Grassroots Railroad Sports?

The same train, the same day, also at Murphyboro.

An IC 0-6-0 waits as the City of New Orleans blasts by.

IC 4-8-2 #2527 passes by the Du Bois, Illinois depot with a string of empty coal cars, headed to the Orient mine loadout on January 26th, 1959. Note that the depot doesn't use the full town name, settling for Bois. It was not an uncommon occurrence for railroad depots to have some name descrepancy with the actual town name, like how the Reading depot at Kemptons was just "Kempton".

The #2613 winding through Cobden, IL with the Cairo Turn.

NickD said:

IC 4-8-2 #2527 passes by the Du Bois, Illinois depot with a string of empty coal cars, headed to the Orient mine loadout on January 26th, 1959. Note that the depot doesn't use the full town name, settling for Bois. It was not an uncommon occurrence for railroad depots to have some name descrepancy with the actual town name, like how the Reading depot at Kemptons was just "Kempton".

And now the railroad left for a while but the town is on every new map as Kempton, singular. The railroad changed a lot of stuff!

TurnerX19 said:

NickD said:

IC 4-8-2 #2527 passes by the Du Bois, Illinois depot with a string of empty coal cars, headed to the Orient mine loadout on January 26th, 1959. Note that the depot doesn't use the full town name, settling for Bois. It was not an uncommon occurrence for railroad depots to have some name descrepancy with the actual town name, like how the Reading depot at Kemptons was just "Kempton".

And now the railroad left for a while but the town is on every new map as Kempton, singular. The railroad changed a lot of stuff!

Reading had the right idea, Kempton sounds better than Kemptons.

A little late to the party with this question but what camera did you buy?

Lou Manglass

In reply to TheMagicRatchet :

A Sony Z-EV10. Digital, can do both film and video

Western Maryland Scenic may have the #1309 out of service, but they did purchase another diesel, GE B32-8 #561. They already have one B32-8, #558, which they've painted into classic Western Maryland "fireball" livery. The plan is also to repaint it into the Western Maryland colors. They have two GP30s, #501 and #502, in Western Maryland colors, one in "fireball" and one in the red and white "circus" livery and a leaser F40PH in hideous light blue and dark red, but from what they said on Facebook, the one GP30 needs to be taken down for maintenance and the other GP30 and the F40 are out of service, with the railroad needing to assess their condition before a return to operation. I kind of hope the F40 stays gone, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, because I see all sorts of railfans maligning how ugly that damn F40 is

That famed F40 that everyone hated. Even stranger was that those colors weren't from the lease company or a previous owner; WMSR applied that themselves. It also wasn't helped by being one of the weird rebuilds with a front platform, or the yellow handrails, or that the blue got filthy along the tops and chalky along the sides. When acquired from Larry's Truck & Electrical, the manager of WMSR at the time said it would be painted in the Western Maryland red, white and black "circus" livery. Then they applied this paint scheme, which clashed with the other locomotives and passenger equipment, and when people crabbed about it, they got oddly snippy on social media about how people saying that it was going to wear WM colors were "just hearsay", even though John Garner had gone in record with Trains saying it would.

Ever see someone almost killed dancing with a train? I did. Metra, our commuter rail outfit makes a stop I front of us. The hellspawn is excited, as we sre first in line at the gates and have a clear view. The pedestrian gates, to stop people from crossing th he double lines, are also down.

After a short while, the engineers sounds the horns. This train is about to roll.

Then I see them. Two idiot teenagers rushing to make the train. Nope. That thing isn't letting you on. I expected to see two dejected teens on the other side once the rails had cleared

Oh, hell, they're going for it! Duck under the gate. THAT TRAIN IS MOVING! Kid one halls ass, so does kid two-But SHE TRIPS! Bounced, then scrambled of the rails on all fours. Missed her by less than five feet.

When I drove by, I rolled down the window and ask, "Well...was it worth it?"

The irony of that story? The locomotive was carrying an Operation Lifesaver banner on it.

In reply to Appleseed :

Worst I ever saw was on the Reading & Northern's line up to Pittston. I had hiked up the gorge to catch JTPI headed north and was looking south towards the curve and rock cut at Glen Onoko. As I'm standing there, facing south, an Asian girl in her mid-20s walks by, headed south, walking in the gauge. I go "Hey, don't be walking on the tracks. This line is busy!" And it is, there were hourly Lehigh Gorge trips, the JTPI/PIJT, and North Reading Fast Freight. She goes "Oh, really?" Literally as soon as she steps out of the gauge and JTPI comes screaming around the curve at Glen Onoko about 150 feet away.

The #561 actually spent some time on the Everett Railroad a couple years ago, and was kind of the odd man out. Everett Railroad operates two "GP16s", 1600hp GP rebuilds turned out by Seaboard Coast Line, and an ex-LV SW8, so the 3200hp GE was a comparatively big unit. I imagine that it was simply bigger and more powerful than they needed, and being a GE on a roster likely didn't earn it any favors either. 

Passing through Roaring Springs in the winter of '20

Switching some extended height boxcars at McCabe Warehouse in Claysburg in May of 2020. The #561 was sold to the Northern Illinois & Wisconsin Railway in May of 2021. NIWX had two former NS B32-8s, including #558, already. WMSR leased the #558 from NIWX, and then this year purchased the #558 from them and also purchased the #561

The WMSR's other B32-8 in the Western Maryland "fireball" livery that the #561 will eventually wear.

