on their locomotives.

The QNS&L GPs were retired in 1971, then sent to Bellequp. This was a short-lived leasing company that was supposedly formed by Canadian Pacific to see if there was money in leasing locomotives. They then were relettered to Bellequip, shipped to Montreal and immediately used by perennially power-short CP. When Bellequip went belly-up in 1972, they then crossed into the US and ended up being owned by Precision National Corp, another leasing company, being relettered again, but still maintaining the old O&W paint scheme. PNC continued leasing them to CP, as well as British Columbia Rail, eventually getting repainted into PNC's new blue and yellow scheme.

By 1975, a number of them were parked, as they were no over 20 years old. They sold most of them off, with a number ending up going to both Chicago & North Western and Illinois Central. Both of those railroads were notoriously stingy (the joke was that C&NW stood for Cheap & Nothing Wasted) and loved to rebuild older units and sent them through their shops, chopping down the noses and painting them in their respective colors. Although I did find a 1976 image of a non-rebuilt GP9 still wearing the QNS&L (O&W) paint scheme with C&NW lettering, which is a bit wacky.

Sadly, after 1960, the Quebec, North Shore & Labrador ditched the gray, yellow and orange scheme for plain gray with just a few yellow slashes on each end. So we never got to see what a GP30 or and SD45 would have looked like if the Old & Weary bought them.

In reply to NickD :

Interesting.

Ok, so I accidentally ran across a picture of a brass model of a Virginian 2-8-8-8-4 today. It seemed a bit crazy and at first I figured someone made the model as an April Fools joke or something, but it turns out the Virginian did indeed have one.

It topped out at 5mph and it was supposed to be used as a helper to push coal trains up steep grades.

Erie also had a small number of triplexes, but theirs were 2-8-8-8-2. I wonder if when Baldwin designed them if they knew they would only work at such slow speeds or did they have to build them, then run them to find out how they operated?

In reply to T.J.(Not Scary Evil Genius) :

From what I've heard of the Triplexes, they were basically built as an experiment but were originally intended to pull trains. The problem was, even with two fireman working full-time (stokers weren't a thing yet) they just couldn't keep enough steam up to feed all those cylinders. Also, as they used up coal and water, the rear engine would lose traction, as it had less and less weight on it. The other issue was that the metallurgy and engineering wasn't there for couplers yet, so when the Erie tried to take advantage of their full power, they broke couplers near the front of the train because they weren't strong enough to hold the weight of such long trains. The tensile load was too much and they would just tear apart. Erie and Virginian got pretty disgusted and stuck them in pusher service for a while and then cut them up. Even so, Baldwin dreamed up Quadruplexes and Quintuplexes but no one bit. Yes, those would be 2-8-8-8-8-2s and 2-8-8-8-8-8-2s. Virginian and Santa Fe also owned some 2-10-10-2s, but the had the same issues of being too hard to keep pressurized. Santa Fe cut theirs in half and built two 2-10-2s from each.

Went out for a walk yesterday. Walked down the old abandoned NYO&W mainline through Cleveland, NY. Even though it was abandoned in '57, you can still find chunks of coal, clinkers, spikes and ties buried in the mud. There were also the remnants of two stone buildings just off the right of way that looked like they would have served the railroad. I asked my father about them, who is a bit of an NYO&W historian, and he was unsure, couldn't recall the O&W having any service in Cleveland other than a small wooden passenger depot.

Once, when I was a kid, we went walking here with my parents and my youngest sister and my father and I found a coal rake that a fireman would use on a steam locomotive hanging in a tree. We grabbed it and carried it back and took it back to our house. For those not familiar with a coal rake, these things are loooong. And we were driving a 1989 Cutlass Ciera. So we had it diagonal across the car sticking out the RF and LR windows. I'm not actually sure where that thing ended up. I hope it didn't get stolen or cut up for scrap on accident, because I imagine there aren't many of those left.

A funny story related to the NYO&W: Back in the 1920s, my great grandfather Nick J Dixon Sr. had a farm in North Bay, NY. He and some other farmers in the area pooled in and bought a box car of fertilizer. The O&W dropped it at nearby Jewell, NY. They would leave it there, the farmers would take their share and then the O&W would pick up the empty and drop off a new one when they ordered it. Well, my great grandfather began to notice that either one of the farmers in on the pool was taking more than their share, or someone else was stealing some. He decided to have my grandfather Nick J Dixon Jr, who was younger than 10 at the time I believe, spend the night in the boxcar and see who was coming down and taking the fertilizer. Well, partway through the night, an O&W train came through and was hooking onto some other cars, and my grandfather woke up to the sound of them coupling cars, thought they were hooking onto the car he was sleeping in and imagined himself getting hauled off to Lake Ontario or someplace and jumped out and literally ran all the way home at something like 2am. 

