Grassroots Railroad Sports?

An interesting comparison of drive wheel diameter effect was on the PRR's Columbus-Sandusky line in 1956. There was a big coal traffic surge up to Sandusky and the Pennsy was short on operational power. They had tons of stuff in the dead lines but some of it had been parked since the Great Depression and couldn't be easily revived, the I1s 2-10-0s were beat to death, and the Q2s 4-4-6-4 Duplexes had all been kicked out of service with cracked boilers. So the Pennsy moved as many J1 2-10-4s they could spare and then leased a bunch of ATSF 5011-class 2-10-4s as well.

The big difference between the two engines was that the PRR J1s had 70" drivers (and there's a story regarding driver diameter there too) and the ATSF's 5011s had 74" drivers, the largest ever fitted to a 10-coupled engine. The consensus of the PRR crews was that while the J1s were worth a few more cars and were easier to start a train with, but the 5011s rode better at speed and could cover the Columbus-Sandusky run considerably. And of course the firemen preferred the oil-fired 5011s over the coal-fired J1s, but that's besides the point

Another that comes to mind is the Boston & Albany J-2 Hudsons. The B&A was a New York Central subsidiary, and had a much more sawtoothed profile than the rest of the NYC system, along with shorter hauls and a higher stop density with their passenger trains. Because they needed an engine that could handle hills better and accelerate away from stops faster, NYC took their J1 Hudson design, which had 79" drivers, and shortened them down to 75". Among other changes were the square sandbox with a higher capacity (for starting and climbing grades), and the short 4-axle tenders (no need for a high capacity tender with 200 mile runs, and it was less dead weight being towed around by the engine). The B&A was dieselized by the NYC fairly early on, since those diesels handled the grades even better, and the J-2s found themselves bumped into commuter service elsewhere in the NYC system, since those shorter drivers were nice for the frequent starts and stops of commuter service.

An easy way to get a little more speed out of an older engine design was to install thicker tires on the driver center to increase the effective wheel diameter. A visible example is on Frisco #1020, which was a 1910-built Pacific that Frisco dressed up for thee Firefly. They installed 2" thicker drivers to bump the diameter from 69" to 73", and then used a lot of sheetmetal to disguise that this was a 30 year old Pacific with a pencil-diameter boiler, tall shotgun stack, oddly large cab, and clunky Cole trailing truck. Note that the cars behind it are old clerestory roof cars that the Frisco disguised with balloon roofs and lower skirting to hide their age. This was a bucks-down effort, for sure.

Union Pacific's 4014 Big Boy is steaming through town again, on its way to Colorado. I didn't go this time.

In reply to llysgennad :

Yeah, I'll probably never see that one live. It won't come this far east, and even if I wanted to go west to see it, I hear that the crowds and traffic are nightmarish. I think it was Rochelle, IL this year where traffic was backed up over 2 hours to get to see it.

Speaking of engines I won't be seeing live, I certainly wont be seeing Arcade & Attica #18 running this year. I've been hoping to get out there this fall, but the last fall trips with it are this weekend and I'm busy both days. They are running trains for the Christmas season, like any tourist line with a brain in their head, but oddly they are not using the #18 for those trips. Which is kind of backwards considering a lot of operations these days only fire up their steam locomotive at Christmas time (looking at you, New Hope & Ivyland)

In reply to NickD :

This make me realize that in this country and only a very few others, passenger rail has achieved the status of horse ownership, but with less mess.

I was also kind of hoping that CPKC was going to use #2816 on their Holiday Train and maybe bring it down the old D&H to Mechanicville, but while they've announced the Holiday Train schedule and they are coming down the D&H, there's been no mention of the #2816 being used for it. So if they are using the #2816, they're playing it real close to the chest. Just seems kind of wild if they only use the #2816 for the merger ceremony train and then don't ever use it again.

They did use it on the "Holiday At Home" train back during the pandemic, where they moved it around the Calgary yard for a video, which was the first time the #2816 had run, or even been seen, since Hunter Harrison had taken over CP and ended the CP steam program.

