Grassroots Railroad Sports?

The remnants after Kinzua blew down, which pretty much ended the Knox & Kane's existence.

There had been some hope that the Knox & Kane could maybe hang on, but the final nail in the coffin was when the enginehouse at Kane, PA was intentionally burned down by vandals with equipment indoors. That's Huntingdon & Broad Top Mountain #38, the last surviving steam locomotive from the H&BTM, which had run at Rail City USA, the Livonia, Avon & Lakeville, and then finally at the infamous Gettysburg Railroad. The K&K had accquired it in 1989 and begun a restoration that was sadly never finished. It was picked up by the Everett Railroad where it's been undergoing a slow restoration as a rainy day project. Interestingly, it joined ex-Bath & Hammondport 2-6-0 #11 at the Everett, which had also run at Rail City USA. You can also see the tail end of one of those ex-Western Maryland chop-nose GP9s, #39, to the far right, which also came from Gettysburg Railroad. It was picked up  by the Georges Creek Railroad at the K&K auction, and was under restoration to operation and WM paint when the Georges Creek lost it's last customer and folded up.

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The K&K's other steam locomotive, and the only one that they operated, was the #58, which was an SY Mikado built by Tangshan Locomotive & Rolling Stock Works in China in 1989 and imported for the K&K. As bad as this engine looks here, and it was damaged worse than the #38, it was in operation just three years later, rebuilt as "New Haven #3025" by Valley Railroad in Connecticut. Valley Railroad had purchased an SY Mikado earlier, but then immediately sold it to New York, Susquehanna & Western when the NYS&W's SY that they were importing sank in the Indian Ocean during a storm.   

I mentioned Georges Creek Railway and ex-WM GP9 #25 in the post above. Well, the GCK was in the news today. The Georges Creek was a freight shortline operating over  14 miles of ex-WM trackage from a CSX interchange at Westernport, MD down to Carlos, MD that was owned by Gerald Altizer and Pat Stakem. Gerald Altizer ended up acquiring a bunch of ex-Western Maryland power, including two GP9s (#39 and the ex-K&K/Gettysburg #25), a pair of SD40s, an SD40-2, an S-2, an SD35, and an FA-2 rebuilt by Long Island Rail Road into a "power pack" cab car. He also picked up a pair of Alco S-6s and an Alco T-6 that were the primary power. The one GP9, #39, and the FA-2 cab car did occasionally go over and run on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad, and work was undergoing on the second GP9, as well as parts had been acquired to make the FA-2 cab car a complete operational locomotive. The GCK eventually ended up closing down around 2021 though, when it's last customer, the paper plant at Luke, MD, shut down. Since then, a lot of the GCK equipment has been sold off, but there's still a few units collecting rust, parked at Westernport.

Well, today, the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad announced that they have worked out a long-term lease of the Georges Creek Railway, with intent to handle both passenger and freight service. The logic behind this move was twofold. There are apparently now some businesses on the line that want freight service and have approached CSX about servicing them, but it isn't profitbale enough for CSX, so they had spoke to WMSR about taking over the line and handling freight service. The other reason is that, WMSR has wanted to run some different schedules on their Cumberland-Frostburg line, but that the county owns the tracks and has final say over the schedule and hasn't always been the easiest to work with. WMSR would have some more freedom over the Georges Creek line, and so could run passenger trains when they desired.

Since the WMSR will need more power for this new extension, they have purchased the two ex-Western Maryland GP9s from Georges Creek/Gerry Altizer. The #39 is complete, in WM colors, and was operational, although it's been sitting for a while and is looking a bit scruffy. The #25 was never finished being repaired after it's acquisition from the Knox & Kane liquidation. WMSR hopes to begin working on them soon. While I appreciate the heritage, I will say that those homebrewed nose jobs that the WM did on their early Geeps are ugly as sin.

The weird detail about this new lease of the GCK is that the two are not directly physically connected. The WMSR runs west from Cumberland to Frostburg. The GCK runs north from Westernport to Carlos, although I believe the line is out of service north of Moscow due to some washouts. There were no business on the north end of the line when the washouts occurred and the GCK never repaired them, although the line is still there. Now, at one one point, the line actually swung south from Frostburg and continued on to Carlos and then down to Westernport, since they were all part of the Cumberland & Pennsylvania. But in the 1970s, the WM severed the line, abandoning the 3-4 miles between Carlos and Frostburg and yanking up the tracks. In fact, immediately behind where the (much-discussed) turntable is at Frostburg, there is an tunnel through Savage Mountain, under Frostburg, that continued on down to Carlos. That tunnel is still there, and hasn't collapsed or been filled in, but there have been houses built where the right of way was down the line. So, it's not feasible to ever reconnect them, since I'm sure the tunnel would need significant work to ever allow a train to pass through it. There isn't even a bike/walking trail through the tunnel and the end behind the Frostburg turntable (not original to WM operations) is fenced off. For equipment to be moved between the two, it will have to be transferred from the CSX interchange with WMSR at Ridgely to the CSX interchange with GCK at Westernport.

