Grassroots Railroad Sports?

There's an effort underway to save another end-cab switcher. Charlie Monte Verde is trying to raise $30k to save an Alco S-2 from Livonia, Avon & Lakeville. Apparently it is a complete, operating, blue-carded S-2 that is supposedly facing the scrapper's torch. Sad to see that LA&L, so long a haven for Alcos, is really starting to act that way. The locomotive originally belonged to Buffalo Creek Flour and was used to switch their plant at Buffalo, NY as their #46, and was even their bicentennial unit. Flour-by-Rail Legacy Project is trying to preserve the legacy of Buffalo Creek Flour and is hoping to buy this S-2 and restore it to it's original appearance, to go with their Buffalo Creek Flour boxcars that they've preserved. The locomotive and boxcars will be displayed and operated on the New York & Lake Erie. They're trying to raise $30k, and so far fundraising has been sadly slow, unlike the B&M SW1.

Fundraiser Link

Well, I'm headed down to the Road Of Anthracite at the end of March. The same groups that ran the rare-mileage RDC trip up to Pottsville Junction, Minersville, and Tremont is running another trip this year. The plan is to depart from Port Clinton and run up through Tamaqua to East Mahanoy Junction, and then take the old Reading line west through Buck Mountain Tunnel to Mahanoy City, Gilberton, Shenandoah Junction, Girardville, Gordon, Locust Summit and Mt. Carmel. I've ridden that line as far as Girardville back in 2021 during the National Museum of Industrial History Charter, but the rest of that will all be new territory for me. Rare mileage and photo runbys are an instant buy-in for me, and I love riding in those RDCs.

Some excitement out in Oklahoma; the FRA has ordered an emergency shutdown of the Blackwell Northern Gateway Railway. The BNGR is a shortline which operates 35.26 miles of ex-ATSF trackage between Blackwell, OK and Hunnewell, KS.  New ownership and management took over in October 2023. 

The FRA began an investigation when there were two separate two derailments which involved unqualified individuals operating locomotives at the railroad, and then, just prior to the shutdown order there was an incident involving a hi-rail truck on January 28th that nearly collided with a vehicle at an unprotected grade crossing. The FRA has since found a long list of violations at the railroad and per the FRA order "The FRA has found that BNGR is operating with a complete disregard for the safety of the public and has not taken corrective action to resolve safety issues identified by FRA as posing imminent risks of injury or death." Some pretty damning accusations.

• BNGR has, in its short time under current ownership, operated locomotives not safe for use under federal law. Some of them were over two years overdue for inspection.
• BNGR allowed locomotives to be operated by persons not properly qualified as engineers in accordance with FRA regulations, and failed to qualify any engineers or conductors under any qualification program in accordance with FRA regulations
• BNGR has maintained no records of track safety inspections, no records of employees designated and qualified to perform track inspections.
• BNGR has no records that roadway workers have been trained to use roadway maintenance machines or perform safety-essential functions in accordance with FRA regulations
• BNGR has failed to report, at a minimum, the two derailments that FRA has discovered through its investigation. In both derailments, the individual operating the derailed train was not properly qualified as an engineer, including at least one instance when the train’s locomotive was also several years past its required periodic inspection
• There is evidence that persons not 4 employed by the railroad and with no qualification under FRA regulations were allowed to operate locomotives.
• BNGR employees have been directed by BNGR ownership to provide FRA false information, including a false engineer certification card and false hours of service records.
• FRA has obtained substantial evidence that the most senior person on location at the BNGR, a co-owner of the railroad, has personally operated locomotives and trains on the BNGR line without the required training or qualification, leading to derailments, and has provided false information to FRA

On January 17, 2024, the FRA found no program for track inspection in compliance with FRA safety regulations and no inspection records for any month from the time the BNGR came under current ownership (October through December 2023). Following these findings, the BNGR management was informed by the FRA that all track over which BNGR operates would be taken out of service. Under FRA rules, any movements on track that is out of service for repairs must be authorized by a qualified person and be made only to facilitate repairs.

On Sunday, January 28, 2024, witnesses reported that a hi-rail vehicle nearly collided with a car at a highway-rail grade crossing over the BNGR line near Blackwell, Oklahoma. The grade crossing signal system at the highway-rail grade crossing was not activated, no flag protection of the intersection was provided, and the hi-rail vehicle reportedly made no effort to stop and yield the right-of-way to vehicular traffic at the crossing. As the FRA finding put it "this incident demonstrates a cascade of failures to protect life and safety by BNGR".