In reply to TurnerX19 :

Look at poor Canada, who is the only country in the G8 to have never had high speed rail in any way, shape, or form. They got close with the United Aircraft TurboTrain trainsets, which were capable of 160+mph operation and were certified to run 125mph on CN rails. Then on the maiden voyage, the trainset struck a truck at a grade crossing at 25mph and despite no onboard injuries and the train being able to continue it's run, Canada got all nervous about high speed running and restricted them to 95mph. If they'd been run at 125mph, they would have been as fast flying on the Toronto-Montreal run they were assigned to, able to do the run in about 3 and half hours. Instead the trip took about 4 and a half, which wan't nearly as advantageous, and then the UAC Turbo Trains were plagued with niggling reliability issues, and Canada has never looked into HSR again with any seriousness.

I rode some Turbos between Kingston and Montreal . . .

In reply to ZOO (Forum Supporter) :

Honestly, not bad machines, and don't deserve to be as maligned as they are. But introduced at a very bad time, when railroads were honestly pretty apathetic about, well, everything

On the subject of the poor treatment of passenger service, the poor Amtrak Adirondack's ongoing saga has the D&H fan in me weeping. The NYC-Montreal train was parked during the pandemic, then took 3 years for it to be resumed. Immediately after service resumed in 2023, CN, who owns the 42 miles from Rouses Point to Montreal, slapped the line with a 10mph speed restriction due to a combination of the track being allowed to deteriorate during the pandemic and possibly heat kinks in the rail. That meant that the train took over 4 hours to go from Rouses Point to Montreal, and on June 26, Amtrak suspended service "until further notice" north of Albany over the track conditions and tore into CN over inconsistent application of the heat order policy. CN meanwhile alleged that Amtrak had failed to pay for maintenance to the track, which Amtrak disputed. Service was restored to Saratoga Springs by July 24th, 2023, and service back to Montreal resumed on September 11th, 2023.

There was then another pissing match this spring, when Amtrak first chose to cancel the train entirely, beginning May 19th , again due to CN's rules on track speeds being reduced to 10 mph under current track conditions any time ambient daytime temperatures exceeded 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Amtrak then chose to run the Adirondack only as far as Albany-Rensselaer, essentially making it another Empire Service until June 29th but soon extended the daily round trip to Saratoga Springs. Then the resumption date to and from Montreal was pushed back to September, with it not making a full trip until September 10th. The Adirondack has now missed two summers of full service due to Amtrak and CN being unable to come to an agreement on track work.

Now, on November 10th, as part of a constricted-capacity plan while East River tunnels are taken out of service for overhaul, the Adirondack is being combined with the New York-Toronto Maple Leaf between New York and Albany-Rensselaer, NY. Passengers on both trains will suffer. Northbound, the Adirondack’s current 8:35 a.m. departure from Penn Station will be pushed ahead to 7:15 a.m., when the Maple Leaf leaves. But the Adirondack’s departure from Albany remains at 11:40 a.m., stalling passengers at the station for 110 minutes instead of 27 during the change from a dual-mode locomotive to diesel power. The current schedule already has a lengthy delay built in at the Canada-US border to allow Canada Border Services Agency personnel to examine travel documents. This consumed 78 minutes on September 29th. Four U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents boarded the southbound train two days later at Rouses Point, NY; it departed on-time after 57 minutes. Southbound, Maple Leaf passengers will wait an extra 65 minutes for the Adirondack. The two trains’ lack of connectivity to Northeast Corridor service caused by early departure and late arrival at New York will be exacerbated.

I would honestly love to ride the Adirondack, at least as far as Rouses Point, but the train has been in such a constant state of flux that it seems like you have to catch it on the two weeks a year where it actually runs the full length.  Make you wish for the good old days when D&H ran it.

Also as part of that East River Tunnel reconstruction, Amtrak has announced the revival of the Floridian name, last seen 45 years ago. Amtrak is trying to reduce the number of services out of New York Penn Station due to reduced tunnel capacity, and so, with the near identical Silver Star and Silver Meteor both running out of New York to Miami, Amtrak made the decision to shelve the Silver Star. Instead, it will be merged with the Chicago-Washington DC Capitol Limited, resulting in a "direct" Chicago-Miami train that will use the old 1971-1979 Floridian name. It will head west from Chicago to DC on the Capitol Limited route and then swing south onto the Silver Star route for a shot down the coast to Miami. I use "direct" in quotes since that's a pretty big jog east, unlike the old Floridian (and it's South Wind predecssor) that ran diagonally down through Indiana, Kentucky and Georgia to Miami.