I just noticed on the above map, there's a place of interest labeled as "Asian Bears". I wonder what the hell that is.

I will say, I do worry about the WMSR possibly overextending themselves with this acquisition. The Georges Creek needs quite a bit of work on it's physical infrastructure, and they'll also need to build up sites for handling passengers, although I think the ex-WM depot is still there at Westernport, although I don't know if that's available for use or not. And the line is out of service north of Moscow due to a number of washouts. I know they spent quite heavily on getting the #1309 up and running, and required a lot of fundraising to push that through at the very end, and had to do a bunch of work on their infrastructure to handle that engine. Just looking at the motive power department, their steam locomotive is temporarily out of service with unexpected mechanical issues, their other steam locomotive reportedly needs quite a bit of work to be made operational, one GP30 is out of service in need of heavy maintenance, the other GP30 has reportedly become a parts donor, and the F40 is now also out of service. That leaves them with just the two B32-8s at the moment. And now they are adding the two Georges Creek GP9s into the mix, one of which hasn't run since it was in the Knox & Kane enginehouse fire.

So - partly enabled by this thread - my lovely wife and I booked the following trip:

Milwaukee to Seattle (plane)

Seattle to Vancouver (Amtrak)

Vancouver to Toronto (VIA Rail - The Canadian)

Toronto to Milwaukee (plane)

For the end of February.  Got a sleeper cabin, really looking forward to it.

Those Western Maryland GP9s with the hoods chopped at Hagerstown were some seriously homely machines.

The #25, during one of the times it was on loan to the WMSR, alongside "Western Maryland #734", which was really Lake Superior & Ishpeming #34.

93gsxturbo said:

So - partly enabled by this thread - my lovely wife and I booked the following trip:

Milwaukee to Seattle (plane)

Seattle to Vancouver (Amtrak)

Vancouver to Toronto (VIA Rail - The Canadian)

Toronto to Milwaukee (plane)

For the end of February.  Got a sleeper cabin, really looking forward to it.

That should be fun. Now is definitely the time to ride The Canadian, because they're still running the old '50s Budd cars. They've put out a request for proposals for modern equipment, so the old Budd cars are living on borrowed time. I also believe that VIA also determined that the "buffer cars" are not required, so they aren't tacking an empty car on behind the round-end observation cars.

WM/GCK/WMSR #25 is unique among the Geeps that had their noses chopped at Hagerstown, in that it was the first to be chopped and the only one to use two windshields. All the rest, like the #39, had one large, full-width windshield.

A Western Maryland GP9, still in WM paint but with a Chessie System number, showing the single windshield that WM equipped on all their Hagerstown nose jobs.

WMSR has continued to trickle out information about the new Georges Creek takeover and has announced that they will also be leasing a GE 80-tonner from McHugh Locomotive to begin performing track work and once things are ready, they might handle freight and passenger service until the GP9s are ready for action.

In semi-related news, the old Reading Gettysburg Branch is going to see passenger service again next year. Patriot Rail took over Pioneer Lines, another short line operator, back in 2002 and that came with the Gettysburg & Northern, as the line had become known in recent years. Just four days ago, Patriot Rail announced that they would begin operating passenger excursions over the Gettysburg & Northern, which runs approximately 24 miles from Gettysburg to Mount Holly Springs, passing through the Gettysburg National Military Park. The last time passenger service was provided on this line was from 2004 to 2008, as the Pioneer Lines Scenic Railway. 

Trains will be pulled by the G&N's dark blue painted GP38s and GP9s and use "a variety of 1950s coaches". For the hardcore railfan, I don't know how big a draw this one will be. GP9s and GP38s don't exactly see railfans scurrying to catch them. But, Gettysburg is a pretty big tourist destination and the average rider doesn't care about power, so I could see this being a pretty decent moneymaker for Patriot Rail.

