Working through the south end of West Cressona Yard
Working through the south end of West Cressona Yard
Climbing up out of West Cressona Yard towards CP Becks, you can see how much an 0-6-0, especially one of this size and power, hunts and weaves around without a lead truck to stabilize it.
And passing back through Westwood Junction.
I then went all the way south and set up on the platform at Schuylkill Haven to get the last run north. The platform was pretty crowded before, so I wanted to stake my claim
After that, I got in my car and headed north for home, which was an absolutely miserable drive, due to weather conditions.
Also, here's someone's videos of #113 running on Saturday, in much nicer conditions.
Couldn't resist this example of cultural vandalism on a local site, normal service will resume with NickD's next post 
Reading & Northern posted another record this year, moving 1 million tons of anthracite in a year for the first time in it's 40 year existence, further cementing their slogan of "The Road Of Anthracite" and "America's Largest Anthracite Carrier". It's been Andy Muller's goal since December 1990, which is when he purchased from Conrail the ex-Lehigh Valley and Reading rail lines serving Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. At the time, the lines were in poor shape, tonnage was in decline, and Conrail had basically said those lines had no money and no future. Now, 33 years later, they're moving ever-increasing amount of traffic, and Reading & Northern has grown to 400 miles of track, over 1800 freight cars, more than 65 locomotives and employs over 350 full- and part-time employees.
A Conrail SW1500 and MP15DC working the former Reading Lebanon & Tremont Branch at Tremont, just a year or two before the handoff to Blue Mountain & Reading, which changed it's name to Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern with the acquisition of all these coal lines. I've ridden this line this spring, aboard an RDC, and this line splits off from the line to Minersville (or rather, vice versa) and continues up through Tremont to Donaldson and then Good Spring, which is where the coal loadouts are.
CNJ #113 as it looked at Locust Summit after the Philadelphia & Reading Iron & Coal Company essentially abandoned it there. Yeah, it was rough. Lots of parts missing that had to be replicated from blueprints, lots of rust, and lots of abuse from it's final years of use. Even more impressive is that the restoration was done outdoors at Minersville by volunteers without any crane or drop pit or large power tools, and the gentleman who spearheaded the effort and did most of the work, Robert Kimmel, is legally blind as well. From what someone was saying Sunday, the boiler on the #113 is pretty good, but the running gear is pretty heavily worn (it's estimated it hasn't had any running gear work since the late '30s) but they couldn't do anything because of the lack of crane or drop pit. Maybe when it comes due in a few years, R&N will let them use the Port Clinton facilities
In reply to NickD :
That's some amazing work without the proper equipment!
In reply to TheMagicRatchet :
It's also pretty impressive that in that condition, it survived a move to Wilmington, Delaware in 1980 and then the move to Minersville in 1986. Also, credit is due to Philadelphia & Reading Iron & Coal Company for not just scrapping the #113 when they were done with it. They really had no need for it anymore, so it would have been understandable if they had just cut it up. They didn't preserve it per se, as shown by it's condition, but they left it in existence so that one day it could be restored, making it one of just two CNJ steam locomotives that escaped the torch. There was a third CNJ engine, Camelback 4-6-0 #774, that outlived a lot of other CNJ steam and was cleaned up in the early '50s by CNJ and ran excursions over their rails. Don Wood and other preservationists tried to get CNJ to donate that engine for preservation, but the CNJ, which was in financial dire straits at the time, said that through the donation of 4-4-2 #592 and Alco-GE-Ingersoll-Rand box-cab oil-electric #1000, they had done enough for preservation. There was an attempt to fundraise to outright buy the #774, but they couldn't get the funds together.