The original Floridian on Monon street-running trackage (now long gone) at Lafayette, Indiana behind the troublesome SDP40Fs.

Here is a weird bit of trivia I ran across (which might be obvious to you, but a bit confusing for others) that you can confirm or clarify Nick:

What is the difference between a train and a locomotive?

From what I understand it a "train" is effectively a service and is on a schedule.  So a locomotive, even if it is attached to multiple cars, if its not on a schedule, it's not a train.  You can even have two groups of engines and cars could be considered the same train because they are running the same schedule.

NickD said:  

 

I loved watching it roll through there in the 90's. It just seemed so bizarre having never been exposed to street running anywhere else. 

aircooled said:

Here is a weird bit of trivia I ran across (which might be obvious to you, but a bit confusing for others) that you can confirm or clarify Nick:

What is the difference between a train and a locomotive?

From what I understand it a "train" is effectively a service and is on a schedule.  So a locomotive, even if it is attached to multiple cars, if its not on a schedule, it's not a train.  You can even have two groups of engines and cars could be considered the same train because they are running the same schedule.

More or less, correct. I would say that that definition needs to be broken down between "train" and "Train" (I'm using capital and lower case for the sake of differentiation). A "train" is just a locomotive with cars. A "Train" is something with an assigned symbol and schedule. You can have a "Train" that's just a locomotive if it's a power-balancing move, or if they're going out to pick up cars from an interchange point or a customer and have nothing to deliver to them. On the flip side, yard jobs are usually a locomotive with a bunch of cars, but you almost never see yard jobs assigned a symbol or train number, although railfans will often call them, say, "North Reading Yard Job" and they might even have to run over to a neighboring yard or even work extremely close customers.

And yes, you could have what were called "Extra sections" of a train running the same timetable slot and schedule. Usually your passenger trains would have a second and sometimes even third section when ridership exceeded capacity. New York Central would also use the term "Advance" where there would be an earlier all-coach version of one of their name trains (Advance New England States, for example), followed by the regular train (New England States) that would be fully trimmed out with Pullmans and sleepers and diners and parlor cars.  In theory, yes, you could have had a thirty or forty car passenger train with enough power on the front but you probably would have had some really unhappy passenger cars in the observation car with whiplash from the resulting slack action. In it's heyday, New York, Ontario & Western would often have as many as 6-8 extra sections of passenger trains headed from Weehawken to the camps and resorts in the Catskills in the summer. There were freight extra sections during traffic surge as well. With marker lights or flags on locomotives, a green flag or lamp would be flown on the first train to indicate to dispatchers and signal operators that it was a regularly scheduled train with extra sections to follow.

B&M #1741 made a test run up to Crawford's Notch and back, flying white extra flags. It was paired with their ex-Guilford GP35 (in MEC paint, although MEC never owned GP35s, and certainly not high hood GP35s) and towing the RDCs and two coaches. Looks like they'll be using it in two weeks for the annual 470 Railroad Club trip.

A pretty interesting announcement was that the East Broad Top Foundation has purchased a building in Mount Union for the ongoing archiving of historical documents. The EBT has an entire vault of documents spanning 150 years, literally before the Civil War, and they need space to store and process those documents. The ultimate storage of the original source material, once cataloged, will go back into fireproof vaults at the railroad house at Rockhill Furnace/Orbisonia but actually cataloging is too cumbersome to deal with in the existing facilities.

Now, where this gets interesting is that the East Broad Top Foundation does not own the line from just Aughwick all the way to Mount Union. That was sold by Nick Kovalchick, the previous owner of the EBT, to one Larry Salone. Salone had hoped to take over as owner/operator of the EBT after the Kovalchicks wanted out, and the idea was that he would lease and operate the railroad and then purchase the line bit by bit. He bought, in three separate transactions, the old PRR/Conrail spur from the Norfolk Southern mainline to the northern end of the EBT yard, and the EBT Mount Union yard from the Conrail spur tie-in to the US 522 crossing, and then the line from Mount Union to Aughwick. He never got any farther, since his East Broad Top Preservation Association (oddly his association never seemed to include anyone other then him) was unable to fund further purchases of portions of the EBT and also ceased operation of the East Broad Top in 2011. Salone and his EBTPA always seemed to be at odds with the Kovalchick family and the Friends of the East Broad Top (the volunteer group that handled restoration, operations and stabilization of buildings and artifacts), with it being rare that either were ever quoted in the same article.