How is this semi-related? Well, in 1976, when Conrail was incorporated, Conrail got to pick and choose what lines they wanted to pick up, and one of those lines not to be picked up by Conrail was the Reading's Gettysburg Branch. The Pennsylvania DOT took ownership of the line and ended up selling it to the Blairsville & Indiana Railroad. The Blairsville & Indiana was owned by Sloan Cornell, who subsequently moved himself, his family, and all his equipment to PA and renamed the Blairsville & Indiana to the Gettysburg Railroad. Included in this equipment was an ex-Western Maryland GP9 that had had it's nose chopped at Hagerstown, the #39. Cornell operated the Gettysburg Railroad between 1976 and 1996 and it was a seriously rough and tumble affair. It folded up in 1996, after they had a crown sheet failure in Canadian Pacific 4-6-2 #1278 that severely injured several crew members and forced the FRA to create the new 1472-day inspection process, and a lot of the equipment, including GP9 #39 and Huntingdon & Broad Top Mountain 2-8-0 #38, went to the Knox & Kane Railroad. After the Knox & Kane's closure in 2008, the #39 went to Georges Creek, and now has been acquired by Western Maryland Scenic Railroad. Yeah, it's all interconnected.

Gettysburg Railroad, the 1976-1996 iteration, remains most predominantly infamous for the CPR #1278 crown sheet failure incident, but was an all-around terrifying place. Those who remember it in operation said it was the closest you could get to experiencing a backwoods, bucks-down shortline from the '40s. Among the various infractions:

• The roadbed had not scene any sort of maintenance of work by the Reading in years and was in pretty horrific shape. The Gettysburg "repaired" it by replacing the ballast, but rather than laying down the proper but more expensive crushed granite, they instead just dumped a bunch of much-cheaper shale. Of course, the shale crushed itself into fine dust as soon as a train traversed over it and the tracks sank back into the mud. Videos of the Gettysburg show locomotives and cars listing drunkenly from one side to another as they crossed over various low spots.
• Rather than convert a gondola or an old passenger car into an open air car, some madman had the great idea to take one of the old autoracks, gut the racks out of it, slap on some side cladding,  and drop a bunch of old bus bench seats in the top and bottom to create a double-decker open air car. The spring rigging and rubber snubbers were all worn out, and it was carrying far less weight than it was designed to, which resulted in a car that was noisier than hell and rode like absolute E36 M3. Those who rode aboard it said they can never forget the experience, especially when it was being towed by CPR 4-6-2 #1278, which had a leaky Elesco feedwater heater and was constantly sneezing water across the top level.
• Often, when riding trains, they would get to the Mount Holly Springs interchange and discover that Conrail had set out freight cars for them. Rather than dispatch another locomotive to come pick up the cars, they would just grab the freight cars, tack them onto the back of the train, and then head back to Gettysburg. Similarly, they would also pick up and set out freight cars and switch businesses along the way.
• The railroad was also know to perform flying switches, also known as a drop switch or a Dutch drop, with passenger cars with passengers aboard. How this works is you have the brakeman set a switch into a passing siding, then accelerate towards the switch. The engineer brakes a little to run in the slack on the coupler, then allows the car to be uncoupled, and opens up the throttle on the locomotive to open up a gap between the car and the locomotive. The locomotive goes into the passing siding, then the brakeman throws the switch for the coasting cars to go onto the other track, and he swings aboard the cars and ties down the handbrakes as soon as they clear the siding. Then the engine backs up, the switch is thrown, and it pulls forward to hook onto the other end. It's really not encourage for a number of reasons; if the brakeman doesn't throw the switch quick enough the cars can run into the stopped locomotive, if the cars are moving to fast the brakeman could fail to get aboard them to tie down the brakes and then the cars just roll on until they run out of momentum, if the cars don't go fast enough they can stop fouling the switch and trap the locomotive on the siding, etc. It's not a procedure done anymore, and certainly never with occupied passenger cars.
• Most of the locomotives were worn-out piles of junk that were falling apart. The railroad made sure that anytime an FRA inspector dropped by, all of the power was out on the road, so the inspector couldn't look it over. But there are accounts of an inspector stopping in and catching all the equipment on site and flagging every single piece of motive power out of order for a litany of safety issues. Ross Rowland recounts being hired to inspect the place after the #1278 crown sheet failure incident and being amazed at the sheer amount of falsified paperwork that the Gettysburg had been filing with the government.
• One of the engineers having his nine year old daughter regularly fire the #1278. It was stoker-equipped, so she wasn't shoveling coal or anything, but there's still a lot of nuance to firing even a stoker-equipped locomotive to avoid damaging the locomotive or getting hurt. Fortunately she was not aboard when the #1278 melted it's crown sheet and blew a cloud of scalding steam into the cab through the firebox door.