I've always been a little surprised that R&N hasn't had the engine down to Lehigh Gorge to haul the Lehigh Gorge Scenic trains up from Jim Thorpe to Penn Haven and back. I know a while back there was an effort to get the #113 up to Scranton to run at Steamtown. Steamtown was running the #26, and the thought by the Railway Preservation Project 113 team was that having two steam locomotives up there would allow them to compare the sizes and the differences between a bituminous-fired locomotive (Baldwin Locomotive Works #26) and an anthracite-fired locomotive (CNJ #113). Even if they couldn't run the #113 up the D-L's trackage, they hoped that maybe they could use it to shove freight cars around the Steamtown yard and show how a typical switch engine was used (Once upon a time, when Steamtown had more steam locomotives operating and more crews, they used to do switching demonstrations). And there was a historical connection, since the CNJ had run to Scranton, at least until the ICC forced them to hand off their Pennsylvania operations to the Lehigh Valley. The CNJ freight house is literally across the road from Steamtown. Apparently they spent three years trying to deal with the insane bureaucratic red tape surrounding the National Park Services and a seeming lack of interest on Steamtown's end before throwing in the towel. One of the people involved talked about how they repeatedly sent e-mails to the head of the program who's blind and then would wonder why he didn't respond, despite him telling them that they either needed to handle business over the phone or at least call him and let him know he had an e-mail so that an assistant could read it to him. Also, some of the paperwork, designed for the average National Park Services, was not well-suited towards what they were trying to do. The same person said that one piece of paper asked if "the visiting artifact was an expression of the First Amendment", to which Bob Kimmel replied "It's a steam locomotive. What the hell does that mean?"
CNJ #113 did at one point get to assist with freight switching at Cressona. Back in 2019, R&N had a single SD50 working the yard at Cressona and needed to move a pretty lengthy and heavy cut of tanker carts. Worried about burning out a traction motor on the SD50, they called the #113 crew up in Minersville, who had the engine steamed up in advance of a move down to Schuylkill Haven for a special event (remember, you typically have to warm up a steam locomotive a day before operating it). The #113 came down to Cressona and lent the #5049 a hand moving cars around the yard. I know there has been some people who have wanted to see #113 spend a day operating at Cressona yard for some sort of photo special but it's kind of a difficult situation.
1. You have to make sure the #113 group is willing to run the engine. Will you bring in enough people to waste a boiler day or two? You're also going to need some coal and water to switch around all day. I doubt the local fire department is going to let you have their water for free.
2. Next, you have to make good with R&N, since you're running on their rails and in their yard. If you sell tickets, they're going to have to get some of the action. Not to mention paying the extra employees needed to direct people in the yard, handle switching moves, etc.
3. Uh oh. Someone slipped and fell in the yard the day of the shoot. Who's responsible? I doubt RBMN or the 113 group wants that responsibility. Hope you have liability insurance for all attendees. Add it to the ticket price.
4. Let's say 200 people are coming for the event. Where are you parking 200 cars? On railroad property? I doubt it. That nearby church has plenty of parking spots, for a generous donation.
NickD said:Reading & Northern posted another record this year, moving 1 million tons of anthracite in a year for the first time in it's 40 year existence, further cementing their slogan of "The Road Of Anthracite" and "America's Largest Anthracite Carrier". It's been Andy Muller's goal since December 1990, which is when he purchased from Conrail the ex-Lehigh Valley and Reading rail lines serving Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region. At the time, the lines were in poor shape, tonnage was in decline, and Conrail had basically said those lines had no money and no future. Now, 33 years later, they're moving ever-increasing amount of traffic, and Reading & Northern has grown to 400 miles of track, over 1800 freight cars, more than 65 locomotives and employs over 350 full- and part-time employees.
This situation actually played out a lot in the early 1980s. When the Staggers Act passed in 1980, it allowed railroads to more easily abandon unprofitable lines. Conrail in particular had a lot of duplicate trackage due to how overbuilt the northeast was (they inherited 4 railroads worth of routes from NYC/NJ to Buffalo alone) and began stripping off the most poorly routed lines. Also, at the same time, there were a couple of other Class Is going belly-up as well, notably Milwaukee Road and Rock Island, and while their major routes were snapped up, a lot of branches and secondaries also went up for sale. This was when you saw a bunch of notable short lines/regionals start to pop up; Blue Mountain & Reading became Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern with the acquisition of the Conrail anthracite lines, Wisconsin Central emerged from a bunch of battered Milwaukee Road trackage from Soo Line, Iowa Northern and Iowa Interstate took over a bunch of Rock Island granger lines, New York, Susquehanna & Western and the rest of Delware-Otsego Corp scooped up Conrail lines left and right and became a successful venture.