The NYO&W's Jewell station

NYO&W class W 2-8-0 #316. After building up a large fleet of center cab "Mother Hubbard" or "Camelback" engines, the Class W was the first conventional firebox 2-8-0s that they bought. Nicknamed "Long Johns", they were rough riding and prone to derailing while reversing with a load. 

One of the NYO&W's delightfully chunky 0-6-0 camelback switchers.

In reply to NickD :

I've never really understood the camelbacks. Did the boiler run through the middle of the cab?

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

Yep. But the cab only contained the engineer on the left side. The fireman stood on the tender under the awning shoveling into the firebox. Camelbacks have that wide sloping firebox, called a Wootten firebox, because they burned anthracite culm. It's waste anthracite coal tailings that are crushed very fine and has a lot of impurities. It was very cheap, as in near free because coal mines had huge piles of the stuff, and still had a pretty good amount of energy, but you needed a huge thick layer to do anything with it. So John E. Wooten developed a very wide firebox that would let you put enough culm in there. But due to it's shape, manufacturers were afraid it would obscure too much of the engineer's view, so they mounted the cab ahead of the firebox, making the "Center Cab", "Double Cab", "Camelback" or "Mother Hubbard" They were popular with a lot of Northeastern coal-hauling railroads. O&W, Delaware Lackwanna & Western, Reading, Central Railroad of New Jersey, Erie, all used them. O&W actually had the highest percentage of Camelback motive power.

But the design had flaws and construction of new Camelbacks was banned in 1935. Because the engineer and fireman were in seperate cabs with no method of communication, there were serious safety issues. If the engineer passed out from heat stroke (he was crammed next to a boiler after all) then the fireman wouldn't know it until the engine derailed from taking a curve to fast or plowed into another train after not stopping for a signal. If the fireman passed out or died or fell off (remember, throwing coal from across the gap between the tender and engine) then best case scenario, the engineer finds himself stranded when it runs out of steam. Worst case, the water level drops to low and he gets killed by a boiler explosion. Also, broken connecting rods would flail around and smash the bottom of the cab. And, the engineer normally had no visibility out the lefthand side, but he could confer with the fireman who typically stood on that side. No he had no visibility whatsoever, even secondhand, of that side of the tracks.

In reply to NickD :

Thanks, that's exactly what I was wondering about. 

I didn't know that camelbacks were built that way to accommodate a giant firebox. Makes sense.

T.J. said:

I didn't know that camelbacks were built that way to accommodate a giant firebox. Makes sense.

The banning of the construction of Camelbacks didn't necessarily kill off the Wooten firebox. Some, like the DL&W and the NYO&W did go to conventional fireboxes. But others just built conventional end-cab locomotives but with a Wooten firebox, the visibility complaint apparently unfounded.

The Delaware & Hudson, for example, had some ungainly-looking Consolidations with Wooten fireboxes that almost covered up the rear driver set

The Reading was also a big fan and used them on everything. Like their shockingly ugly G3 Pacifics

As well as their powerful but somewhat unattractive T1 Northerns.

I have to be honest. I don't think the Reading ever had a single attractive engine. They built some of the most absolutely homely stuff around. The irony here is that I have actually funded the purchase of a 10 firebox staybolts in a Reading T1, and I can't say I've paid for parts on any other steam locomotive out there.

Like I said, it was only the construction of new Camelbacks that was banned in 1935. Some seem to confuse it as being the operation of any Camelbacks. This was not the case. The US was in the Great Depression and the railroads that used Camelbacks tended to have a heavy concentration. Also, many of these railroads were in poor financial shape. The O&W declared bankruptcy in '37, from which they never recovered. The Central Railroad of New Jersey, who's only non-Camelback engines at the time were their Mikado freight engines, would declare bankruptcy in '39 (and again in '47 and '67). These railroads were in no condition to suddenly have to pay to replace their entire fleet. So the FRA just limited the ban to the construction of the design. CNJ would keep theirs in operation right up until they dieselized. And in the 1960s, the Strasburg Railroad Company even restored a Reading 0-4-0 Camelback, the #1187, to operation and used it for several years before retiring it, not due to safety concerns but simply because the engine was too small to be of practical use to them

Meanwhile ...today ... a small line that somehow still survives.

The Florida Gulf and Atlantic Railroad (FGA).   On the Attapulgus spur.   This little combination runs about once a day.  Hauls tank cars with chemicals to a wood pressure treating facility in Havana Florida, and hauls Attapulgus clay (cat litter) out of pit mines around Attapulgus Georgia.

This picture at mile marker 66.  About 200 feet from where i am remodeling a home.  Track is in no condition for high speeds.

In reply to Purple Frog (Forum Supporter) :

Your comment about being 200ft from the line reminded me of a topic I wanted to bring up. 
 