My guess is, the BNGR's goose is cooked. Someone is likely seeing jail time, and I imagine that owners of the line, Blackwell Industrial Authority and Oklahoma DOT, will probably be soliciting for a new operator. Amazing how badly this Blackwell Northern Gateway Railroad botched things this badly. Like, Gettysburg Railroad levels of bad.

Blackwell Northern Gateway did rise to some popularity with railfans because they were running with some leaser engines, which included this scruffy ex-C&O SD18 on Alco Tri-Mount trucks. C&O traded in their old RSD-5s on the SD18s and got considerable discount by reusing the Alco trucks and GE traction motors. Actually, I'm not sure this SD18 ever actually ran there, since every photo of it that I can find shows it just parked at South Haven, KS.

They also had an ex-Wisconsin Central GP30 that they were using, also from the same leaser. This one definitely ran, but I believe had been parked in more recent years.

In reply to NickD :

GRM group-buy for an entire railroad?

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

From some of the accusations I've heard online, it sounds like the current operators were basically some railfans who thought they'd take a stab at running a railroad without any idea of what is involved with actually running a railroad. Kinda fits some of the FRA findings, like uncertified crews and people who weren't employees being allowed to run equipment. What I do kind of scratch my head at is that this management only took over in October and was running leased equipment, and some of these issues, like lack of locomotive inspections, date back for years. Shouldn't some of the onus fall on the equipment leasers or previous management? I'm not familiar enough with the laws to be certain on some of that.

This has been turning into dirt as long as I can remember. Over 50 years of my life. There must hundreds of class graduation photos taken from that car.

Railroading Rambler posted his video of Tuesday's NYSW UT-1, and I make a brief, non-speaking appearance at 5:13 in the Carhartt jacket and gray hat

In reply to NickD :

That's some crazy infrastructure there; the tracks running down the middle of the street right in front of people's homes. If that where in my town, people would be running into that train right and left. 

In reply to VolvoHeretic :

I don't know that they've had a full-on collision, but I have a coworker that used to live there and he said every once in a while, someone would park too far out from the curb or try a dodgy pass and get a side view mirror snapped off.

Jay Winn, a local railroad photographer, audiographer and videographer of some renown, tells a story about riding Erie-Lackawanna's BU-11, a symbol freight that ran between Utica and Binghamton in the evening known as the "The Bull" and ran over Schuyler Street. He said a friend got a pass from E-L to ride "The Bull" from Utica down to Binghamton (ahh, the old days when a Class I would let you ride on a freight if you knew someone in the office) and asked if Winn wanted to go with him. Winn said, well, they'd get into Binghamton at night, his car would still be up in Utica, so he'd have no way to get home and he had to work the next day. His buddy then explained that E-L was testing a system where the northbound run out of Binghamton and the southbound run out of Utica would depart at the same time, meet at the halfway point, and then swap crews, so that the crew that left Utica would take the northbound train back to Utica, while the crew that left Binghamton would take the southbound train back to Binghamton. The idea was that it let crews sleep in their own beds and the E-L wasn't having to pay to put the crews up for the night. So, Winn decided to ride down to the halfway point and also swap trains and come back to Utica, and then he could drive home and be able to go to work the next day.

So they got on at Utica and headed out of the yard, and the BU-11 was a big train, often 100 or more cars (imagine how long that fouled up the streets at Schuyler Street) and the crew is immediately wide-open on the throttle because not that far out of Utica, trying to build up speed because they have to hit Paris Hill, an eight mile grade with an average of 1.55% but points as high as 1.8%, one of the toughest on the entire DL&W system and a helper district in the steam days. They pass one grade crossing and there's a guy standing there waving his arms and yelling "There's a car stuck on the track at the next crossing" and the engineer looks at Winn and his buddy and goes "You better hold onto something, if they think I'm stopping now, they got another thing coming." As they got within visual range of the next crossing, they saw the car just getting pushed off before the gates started to go down.