That's the infamous converted autorack two cars behind ex-Frisco/Mississippian 2-8-0 #76. It appears to have a roof added in this photo, but many photos show it without the roof. From what I've heard, efforts to restore the #76 back to operation by Steam Railroading Institute were halted because the neglect and abuse that it had suffered at the hands of Gettysburg Railroad was so severe that it was cost-prohibitive to try and repair the running gear and boiler.

Of course, Gettysburg's true moment of infamy was the June 16th, 1995 crown sheet failure on CPR G5 class Pacific #1278. The #1278 had been restored and operated at Steamtown USA in Vermont and had made trips across PA with Ross Rowland's High Iron Co throughout the '60s and '70s, but when Steamtown made the move to the new Scranton location, they needed something with the tractive effort to climb the grades to the Delaware Water Gap. So in 1986, Steamtown traded the #1278 to Gettysburg Railroad for Canadian National S-1-b #3254, which Gettysburg Railroad had acquired in 1982 and only run for a year and a half before finding it to be too big and heavy for their tracks. 

While hauling a regularly-scheduled dinner train, the top, or crown sheet, of the firebox collapsed and dumped water into the firebox, right as one of the two fireman aboard was opening the firebox door to shovel in some coal. The water instantly flashed to steam and blew out through the firebox, burning all three of the crewmembers. The fireman jumped clear of the cab, while engineer Jim Cornell dumped the brakes and then hopped out himself. I've read an account of someone who was on the train that day with his daughter, and the train all of a sudden came to a halt. They then saw the two fireman, covered in soot and with sheets of skin hanging off their arms, come tumbling out of the cab. The conductors/car hosts never said a word about what was going on, one of Gettysburg's diesels showed up, the #1278 was unhooked and dragged off and the diesel took the train the rest of the way like nothing had ever happened.

The FRA launched an investigation, with Valley Railroad's chief mechanical officer, David Conrad, being brought in as an expert. The list of mechanical issues with the #1278 were pretty staggering. The determined cause of the failure was from the crown sheet overheating, due to a lack of a sufficient water level being obtained, and the crown sheet then softened and ripped away from the crown staybolts. At the time of the incident, the lines to the water sight glasses were almost completely blocked with scale from a lack of cleaning or water treatment. The sight glass levels were not reading correctly as a result, only fluctuating about a 1/2" in the sight glass. That should have been a giveaway, since 2-4" fluctuations are normal, but none of the crew had sufficient training to know that was an issue. Even if they had been trained sufficiently or the sight glasses had been working properly, the dynamo was no longer functional, so none of the gauges were lit in the cab, making them impossible to read, especially at night. The water injector was also not functioning properly because it had been improperly repaired. The line from the feedwater heater to the boiler had sprung a leak, so when they were trying to add water to the boiler, a good portion was leaking out. The flow gauge for the injector (what adds water to the boiler) had failed, been replaced, failed again and then the owner had just decided to forgo it entirely and thus had no idea how much water the injector was moving, or if it was working at all. The injector had the incorrect brass disc installed, with too small of an opening, causing it to inefficiently add water to the boiler. A thick layer of scale was found inside the boiler, which causes the water to not cool the firebox properly because the scale acts as an insulator, due to insufficient water treatment facilities and none of the crew knowing how to blow down the boiler. 

Fortunately, due to Canadian Pacific's design of the crown sheet on the G-5s, the crown sheet didn't collapse entirely. If it had, that would have possible resulted in a true boiler-off-the-frame boiler explosion. As bad as the crown sheet failure was, at least it only harmed the crew. A true boiler explosion likely would have killed many passengers. The resulting investigation caused the FRA to completely revamp the entire steam locomotive inspection process, rolling out the modern 1472 process in 2000. Gettysburg Railroad never recovered from the incident, rightfully shutting down in '96, and the #1278 was eventually sold to Age Of Steam Roundhouse, where it remains a display piece. While there are those that complain that the new process makes operating steam too expensive, the reality is, that if you can't afford to run a steam locomotive in accordance with the new rules, you shouldn't be running it anyways. This fortunately remains the only incident of this severity in the US in the preservation era.

Why didn't the FRA inspector catch this before it happened? Well, part of it was that Gettysburg was falsifying paperwork that they were submitting. But part of it was that, at the time, the FRA didn't really take steam locomotives too seriously and as a result, they really didn't have any inspectors who were really trained on them. By 1995, anyone who had been an inspector back when steam locomotives were still in regular everyday usage was long retired. And the total amount of them running wasn't that high. But the issue is that despite their small numbers, steam locomotives represent an outsized risk to the general public due to their being tourist attractions.