A lot of these lines had potential but had suffered from years of neglect. ICC rate-setting made it impossible for railroads to operate them profitably, road beds hadn't seen ballast trains or new rail in decades, derailments were a nearly everyday occurrence, customers had fled over poor service and poor relations with the railroads, and in some cases the Class Is actively chased off customers through high-handed bargaining. The smaller, more local, more flexible, more efficient short lines were able to run them profitably and in a lot of cases were able to rebuild the lines and woo back customers. Granted, not all of them were a success; Michigan Northern couldn't make the old PRR Grand Rapids & Indiana line work, in three years the Erie Western and the Chicago & Indiana both learned there was a reason no one wanted the western end of the Erie-Lackawanna and went out of business, and the Indiana Hi-Rail stumbled along with segments of Nickel Plate Railroad trackage for a decade and a half before throwing in the towel.
Unfortunately in recent years, a new trend has started to emerge. Now Class Is are starting to buy up those short line/regional railroads that operate trackage that they once cast off. And in a lot of instances, it's gone poorly. The Class Is rip up the rails for all the branches and spurs and just keep the spine to connect their divisions, or they immediately turn around and run off the customers that the short line had won back over, or they acquire it just to use as leverage over another railroad regarding trackage rights and idle the whole line.
Probably one of the first major instances was in 2001, when Canadian National bought out Wisconsin Central, which was operating ex-Milwaukee Road trackage that it had acquired from Soo Lines (itself taken over by Canadian Pacific in 1990). But in recent years it has become much more common, with Canadian National announcing just this week that they are planning to buy out Iowa Northern next year.
Wisconsin Central was a particularly tragic one. In 1985, after nearly 30 years of steady decline, the Milwaukee Road went out of business after having abandoned it's mainline to the PNW and spending the previous 8 years bankrupt. Soo Line ended up buying what was left on January 1, 1986 and nine days later it created the Lake States Transportation Division under ICC order to divest itself of some of the duplicate trackage it now owned. The Lake States Transportation Division would own and operate the original Soo Line mainline from Forest Park, Illinois to Minneapolis, Minnesota via Withrow as well as from Withrow to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and branch lines from Argonne, Wisconsion to Neenah Wisconsin and former Milwaukee Road branch lines from Green Bay to Milwaukee, which all totaled around 2000 miles. The sale would also help Soo Line reduce some of the debt that they had taken on with the purchase of the old Milwaukee Road.
Ed Burkhardt, who had been an executive at C&NW previously, stepped up to the plate and gathered a group of investors to back him in buying the LSTD from Soo Line. Ominously, Burkhardt recounted in a Classic Trains article that when he went to sign the paperwork with Soo Line on April 3rd, 1987, some of the Soo executives pulled him aside and told him "We're selling this trackage to you because we trust you, but we do not trust the guys backing you and neither should you. If you weren't in charge, we wouldn't have sold this to them." On October 11th, 1987 the first Wisconsin Central train ran from Stevens Point to Fon Du Lac.
The Wisconsin Central quickly cemented itself as the darling of the industry. It was breathing life back into lines that had seen severe neglect and was making a pretty good profit. Customers found the WC very easy to work with and it attracted quite a few customers back, especially in the pulp wood industry. Railfans flocked to the handsome maroon and gold livery and roster featuring classic EMD power like GP30s, SD45s, F45s and even rare SDL39s. In 1992 Railway Age even named the WC the "Regional Railroad Of The Year". The Wisconsin Central also took over the Fox River Valley Railroad and Green Bay & Western Railroad in 1993 and the Algoma Central in 1995, and in 1997 it acquired 207 miles of track from Union Pacific to form a Wisconsin Central connection between Green Bay and Ishpeming. It also hosted excursions, steam locomotives and even Metra service over it's Waukesha Division starting in 1996.