The rest of the trip south was uneventful, they got to the halfway point and Winn's friend stayed on with the train headed south, while Winn and the crew out of Utica swapped trains and headed back north. Well, what he didn't realize when he signed onto this little adventure was that the northbound run stopped at all the customers along the way and serviced those customers and switched out cars. So what had been a quick little hour and a half jaunt south suddenly stretched into quite a few hours headed back north. They get back into Utica at like 1:30am and they come creeping down Schuyler Street and there's a truck parked too far out from the curb. So the engineer stops the train, yanks the horn cord and just holds it there for like 10 minutes. Lights are flipping on in houses up and down the street, and finally some drunk comes staggering out of a bar, sheepishly waves at them, and then gets the truck out of the way so they could get back into Utica Yard.

Doug Ellison photo of a nasty Conrail wreck in Utica on April 28th 1992. An eastbound double-stack train, with a B40-8 and a C30-7 on the lead, hit a shopping cart that had intentionally been wedged between the tracks by a couple of delinquent teenagers. The cart had actually been position two miles east, at Milepost 239 in Whitesboro, but dragged along underneath until they reached Control Point 237, which was a crossover switch just past the NYS&W yard. The cart wedged in the switch points and derailed the train, as well as tearing up a lot of the track.

When Conrail rebuilt, they eliminated the switch at milepost 237, which means now to cross over from Track 2 to Track 1 requires running several miles east, passing through a crossover and then running back east. From what some were saying, Conrail was looking at getting rid of the old Utica & Black River/Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburg line from Utica to Remsen to Lyons Falls shortly before then, and Walter Rich was looking at buying it to add to his New York, Susquehanna & Western. When Conrail rebuilt and eliminated that crossover, that pretty much killed any hopes of that, since it would require the more complicated move over Conrail to access the other part of it's trackage. Conrail wasn't exactly friendly to NYS&W, since the NYS&W had stolen away the Sealand container train traffic from Conrail, which would have likely resulted in Conrail being difficult to work with in getting over to that line. Instead, in 1995, Conrail sold that line, and some trackage in Rome, to Genesee Valley Transportation, who formed Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern to operate it. To this day though, elimination of this switch has remained a bit of a hassle, because whenever NYS&W needs to borrow power from MA&N or cars need to be interchanged between the two, they have to tie up the CSX mainline to run west to the switch and back.

Al Gorney photo of the DL&W's old engine facilities at Utica, with the remains of the roundhouse (long gone now) on the left and the turntable behind the pair of Geeps at center. The #2460 is one of the Erie-Lackawanna C425s that were sold to British Columbia Railway by the financing company shortly before the formation of Conrail. While a handful of the C425s came back to Utica in the '90s for the Mohawk, Adirondack & Northern, the #2460 had been wrecked in 1985 and scrapped.

A General Electric B40-8 demonstrator coming off of the Schuyler Street street-running segment while testing on the Susquehanna. The #808 generated a 4-unit order from the Susquehanna, and then when the Susquehanna became the designated operator of the bankrupt D&H, CSX financed another 20 B40-8s for the Susquehanna to help them handle all the added territory that they took over.

Another Al Gorney photo at the DL&W's Utica turntable, with a U25B, two Geeps and an end-cab switcher.

A "rainbow era" Conrail train on Schuyler Street, crossing Noyes Street, with a U23B of obvious ex-Lehigh Valley heritage leading an ex-Erie-Lackawanna U25B that has already received Conrail blue. The nose on the #2781 hasn't faded to a dull reddish-pink, that's red oxide primer, because that's a nose off of a later GE B23-7. The #2781 had been wrecked out to Berea, Ohio in '78 and Conrail had purchased a B23-7 nose from GE and grafted it on. Indicative of Conrail power shortages of the era, it didn't even have time to paint the whole unit, or even the nose, and was just rushed into service as it was.

That's not gone well....

In reply to 02Pilot :

I like the cement truck slowly backing away like "Oh E36 M3, here we go." I'm always amazed at how many people think those gate arms are some sort of ultra-strong material. They're literally designed to snap off fairly easily for that exact reason. If you get trapped by one, gun it and snap it off. I saw where someone was waiting there to get photos of the heritage unit, which was undamaged in the collision, and since CSX had to cut that power off and replace it, the CSX crews were nice enough to cut the lead two units off and move them a little ways away so he could get nice photos of the heritage unit without anything coupled to the front.

A couple years back, NS's Southern heritage unit hit a rock slide and got smashed up pretty bad.

CSX has rolled another heritage unit out of the paint booth, RF&P Heritage Unit #1836. It's quite sharp, although the photos aren't because they're screenshots from the CSX reveal video.

