Grassroots Railroad Sports?

NickD said:

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

Huh. That's really weird. My first thought was that there were ties in between and they had ballasted over them, but the spacing appears too uniform and I can't even the ends of ties outside the rails in between. Also, the spacing is too uniform. And why does a bridge have ballast anyways? With that distant of spacing, I'm guess it was light trains only and moving very slowly.

This was part of the current NO&M CSX sub. I don't think it ever had traffic that light?

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

NickD said:

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

Huh. That's really weird. My first thought was that there were ties in between and they had ballasted over them, but the spacing appears too uniform and I can't even the ends of ties outside the rails in between. Also, the spacing is too uniform. And why does a bridge have ballast anyways? With that distant of spacing, I'm guess it was light trains only and moving very slowly.

This was part of the current NO&M CSX sub. I don't think it ever had traffic that light?

I'm not sure then. That's really weird. Maybe the L&N Historical Society would have some sort of insight

Someone got photos of R&N #425 outside the shop, with her overhaul still ongoing. Not sure if we'll see her this year or next year, but I can't wait for the Four And A Quarter to return. The #2102 is definitely an impressive machine, but there's just something that I prefer about the #425.

Some railfans also got pics of the FRA geometry train running from Pittston down to Port Clinton on Monday. After that, it was to hop on back on the NS at Reading and head off elsewhere. 

Found this in some photos I took last year in Maine. This is the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railroad, now a tourist ride, though they have a pretty impressive restoration/machine shop facility. I'm not knowledgeable about trains -- I just thought this was cool (and it was a fun outing with family & kids).

U.S. Sugar 4-6-2 #148 did a photo charter in it's original Florida East Coast guise over last weekend. The #148 was originally built for Florida East Coast in 1920, then sold to U.S. Sugar by the FEC in 1952, along with sister 4-6-2s #98, #113 and #152 to haul the sugar cane harvest on U.S. Sugar's own insular railroad until into 1968. It was then sold to Sam Freeman, and it kicked around the northeast for a while, both at Black River & Western and Morristown & Erie, before finally being retired in 1977. Those familiar with the engine back then said that it had a great running gear, but an absolutely frightening boiler (one ultrasound later in it's life found boiler courses as thin as 0.192" in places). It then was donated to Valley Railroad in Essex, CT in 1982 after Sam Freeman's death, where it sat on display before being sold to Bob Carr in Traverse City, Michigan five years later. Carr envisioned a round trip between Traverse City and Interlochen, and even had the rights to re-lay 3 miles of track to reach Interlochen, but work on the #148 didn't begin until 2000, which was when the poor condition of the boiler was discovered. Work stopped shortly after and a couple years later it was sold to the Denver & Rio Grande RR Historical Foundation with hopes of running it over the old D&RGW Creede Branch between South Fork and Creede. The 2008 recession killed that plan and the #148 sat outside, disassembled. 

It wasn't until 2016, that moves began moving towards getting the #148 running again. U.S. Sugar bought the #148 back and moved it to Clewiston, FL and conducted an extensive overhaul, which a new smokebox and front boiler course, extensive work on the drive wheels and crankpins and bearing boxes, as well as a conversion from burning Bunker C fuel oil to used vegetable oil. It took about 4 years to get it running again, and the result was basically a completely new engine. It's been running the U.S. Sugar Sugar Express since then, but always in it's U.S. Sugar appearance. The charter last weekend was the first time it's been put back in original Florida East Coast appearance in decades.

procainestart said:

Found this in some photos I took last year in Maine. This is the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railroad, now a tourist ride, though they have a pretty impressive restoration/machine shop facility. I'm not knowledgeable about trains -- I just thought this was cool (and it was a fun outing with family & kids).

I got up there three years ago, and I'd love to go again now that they have the 3 mile Mountain Extension open. That's a great little operation, and some absolutely wild history behind it all.

In reply to NickD :

That is a sharp-looking little Pacific...

In reply to Recon1342 :

Yeah, although it looks older that it is, in my mind, between the high-mounted headlight and that clunky Cole trailing truck. It came out right at the end of the Cole (Alco) and Hodges (Baldwin) trailing trucks, with the more attractive Commonwealth Delta truck coming out the year after, and the high headlight was largely out of style by then.

Those who ran it back in the day said it was a great running engine, but anyone who looked inside the boiler was pretty scared of it. Sam Freeman had had a bunch of running gear work done to it when he got it, but ran out of money before he could get the boiler work done, and just ran it as was. Some of that nice running gear work was undone during the move to Traverse City though. A local said that when it was on the last leg of the trip, the engineer towing it in had applied the #148's brakes so that the slack action would stop bumping him around in the diesel and the dragging brakes heated the tires up and caused them to loose their press on the wheels and spin, damaging the tires and wheel. 

It was supposed to come up here to New York to run on Frank Menair's 1979-1980 Adirondack Railway. After the Winter Olympics wrapped up, he envisioned running steam-powered trains as a way to keep the public interested. He was friends with Freeman, and the #148 was already oil-fired (NY banned coal-burning locomotives in the Adirondack park between early April and late November at the turn of the century) and the #148 had been operational just two years before. Menair had also purchased DL&W 2-6-0 #565 and had that undergoing a restoration and oil-burning conversion, and had also bought CN 2-8-2 #3254, which was partway through an aborted restoration, and had plans to get that going and also convert it to oil-burning. Then the state shut the railroad down in the summer of '80 over dangerously deteriorated track conditions, Menair didn't have the money to perform track repairs and the whole thing collapsed.  