But behind the scenes, there was a problem that had started all the way back in 1991. Since the physical plant for the WC was in need of work, Burkhardt had taken the Wisconsin Central public, trading under the ticker symbol WCTC. This gave the WC the money it needed to shore up a lot of infrastructure, but Burkhardt said it was a move he always regretted. When the announcement had been made, another railroad exec had congratulated him but told him "it could be the best thing in the world, but it could also be the worst thing in the world." Through the '90s, as the WC increased trackage, took on customers and rebuilt their lines, things were great. But the shareholders are only happy as long as you break records year after year, and that's not always sustainable or possible. In March of 1996, the WC had a nasty derailment in Weyauwega, Wisconsin after a train picked a switch and spilled 14 tank cars of LPG and propane, which ignited and caused a bad fire that forced the evacuation of 2500 people for over two weeks. After years of rapid growth, stock prices from then on seemed to stall out, and when Burkhardt started making rumblings of wanting to plow money back into the WC to upgrade more of the physical plant, the shareholders started to push back in favor of cutting expenses. Burkhardt and Thomas F. Power Jr, a former chief financial officer at the Milwaukee Road, started clashing in board rooms and on July 7, 1999, at a special meeting of the WC board of directors, Burkhardt was asked to resign. Ironically that year Railroad Age named Burkhardt "Railroader of the Year" for his leadership at WC. As soon as Burkhardt was out and Power was in charge, the shareholders began making a push to sell the WC to Canadian National and make a quick payout. By January of 2001, a deal was finalized to sell Wisconsin Central to Canadian National.
CN’s acquisition of Wisconsin Central in 2001 was an absolute home run from a network strategy perspective. When paired with the former Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacific the WC formed the U.S. backbone of CN’s own Winnipeg-Chicago main line. But shippers on WC branch lines say the deal was a disaster due to the Class I’s inflexible service and lack of focus on local customers, which drove away business (worth noting that shortly after acquisition, Hunter Harrison took over at CN). Over the next two decades, CN would also dispose of the branch lines it never wanted in the first place, ripping up quite a few of them, although they did sell 328 miles of former WC track in Wisconsin and 142 miles on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Watco. The CN pretty much gutted Wisconsin Central, and a lot of the industries have never come back to shipping by rail, or no longer have the option too.
The Wisconsin Central F45s were really handsome.
Some other recent Class I buyouts of shortlines:
CP jettisoned its trackage east of Montreal in the mid 1990s, including its line to Saint John, New Brunswick. After a succession of shortline operators, the route ultimately became the Central Maine & Quebec, with a main line stretching 262 miles from Montreal to Brownville Junction, Maine. From Brownville Junction to Saint John, the 185-mile former CP line is operated by J.D. Irving short lines New Brunswick Southern & Eastern Maine Railways. In 2020, CP paid $130 million to reacquire the CM&Q portion of its historic shortcut to Saint John and then invested $90 million to raise track speeds to 40 mph from 25mph/ Cutting out the CM&Q middleman, combined with a haulage agreement with the Irving short lines, enabled CP to attract shipping lines to an expanding container port at Saint John.
Back in 1987, Burlington Northern owned two parallel mainlines through Montana, one from Great Northern and one from Northern Pacific. BN determined that the GN route was better and decided to spin off the NP main between Jones Junction, Montana, and Sandpoint, Idaho, entering into a 60 year lease with Montana Rail Link. BNSF always used the 590-mile MRL as a through route, since there is little actual local traffic along the old NP route these day. But because of the way the lease was structured the regional had little incentive to lay new track or hire more train crews to support BNSF volume growth and seasonal traffic surges, while the physical routing of the old GN route made it impossible for BNSF to add capacity. In 2022, BNSF announced that they were buying out the remaining 5 years of the lease. By bringing MRL back into the fold, BNSF will be able to control its own destiny, make better use of its former Great Northern and Northern Pacific main lines across Montana, and take full advantage of capacity improvements made both east and west of the MRL.