An Al Gorney photo taken at Utica, with Adirondack Railway (the 1979-1981 iteration) RSC-2 #25 "Tampa Tiger" on the left and a westbound Amtrak F40PH on the right. The awning was still intact between the Adirondack's track and Amtrak's, and you can also see the concrete booths under both awnings, which was where you descended down to the tunnels to get between the tracks. My father said he remembers going through those tunnels in the '60s and they were pretty gross; dark, moldy, constant puddles of water on the floors. Also, at far left, you can see Pennsy keystones on the old PRR P70 coaches that were part of their passenger fleet. This shows the advantage that the Adirondack Railroad had when the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics were going on; you could ride an Amtrak train east from Chicago or northwest from New York City, then transfer to a waiting Adirondack train and get whisked up to Lake Placid without having to do any driving. I believe this is the only place where a tourist line and Amtrak share the very same station.

The "Tampa Tiger" at Utica Yard with a line of coaches. This was one of Seaboard Air Line's old RSC-2s, which were an RS-2 with A1A trucks. It had been sold to Florida Power & Light, where it got the orange and blue paint, and it was a real piece of junk, according to anyone involved with it. The big smokestack to the left was for, I believe, the steam generating plant for the station and the "hotel track". You had a track where private cars could be set out and be hooked up to a steam line, as well as coaches that were stored for usage on other trains. Steam heat took a long time to actually heat up cars, so you couldn't just hook on and use them, or the passengers aboard would be freezing. On that topic, I actually spoke to a guy who rode the Adirondack Railway during the 1980 Winter Olympics, and he said that they never knew how many people would be showing up to ride north, so they would have three or four cars ready to go, but if a bunch of people hopped off the Lake Shore Limited, they would grab another car or two out of the yard. And they were not hooked up to the hotel track steam plant, which I don't think was even operational anymore. This guy said he got stuck in one of those coaches, and by the time they got 100+ miles north and were on the last couple miles into Lake Placid, the car was just starting to heat up.

An Adirondack train waiting to head north with borrowed Conrail Geeps. You can see the intact awning on the north side with the towers to access the tunnels, the yard office at the far end appears to be active, and there even seems to be something working the old NYC yard in the far top left. There's also a whole lot of MoW camp cars on the right, and that track is gone entirely as well. Adirondack Railway was making do with two ex-Roberval & Saguenay RS-3s and the "Tampa Tiger" but none of them were in terribly good shape, and the winter was very cold and they had a lot of issues with them freezing up, particularly if they stayed at Lake Placid overnight. As protect power, they would borrow one of the D&H's RS-3s, as well as this pair of Conrail Geeps, and sometimes a Conrail "Dewitt Geep" RS-3M. The D&H RS-3, #4075, was one of the steam generator-equipped ex-B&M RS-3s that they traded for to use on the Adirondack, the Amtrak train, and it was freed up with Amtrak taking over the Adirondack in 1977. The Conrail Geeps lacked steam generators, and so they had to borrow that lead baggage car from Norfolk & Western. That was a baggage car that N&W had converted to operate as a steam generator car for the Chicago commuter responsibilities that they inherited from Wabash.

The leased D&H RS-3, with the leased N&W steam generator car, arriving back in Utica from Lake Placid. My guess is that the single steam generator on an RS-3 couldn't keep up with demand, and so they needed the N&W car as well.

An old Bob Morgan slide of Utica, looking west. Unfortunately a lot of guys shot slides back then, but as a medium, they really aren't that great. A guy I've bumped into on a couple railfan trips, Pete Swanson, was talking about how he knows an elderly gentleman with scads of railroad slides that he wanted Pete to help digitize and he was crabbing to me about how they were of interesting and rare subjects, but once you digitized them and tried to blow them up, the resolution just went to hell. Still, this shot, which would be early 1950s (NYC steam was pretty much done in the east by '53) shows the station on the left, the steam heat plant on the right, and the sheer amount of tracks and platforms Utica had at it's peak. This would be the track that Adirondack Railroad boards from these days.

In reply to NickD :

A lot can be done with slides if they're scanned carefully with modern equipment, depending on the film stock. Kodachrome was remarkably fine-grained and capable of excellent resolution, but the early stuff was only 25ISO, so you had to be quite careful with steadying the camera. I suspect in some cases it's poor scanning, and in some it's just that they weren't all that clear when exposed.