It's really strange that WMSR will now be operating with two B32-8s. GEs in general aren't very popular for tourist lines, GE Dash-8s certainly aren't very popular with tourist lines (in fact, I think WMSR is the only one regularly operating Dash-8s), and B32-8s were sure as hell not popular when they were new. GE built three early protoypes that used the rounded Dash-7 cabs instead of the angular Dash-8s cabs and leased those to BN for a while before taking them back, they built one prototype of their own that they used as a lease unit for a while, and then NS ordered 45 of them. That was it, other than the B32-8WH "Pepsi Cans" over at Amtrak. A pretty severe drop compared to the preceding C30-7 (399 produced) and the even earlier U30B (295) produced. There was also a 6-axle variant, the C32-8, which was even more unpopular, selling just 10 to Conrail.

NickD said:

It would certainly be exciting to be on that path in the middle of the tunnel when a train passed through!

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

NickD said:

It would certainly be exciting to be on that path in the middle of the tunnel when a train passed through!

Yeah, I'm not certain I'd want to be in there when #1309 came through. It's uphill the whole way from Cumberland to Frostburg, so she'd be working steam through there. Coming back to Cumberland, it's down grade at least, so they diesel would just be riding the dynamic brakes down.

Those GE C32-8s, the 6-axle variant of the B32-8, were rather ungainly-looking machines. The short hood seems a bit too high, giving the cab a squinty-eyed look, and then the air filter setup is contained in that large boxy enclosure that's taller than the cab roof, giving it a hunchbacked roof. The C39-8 had similar looks, again with the gun slit-like cab windows and the high air filter, while the C40-8 had the air filter setup the same height as the cab. And, of course, by that point, the wide cab B/C##-8W variants began to take over. The C32-8 was a sales flop, worse so than the B32-8, with Conrail buying the only ones of them, and only 10 of them at that. Conrail repainted them into a gray paint scheme and assigned them, and two old C36-7s, to their "Ballast Express" MoW service in fairly short order. After the Conrail split, NS ended up with six of them and CSX got the other four, only for CSX to return their four to GE when the lease expired and NS bought them from GE to end up with all 10. They eventually retired them and they ended up at RMDI/BDLX in Pittston, in hopes of becoming leaser units. When no one was interested in leasing them, RMDI/BDLX scrapped all of them, and the C32-8 went extinct.

One of the C32-8s in the "Ballast Express" gray livery. Conrail quickly learned that maybe painting a locomotive in light gray wasn't the best idea for visibility at grade crossings in snow or fog or low light. CSX had the same issue with the "stealth" livery that they introduced in the mid-'80s, before ditch lights were mandated.

RMDI/BLDX, there was a really weird one. RMDI stood for Ronald M Delivan Industries, while BDLX was Big Dog Leasing. They were both owned by the same guy, Ronald M Delivan, and RMDI was a locomotive rebuilder, while BDLX was a leasing side of it for some of the locomotives that they rebuilt. He operated out of the old Lehigh Valley roundhouse at Coxton Yard in Pittston, and the place was completely bombed-out; windows broken, holes in the roof big enough to airlift an automobile out through, tracks that you couldn't see through the weeds, partially cut-up locomotives and heaps of parts everywhere. Even the old coaling tower, which hadn't coaled a steam locomotive in 40 years, was still out there. There was tons of odd stuff up there; ex-Conrail SD50s, ex-Reading & Northern GE U-boats, an L&N U25B that had been at TVRM, ex-NS high-nose SD40s, ex-UP C36-7s, a bunch of end-cab switchers, even a GP40X prototype. Reading #2102 was even stored up there for a while, after coming back from having some work done at Steamtown.

There wasn't a regional or short line in the area that didn't do business with either RMDI or BDLX though. Everyone was either buying parts off them or leasing locomotives from them. The weird era of a bunch of GE Dash-7s kicking around the Reading & Northern? Yep, those were all either purchased from RMDI or leased from BDLX. When George Hart's Rail Tours Inc was running trips out of Jim Thorpe and his equipment came up lame, he'd borrow an RMDI unit, which probably contributed to George Hart getting thrown out of Jim Thorpe for his operations being an eyesore The Alco guys from Delaware-Lackawanna were reportedly down there all the time grabbing electrical gear out of the junk older GEs to graft into Alcos. The Wimpey Minerals ex-LV U23Bs all came from RMDI as well. None of the leasers were ever painted, just got BDLX reporting marks slapped on and were sent back out. I heard that their reputation was pretty mixed, a lot of stuff that failed pretty quickly.

One of the more unusual things he would do, since he was often too busy, was sell you an entire junk unit that had the large part you wanted, instead of pulling the part. As one customer recalled, sometimes he would send a hulk with the large part (prime mover or generator) they needed and the unit was close enough to being operational that they would just put the thing in service and get a few years out of it, then scrap it for parts. At one point he had a bunch, about 15, of N&W SD40s that made good parts units. N&W had ordered dual control stands on them, so buying one of those for parts meant you got two SD40 control stand to upgrade a unit with the old cash register-type control stands. And even if you ended put the SD40 in service, you still got an extra control stand. 

Delivan himself was kind of a character too. The place was supposedly not railfan-friendly, but other said that if you called and got permission he was pretty welcoming and would let you poke around. The big thing was if you got permission, he didn't want you posting photos on the internet because he was afraid of people knowing what he had and then coming and taking souveneirs. Of course, all that is irrelevant, since RMDI/BDLX ceased to exist in 2009. Around 2006, he was he selling more and more of the locomotives he had on site for genset rebuild cores, and by 2009, the operation was closed up and a lot of what was left behind was scrapped.