Here in MS we're about 400ft from the CSX Nola-Mobile line. Back in IL we were between 2-3 blocks from the CSX Chicago-Terre Haute line. The trains here in MS are almost unnoticeable sometimes, especially if they don't blow their whistle for the nearby crossing(they often don't late at night). It's very rare to feel the train going by. Conversely, back in IL it would shake & rattle both of our places(one stick-frame on a basement, the other brick on cement slab).

My hunch is it's due to the soil difference. We're mostly sand here in MS and are only 900ft from the water, while back in IL it was all farm ground in every direction. 

I love this thread.

I always liked 4-8-4 Northerns. I think they look purposeful and powerful.

4-8-2 Mountains are also nice in my book.

T.J. said:

I always liked 4-8-4 Northerns. I think they look purposeful and powerful.

4-8-2 Mountains are also nice in my book.

Yeah, Mountains and Northerns are two of my favorites. Although I like 2-10-4 Texas as well, just for their sheer size and power. And I do like little 2-6-0 Moguls as well.

I like how the Northern seemed to have the most different class names. Northern Pacific bought the first ones so they chose the Northern name. But many railroads, particularly southern railroads, called them by other names

New York Central called them Niagaras.

DL&W called them Poconos.

Lehigh Valley called them Wyomings.

C&O called them Greenbriers.

Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis called them Dixies.

Southern Pacifi called them Golden States.

Western Maryland called them Potomacs.

Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac didn't give them a class name, but just named each engine after a Southern general, governor or statesman.

Denver & Rio Grande Western called them a Western. 

Central of Georgia called them a Big Apple.

Canadian National called them a Confederation.

Nacional de Mexico called theirs a Niagra.

What is really odd is that the Mountain was much more popular than the Northern. There were plenty of railroads that owned Mountains, but didn't own Northerns. The Northern was a little late to the party and some railroads felt that the extra trailing truck axle didn't offer enough of an improvement to warrant purchasing an all-new engine. But, in preservation, there are 44 preserved Northerns, but only 16 preserved Mountains. There are currently 6 operational Northerns, and over the years there have been an additional 6-10 that were operational but are no longer, and another 3 or 4 being restored right now. But there has only ever been 1 Mountain restored to operation (Frisco #1522) and it has been out of service for years, with no other Mountains in the process of being returned to operation.

Went to Hamilton, NY to go for a walk yesterday along the NYO&W's old Utica division. This was actually constructed originally as the Utica, Clinton & Binghamton railroad, which the New York & Oswego Midland (the NYO&W's predecessor) leased. For a short while it was used by the Delaware & Hudson but then the NYO&W bought it up and used it to access Rome, and Utica. At a later point, the O&W realized that their mainline, which was just one valley over, had a much more torturous route, with long steep grades, and added connecting points and shuffled most traffic over to the Utica Division through the Chenango Valley. The Utica Division stayed active right up until abandonment in '57.

The building directly behind the sign is the Hamilton Depot. This was constructed by the O&W during better years and is still in use, as a consignment shop these days. Just barely visible, to the left of the new depot and even further back, is a reconstruction of the UC&B's original depot. This building was used by O&W for some years before the built the newer depot. The original building was there until several years ago, when Hamilton began looking at moving their town offices into the building. But to get it up to code would have cost more than building a new structure. So an externally-identical brand new building was built on the exact location.

Just 150 feet from that marker is the Leland Coal & Oil Company coal trestle. Built sort of like a bridge but with only one end and a shed on the elevated end, the railroad would shove coal hopper cars up it and then open the bottoms, where it would pour through the open deck down into coal bins underneath. The coal was then sold from there for businesses and residences to heat with. By the 1950s, the trestle was less and less frequently used, as oil took over from coal. But in 1955, the trestle was the site of one of the most odd accidents in railroad history. At 9pm on September 27th, a 62-car train behind FT #803 was headed through Hamilton at about 35mph. For some reason, the switch was in the position to send traffic up the trestle. The train went up the coal trestle, through the shed and then flew 150 feet off the end of the trestle to land in the grass. The train stayed upright, nobody was killed and nobody suffered serious injuries. Part of this was due to the fact that there was not a loaded coal car in the shed at the top, a miracle, as owner Jim Leland said that 3 out of 5 days there was one present. But several box cars of chocolate bars from the Fulton Nestle plant smashed open. Children scavenged many of the candy bars and candy sales in the area tanked for several months.

The O&W rerailed and repaired the #803 and removed all the cars. They ended up paying to repair the coal shed and fix the people's lawns that played unsuspecting host to the train, to the tune of some $500,000. The switch was determined to have been intentionally thrown by someone, and hundreds of people were questioned, but no arrests or convictions were ever made. While Hamilton chooses to refer to it as The Great Chocolate Wreck, the O&W preferred to call it "The Flying Diesel Corps" and gave the crew members badges naming them as members.