CSX's buyout of Pan Am Railways is a weird one, kind of backwards of this type of situation. You could call it a rescue, I suppose. Trackage that Pan Am owned was in shambles due to 4 decades of deferred maintenance and mismanagemn, combined with the railroad’s mainstays, the Maine paper and forest products industry and coal traffic bound for power plants in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, declining to move by Pan Am or drying up entirely. CSX, finally sick of multi-day transits that should take a day by mileage, shelled out $600 million for Pan Am and now is investing $107 million to bring Pan Am’s 10-mph main lines up to 25 mph and 40 mph, and to rebuild its decrepit yard trackage. There’s hope that the physical plant improvements will lead to more reliable service and traffic growth. And single-line service is always desired by railroads.
Down south, CSX and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (ugh, that name) plan to acquire Genesee & Wyoming short line Meridian & Bigbee. The short line’s 168-mile route is the missing link between the CPKC system at Meridian, Mississippi and the CSX network at Burkeville, Alabama, just west of Montgomery, Alabama. The M&B has been a shortline since it was founded in 1926, although the line from Myrtlewood to Selma, Alabama is ex-L&N and the line from Selma to Burkville is ex-Western Railway of Alabama.
And finally, just this week, Canadian National announced they are taking over the Iowa Northern. The IANR was founded in 1984 to operate the former Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific trackage and the current ownership group, headed by second-generation railroader Dan Sabin, took over in 1994, when the Iowa Northern handled 15,000 cars per year on rickety 10-mph track. Today the Iowa Northern handles more than 60,000 cars a year and the railroad has invested millions of dollars to bring the track into a state of good repair. Customers include 20 grain elevators, two ethanol plants, two mineral processing facilities, and shippers and receivers of fertilizer, farm machinery, food, chemicals, and lumber. Iowa Northern is the serving carrier to Manly Terminal, a liquids storage and transloading facility that serves biofuel production industries handling fuels, chemicals, and co-products. CN claims that the short line’s customers will benefit from single-line service to points on its 19,200-mile network, as well as retain their options to connect with Union Pacific, CPKC, and Cedar Rapids & Iowa City. “We are confident that, as part of CN, IANR will be able to continue to provide reliable first and last mile service to our local customers while providing them access to a much broader network and market,” Sabin said in a statement. Others don't feel the same, with CN's track record of ignoring local customers. As one put it "If I was a small shipper on the IANR I would be afraid if I wanted to keep using rail. Dan Sabin and crew looked for ways to expand and gain business. The Forest City to Belmond line is an example. I would expect CN will jettison that line." Some are theorizing that CN just wants the ethanol trains and will dump everything else, or that this is just a defensive move, with CN seeing this as a possible puzzle piece for CPKC to build a shortcut between Minneapolis and Kansas City and trying to deny them that.
NickD, can you tell me anything about 6029 in this video?
Shadeux said:NickD, can you tell me anything about 6029 in this video?
It's a Beyer, Peacock & Co. Garratt-type locomotive, often called a Beyer Garratt or just a Garratt. It has two separate engines at the front and rear, in this case a pair of 4-8-4s making it a 4-8-4+4-8-4, with a water bunker over the front engine and an oil or coal bunker over the rear, with the boiler, firebox and cab slung between them. They were British designed, and mostly saw use in Africa, New Zealand and Australia. The advantages were that they could produce a lot of power from a design that could operate on light rail, they could negotiate very sharp curves for the size and power, firebox depth was pretty unencumbered which allowed them to burn poor quality fuel, they could operate bidirectionally, and they could fit a large powerful locomotive in a restricted loading gauge. The downside was that they added a lot of complications and extra parts to the design, and as you emptied the fuel and water bunkers you reduced the weight on the drive wheels and consequently reduced traction.
Alco got the distribution rights to build Garratts for the American market in the '20s but never actually sold any. The advantages weren't as useful in the US, where loading gauges weren't as tight, and by that point the Mallett design was pretty entrenched already. Supposedly GM&O did consider a 2-8-0+0-8-2 Garratt for a specific branch but never pulled the trigger, and Alco tried marketing a 2-6-6-2+2-6-6-2 "Super Garratt" but no one was interested.
Thanks! I could have looked it up but I really like how you explain things.