There had been some recognition of the issue, because someone had drafted what became the new rules and submitted them to the FRA a year or more prior to the Gettysburg incident, where it sat, forgotten, in someone’s filing cabinet. Immediately after the Gettysburg #1278 incident and the Nevada Northern #93 accident (literally the day after the Gettysburg crown sheet failure, Nevada Northern had a loaded freight car full of ties runaway and hit 2-8-0 #93 head-on while it was pulling an excursion) the FRA's initial kneejerk reaction was actually just to outright ban steam locomotives. Then someone remembered that there had been a proposal submitted a while back, they dug it out and applied it.

It added the 15 year total limit, required flues to be replaced every 1472 days of operation, got rid of flue extensions and generally just made the process a lot more in-depth, and also put the reins back in the FRA's hands after years of what was largely an honor system and turning a blind eye.

If you've got a couple of spare bucks, consider donating here. A group is trying to save Boston & Maine EMD SW1 #1127. This 1952-built SW1 is unique in that it's the only SW1 owned by the B&M that was equipped with M.U. connections, and is known amongst fans of the B&M for operating on the B&M's White Mountain Branch as well as the Hillsboro Branch on local freights. The locomotive is fully operational, has a valid blue card, still has it's original 6-567B engine and friction bearing trucks, and has been well cared for. It was running down on the Luzerne & Susquehanna but was traded in to Progress Rail and Progress Rail is willing to sell it, but only if $50k to purchase the locomotive plus another $15k to move it is raised by Monday, January 22nd. Otherwise it meets the torch. A pair of roller bearings trucks is on hand to be placed under the locomotive to ship it home to New England. If saved, it will be relocated to Danbury Railway Museum.

A Marc Glucksman shot of L&S #600/B&M #1127 from back in 2019. I always liked the SW1s, with the weird little enclosure for the sandbox in front of the grille and the big porch on the back. There were some asking why the guys saving it weren't instead moving it to Conway Scenic, since they have plenty of B&M equipment there, but the answer was that, they had approached Conway and Conway wasn't interested since, with only 600hp on tap, an SW1 is too small to be of any real use to them.

B&M #1127 crossing the unusual Suplhite Railroad Bridge in Franklin, NH on the Franklin & Tilton Branch. This was a frequent haunt of the #1127, due to the weight restriction on this unique upside-down covered bridge.

It is impressive that the #1127/#600 has managed to hold onto the rather SP-esque big angled numberboards after all these years. I honestly would have expected them to be hacked off at some point in their life. B&M applied these to a bunch of their switchers and road switchers, like this pair of RS-3s below.

Another example of those big B&M numberboards, this time on a D&H RS-3. When the Laurentian was revived as Amtrak's Adirondack, the D&H was originally handling operation of it, and talked the state and federal governments into providing money into overhauling the D&H's worn-out Alco PA-1s with 251 engines. To handle the train while the PA-1s were being rebuilt into PA-4us, D&H traded two of their regular RS-3s to the B&M for a pair of steam generator-equipped RS-3s, one of which was the #1508 here.

There's supposed to be a solar eclipse over Old Forge on April 8th this year, and Adirondack Railroad was asking if people would be interested in taking a train up to Old Forge, avoiding traffic on Route 28, which can be nightmarish even on a regular day. They put out a survey, using the words "unobstructed view to watch the once in a lifetime Solar Eclipse". I answered it, and if they actually run it, I would certainly ride it. Or maybe, work it, if they ever answer my volunteer application.

NickD said:

There's supposed to be a solar eclipse over Old Forge on April 8th this year, and Adirondack Railroad was asking if people would be interested in taking a train up to Old Forge, avoiding traffic on Route 28, which can be nightmarish even on a regular day. They put out a survey, using the words "unobstructed view to watch the once in a lifetime Solar Eclipse". I answered it, and if they actually run it, I would certainly ride it. 

And they announced it today; Utica-Thendara-Utica, departing Utica at 11:15 and departing Thendara at 4:15. Bought a Coach class ticket for $39.

The two Reading FP7s stored at Steamtown, #902 and #903, have arrived at their new home on SMS Rail Lines. Having been out of service for several years, SMS needs to perform some work on them before they're ready to go, but once finished the plan is for them to haul passengers on their Woodstown Central Railroad operation out of Swedesboro, NJ. Norfolk Southern moved them there, oddly nose-to-nose, and there were some who were dismayed that NS didn't dispatch the Reading heritage unit for the move.