Now, when the East Broad Top foundation purchased the rest of the EBT from the Kovalchick family, it did not include the Aughwick-Mount Union portion because, again, Kovalchicks no longer owned it. The decision to go southwest to Pogue, Saltillo and Robertsdale was made in part because they didn't own the trackage much farther north of the wye at Colgate Grove Picnic Area in Shirleysburg. When people would ask about going north to Mount Union, the answer was always "Nope, we don't own the track, and there's not much up at the Mount Union yard anymore." So, at first glance, the decision to get a building in Mount Union partially just seems like a case of the building being available and right for the task. But then there's this quote.

"We’re showing that we are committed to being in Mount Union. And this is the first step,” Levin said.

Levin and Esposito said they are bound by a confidentiality agreement and can’t yet talk about the specific details of their plans, but Esposito made clear to the Mount Union planners: “We do have every intent of getting trains to Mount Union at some point.”

Hmmm. Maybe Salone is throwing in the towel at whatever he was trying to do up to Mount Union, maybe he sees an opportunity to make a quick buck by selling his portion to the East Broad Top Foundation, or some theorize that maybe they are working out a deal for trackage rights or a lease with Salone and his EBTPA. Granted, I think it won't be anytime in the immediate future that they go to Mount Union. They're already working hard on going to Saltillo and have that all planned out, plus there is a washout below Aughwick and the issue of the Aughwick concrete bridge. While the washout isn't a huge deal, the concrete bridge looks like it's in absolutely disastrous condition. I'm no bridge engineer but I think it's at the point where it would require replacement. Also, there is no longer a place to turn the locomotives. The wye was cut out and while that's not the end of the world, since the wyes are gone at Robertsdale and Saltillo and will be rebuilt, in Mount Union a McDonalds and Dollar General have been built on the land close to where the wye was.

On the other big narrow-gauge network in the US, there was a photo charter up on the Durango & Silverton over the weekend. It was hosted by Trains, and I actually received an email that they had two people cancel and had two tickets available, and they were offering them to anyone who went on the Vermont Railway charter last month. On top of some apprehension about going on anymore Trains charters (the woman that caused all sorts of issues on the last one appeared to be involved with this one), there was also the problem of trying to find travel and reservations in Colorado just two weeks beforehand. I also have seen photos from it, and although it was neat to see one of the K-28s (#473) renumbered to #477 and both of the K-28s were the stars of the trip, it was also already cold and snowy out there.

I am thinking that maybe next year I will finally go west to Durango & Silverton and Cumbres & Toltec. I planned a trip in Fall of '19 for spring of '20 and, well, you can guess what happened there, and then I've just never gotten around to rescheduling.

In reply to NickD :

I really want to get out to both of them too, but even though we've passed through NM & been in CO the past few years, we still were several hours away from either location. 

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

Those two, and Nevada Northern are the big ones that I'd like to visit in the Southwest.

I've done Durango & Silverton a few times, and it's definitely worth the trip. I looked into doing Cumbres & Toltec when I drove out that way this summer, but decided it was too much to shoehorn it into my schedule. The problem with the latter is that both ends are sort of in the middle of nowhere; there's a lot more around Durango, both in terms of hotels and activities.

In reply to 02Pilot :

Yeah, if you're going to Antonito or Chama, it's because you're going to Cumbres & Toltec. Even the lodging accomodations at Antonito are pretty sparse. But if I was going out there, it would be to do both in the same weekend, since it's only about three hours from Antonito to Durango. The plan I had had back in '19 was to fly into Albuquerque, drive to Antonito, ride the C&TS, then that evening drive to Durango, stay at the Strater Hotel and ride the D&S the next day, then drive back to Albuquerque and fly home.

The difference I've heard is that D&S is the more touristy of the two, a little more polished and aimed towards the average folk. C&TS is more of a railroader's railroad, gritty and a bit more for the diehard railfan.