In reply to Shadeux :
I definitely think they had some potential in the US, but Anatole Mallet's design had already established it's roots and railroad's are pretty resistant to change. Aside from the aforementioned GM&N/GM&O line, they would have made a lot of sense on the D&RGW narrow gauge network, especially the Rio Grande Southern. Look at photos of those lines and there were frequently two engines per train but they would have to put a few cars between the lead locomotive and a helper to reduce load on the bridges, or they would have to uncouple one engine and run it across the bridge and then the other locomotive and the rest of the train would proceed across. A Garratt would have alleviated the need for some of these procedures. I've also seen photos of a certain Western Maryland line that had very sharp curvature, forcing them to use nothing larger than a 2-8-0, but had steep grades and heavy loads, forcing them to use as many as seven Consolidations on a single train. A 2-8-0+0-8-2 Garrat could have considerably reduced the amount of crews needed. I also read that Garratts were marketed heavily to logging railroads, but again, the Shay, Climax and Heisler designs were all pretty established and no one wanted to take a chance on a new design, and there were concerns of the added expense and complications of the Garratt design. It also didn't help that a lot of logging operations were pretty short-lived and once the intial batch of gear-drive locomotives were built, they just changed hands time and time again as one operation closed down and another opened. Seriously, a lot of Shays were often on their fifth or sixth owner by the time they were retired.
Well, this one is pretty damn depressing. Canadian Pacific #8554, a Fairbanks-Morse/Canadian Locomotive Company H-16-44, and BCRail RCC-3 and RCC-4, FM/CLC CPB-16-4 boosters converted to remote helper control cars, were scrapped outside the abandoned Mazeppa, Alberta gas plant yesterday. That brings the count of surviving H-16-44s down to two, both in Mexico, and the FM C-Liner booster units are now fully extinct. Sad that stuff this rare is being scrapped in this day and age. Owned by the Locomotive & Railway Historical Society of Western Canada, they had been moved to Mazeppa a decade ago by a Class I, cut into a middle of a freight train, so there was possibility that they could have been moved. There had been other equipment stored at Mazeppa that that it was all moved to the nearby Aspen Crossing tourist railway a few years ago. Too bad the three FM units couldn't have been 'piggybacked' onto the same special move. The owners had made it known that they were searching to get rid of them, but there had been no mention of scrapping or a definite deadline to have them gone by, and the scrapping occurred rather out of the blue. Several groups, both in Canada and the US, have said that they had expressed interest in buying them, or made offers to move them to more secure locations to give more time to find new owners, but that the L&RHS never answered their calls or emails or other expression of interest. The H-16-44 is sad, because while rusty, it was a complete locomotive, right down to still having a prime mover and generator on board. The B-Units were gutted when they were converted to Remote Control Cars, but the shells were still pretty nice, and they could have made nice display pieces behind the two (inoperable) C-Liner A-Units that are preserved in Canada.
NickD said:Even more intriguing was the Adirondack Railroad's booth. My father and I went over there and they had a sign that they are looking for volunteer conductors and engineers. That got my father's interest and we struck up conversation with one of their engineers, Larry Girard. According to him, they unexpectedly lost 4 engineers this year alone and he's the youngest at 73 years old. My father went "Well, I retire next year and I'm 65. You're willing to train and qualify someone?" He got a very enthusiastic yes. And now I'm thinking I might hit them up. I'm quite a bit younger and I wouldn't mind training and being an engineer for them a weekend a month. I had just assumed that operating crew was like firemen, everyone wants to drive the truck, no one wants to fight the fire. I assumed that if I volunteered, I'd get stuck being a car host, and I am not car host material. Hell, I'd even be okay with playing brakemen.
Well, I turned in my volunteer application to the Adirondack Railroad a week and a half ago. No call, no e-mail yet. You'd think, with them hurting for volunteers, I would have heard something.
In reply to NickD :
Maybe to close to the holidays for calling? People may assume the calls are looking for donations this time of year.
I do know that the Spam folder is the home of semi important first response emails for me at times, so maybe some kind of automated response in there?
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