The #148 doubleheading with George Hart's Canadian Pacific 4-6-0 #972 on a trip over the Lehigh Valley, near Bethlehem. With Conveyance Day in just a few months, the trip was being run as a farewell to the Lehigh Valley Railroad. The #972 was by all accounts a pretty wretched machine. George Hart never had the money to do a full overhaul, so it'd go over to Strasburg and have the bare minimum done to it to keep it running and then go back to Jim Thorpe to run on his Rail Tours Inc. operation. One gentleman who was working for Frank Menair talked about following the #148 and #972 back from Bethlehem by car and they were on a parallel road and were so close they could practically reach out and touch the engines. They were really moving along, albeit coasting, and the #148's running gear was really quiet, but the #972 was quite a different story. The rods were banging so hard it gave you the impression from the noise the engine was going all out and he told the driver to to pull ahead as he didn't want to get his teeth brushed by flying rods. Others who were around the #972 said she was prone to going into a bad high-speed slip on switches and "she'd make you pray the Rosary on crossovers at track speed", and another added that "the only time I have ever been tempted to pull a Sim Webb and dive to the ballast was on #972 when she went into such a gut wrenching slip at speed I swore we were on the ground and headed for the ditch. After looking around the cab once she regained traction, I realized I was not the only who had considered bailing... neat, but scary."

The passenger car paint scheme that U.S. Sugar uses is a little confusing at first, since it almost looks like Union Pacific gray and yellow. But the top and bottom of the cars is actually a light green, and the yellow, green and red is said to be inspired by the original unique livery used on the Illinois Central's City Of Miami, which was handled from Jacksonville to Miami by the Florida East Coast (at least until the ugly 1963 strike on the FEC, after which the Atlantic Coast Line handled the final leg). That paint scheme faded out relatively quick, when the train's popularity prompted IC to add more cars and the decision was made just to use the standard IC "Autumn Sunset" brown and orange to avoid mismatched consists. Definitely an unusual choice, and you have to wonder why they didn't use the more popular FEC "Champion" livery. The only reason I can think of is that since FEC still exists and is still using that livery on their diesels (although it's starting to be replaced by an ugly FerroMex-inspired liver) and U.S. Sugar trying to use it might run afoul of trademarks.

A close-up showing the green, yellow and red paint.

One of the interesting bits about the Illinois Central City of Miami was that it traveled over the Central of Georgia from Birmingham, AL to Albany, GA and so, when the train later used the conventional IC paint scheme, the Central of Georgia acquired two E8s that were built to IC spec and painted in IC colors, just with CofG lettering over the green diamond on the nose. This was done to avoid a power change at Birmingham, as well as keeping the train's appearance in full IC colors. These were also used on the joint Chicago-Jacksonville Seminole as well. The City of Miami would also take on Northern Pacific dome cars during the winter. Passenger traffic to the PNW would be low in the winter, while the Chicago-Miami trains would be at their peak, so ratther than the dome cars just sitting around, they would be painted in IC colors and leased to the IC until spring time, and then painted back to NP colors and handed back to their owner.

A photo of one of those NP dome cars being repainted into IC colors and lettering. Someone on Trainorders said that they knew a guy who ended up with one of those domes and was restoring it, and he said that the dome cars were clearly not stripped between repaints since it had about 10 layers of alternating NP and IC paint.

Arcade & Attica has announced that their 2-8-0, #18, has passed a successful hydrostatic test under the supervision of an FRA inspector, a major step on it's return towards operation. their original hope had been to have it running this spring, which now looks unlikely, but it definitely seems like we'll see it this year.

Is there a specific primer that is used on steam engines prior to final assembly / paint or is it just fluke all steam engines 'under restoration' have a reddy brown primer?

Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) is pleased to announce the schedule dates for its historic Final Spike Anniversary Steam Tour

The Empress 2816, a 4-6-4 Hudson-type steam locomotive built in 1930, will make 11 stops between Calgary and Mexico City:

• Calgary, Alta. | April 24 

• Moose Jaw, Sask. | April 28 

• Minot, N.D. | April 30

• St. Paul, Minn. | May 3 

• Franklin Park, Ill. | May 8

• Davenport, Iowa | May 10 

• Kansas City, Mo. | May 18

• Shreveport, La.| May 24 

• Laredo, Texas | May 28

• Monterrey, Mexico | May 31 

• Mexico City, Mexico | June 4

My daughter just informed me that we are getting a visit on Tuesday that I will have to attend and get some photos of.  

DjGreggieP said:

Is there a specific primer that is used on steam engines prior to final assembly / paint or is it just fluke all steam engines 'under restoration' have a reddy brown primer?

Back in the day, they used red lead primer, which I'm sure had to do with lead-based paint's excellent adhesion and durability (pity about all the downsides). I have books with photos of Frisco and Illinois Central 4-8-2s (the ones rebuilt from 2-10-2s by both lines) rolling out of the shops in red lead. Also, the red cab roofs on a lot of locomotives (Frisco and Southern, particularly) wasn't red paint but just bare red lead primer. I'm not sure if they still use red lead (can you even get that anymore?) but I'm guessing the red oxide primer is chosen because it's used on a lot of other stuff. A lot of maroon boxcars and cabooses were also just bare primer.

In reply to VolvoHeretic :

Very nice. I'm hoping that they'll eventually bring it out to the east end of the system for the Holiday Train. They usually run that down CP's half of the D&H, from Rouses Point to Port Henry, Saratoga Springs and Mechanicville, and they used to run the #2816 on that before Hunter Harrison took over. I really can't imagine CPKC spending all this money overhauling the #2816 and fitting it with PTC just to make a single trip over the line from Calgary to Mexico City and back and then shoving her back in the shop and never using it again.

In reply to NickD :

I'm hoping they'll make a run down the former IC from Chicago to Nola eventually. 

Oh, and I saw the CSX Conrail heritage unit pass by the house today. Didn't have time to get my phone out & snap pic sadly.