NYO&W FTs await their fate at the Middletown yard in May of 1957. The railroad had been abandoned for 2 months at this point. Many of their F-units were cut up. The NYC also bought a large amount, and then traded them into EMD for GPs. No O&W FTs or F3s exist today.

After an exhaustive rebuild and overhaul, Florida East Coast/US Sugar Company #148 is now up and operational in time for her 100th birthday.

Headed into the 1920s, the Florida East Coast felt like they were on top of the world. They had completed their successful Key West Extension and were capitalizing on the Florida real estate boom. They double-tracked their mainline from Jacksonville to Miami and placed large orders for Mountains and Pacifics, including the #148. And then, they got hit by the 1929 stock market crash followed by the Great Depression, and then in '35 a hurricane wiped out their Key West Extension. Suddenly the FEC found itself in financial dire straits and had a surplus of motive power. They began selling off large amounts of steam locomotives. Many of their Mountains went south to Mexico, where some operated as late as the '60s. They also sold off a number of their Ten-Wheelers and Pacifics, which found new homes on short lines. 

Enter US Sugar in Clewiston, Florida. Tired of relying on trucking companies to move sugar cane from their fields to their plants, US Sugar laid down 25 miles of track and began their own internal rail service. Needing locomotives, and not wanting to spend money on brand-new engines, they purchased some FEC 4-6-0s and 4-6-2s. These locomotives were light enough to serve their needs, and with a relatively short (for a Pacific) 68" driving wheel, they weren't high-speed sprinters. A comprehensive steam roster for USS is difficult to find, so exactly which engines they owned is a bit hard to find, but they had at least 5 Pacifics (#65, #98, #113, #148 and #151) and at least one 0-8-0 (#253)

The #148 was not one of the Pacifics sold off in the '30s and '40s. It held on on the FEC until dieselization started in 1952, at which point US Sugar grabbed it up, presumably to replace one of the Ten-Wheelers (of which none survive) or one of the earlier-purchased Pacifics. USS kept the steam engines on the job until the late 1960s as they had an advantage over diesels: in the event of a flood, you could still operate a steam engine over flooded tracks, while a diesel would ground out the traction motors. But by '68, the steam engines were largely relief power and they sold them off. The #113, #151 and #253 went to museums, but the #148 went north to NJ.

The #148 began an excursion career, first on the Black River & Eastern and then on the Morristown & Erie. But by this point, it was a 50 year old steam engine that had been used hard for a long time. Firsthand accounts from crews say that by this point it had lots of leaky flues and dry pipes, and the wheel flanges were worn thin to the point where they had a bad tendency to pick switches. In 1977, the Morristown & Erie cancelled their steam operations and the #148 was retired. It then ping-ponged across the US to various owners, all of whom planned to restore it but then discovered the extremely poor mechanical condition of it. In the 2000s, it ended up in Colorado, where a company was trying to start up a tourist dinner train program. The #148 was torn down and disassembled and found to be in incredibly bad shape, with the boiler down to 1/4" thickness in spots and the tender rotted out, and then the 2008 recession killed off what seemed to be its last hope.

But in 2016, US Sugar purchased the remains of the #148 and shipped it back to Florida and began an exhaustive restoration. As one person described it "I had the chance to see this engine while it was in Traverse City, MI in the midst of an aborted attempt to restore it. I can't think of an engine in worse condition where an operational rebuild was attempted. For example, I am sure you could have punched a hole right through the rusted-out tender - so a new tender tank is absolutely needed. And the engine appeared to have many parts missing on the backhead and running gear. Also, I was told the engine was dragged en route to Traverse City, damaging the wheels and who knows what else more. So I am not surprised the 148 needs basically everything rebuilt new or from scratch - running gear, wheels, drivers, backhead, cab, etc. I am still surprised anyone attempted this restoration."
 

The restoration was originally undertaken by a contracted team, but as costs mounted, USS let them go and began using their own employees. Typically a change in crews is the death knell for a restoration, but not in this case. The #148 received a new boiler, new firebox, new front flue sheet, a new smoke stack, new cab and windows, new valve gear crossheads, new side rods, new drive wheels and bearings, overhauled lead and trailing trucks, a new tender cistern and oil tank, essentially everything. And along the way, they threw in a number of upgrades, including cross-compound air pumps, roller bearings on every axle, non-lifting injectors and brake handles on the tender. Essentially, aside from the frame and lead and trailing trucks, they damn near built a new locomotive from the ground up.

Current operational plans are a bit nebulous, but I'm sure now that she's operational, they'll start announcing whether they will be running public excursions or not. I'm interested to see if maybe a trip over the Florida East Coast trackage is in the future.

Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern C425s #2456 and #2453 crossing the dual-use car/train bridge here in Rome, NY. I've crossed that bridge dozens of times, but I have never seen a train on it myself personally.