Just and FYI for the hive, Strasburg is busy today and Virtual Railfan has a camera operator following and tracking as they switch ends and service the locos. Been pretty fun to watch so far this morning.
Just and FYI for the hive, Strasburg is busy today and Virtual Railfan has a camera operator following and tracking as they switch ends and service the locos. Been pretty fun to watch so far this morning.
Duke said:In reply to 914Driver :
I've seen similar bridges but that is berking terrifying.
Agreed! At one time it was the world's tallest & longest all wood bridge.
In reply to 914Driver :
So what's the story on the Zephyr observation car with what appears to be a likeness of Mark Twain in place of the drumhead?
OK Nick,
What can you tell me about these two. If you need more info, I can tell you where I took the pics, but I know nothing else.
Maine Central 2-8-0 #501 at Conway Senic Railroad
In reply to aircooled :
I know nothing about those specifically, but I figured rrpicturearchives.net might have some clues. I check this website a lot when I need to obsessive-compulsively look at certain locomotives. I'm fairly confident that the steam engine is the Maine Central #501, which is an Alco 2-8-0, and #4268 is a Boston & Maine F7A, and that both are/were owned by the Conway Scenic Railroad in New Hampshire.
Here #501 sits next to another F7A, #4266.
And here's a photo of #4266 and #4268 together.
At some point, #501 looked like this before it was cosmetically restored.
Yes I spent too much time looking this up. Nick probably has more info anyway. 
Recon1342 said:In reply to 914Driver :
So what's the story on the Zephyr observation car with what appears to be a likeness of Mark Twain in place of the drumhead?
That's the Mark Twain Zephyr. It was one of the nine Zephyr trainsets built by Budd for the CB&Q in '34. It ran from St. Louis to Burlington, Iowa vai Hannibal, Missouri (Twain's hometown). Each of the four cars was named after one of his characters (Injun Joe, Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn). CB&Q retired it in '60 and it has kicked around for the past 6 decades, being on display at a park, then being bought for a Mark Twain-themed amusement park that never opened, then someone planned to use it as a dinner train out of Chicago, then it was stored at Relco's shops for a while.
Currently the Wisconsin Great Northern owns what is left of the Mark Twain Zephyr. They say they are planning to restore it to operation but that is quite a task. The years of the poor storage means that the cars are completely gutted shells. Also, it is missing the Winton 201A 8-cylinder diesel. On one hand, 201A parts are completely non-existent, so they probably wouldn't have been able to use that anyway, but on the other hand it will also take significant re-engineering to make a new powerplant fit (they are looking at using a 6-cylinder 567 out of an SW1). The other issue is that these are kind of difficult to operate on a short line. Because they are a semi-permanently coupled trainset, you can't uncouple the locomotive at one end and run it around to the other, and you can't install a control stand in the observation car without ruining the interior, you need a wye at both ends to turn the whole thing. A group in New Hampshire was looking at restoring the Flying Yankee, and had the same logistical issues they could never solve.
In reply to aircooled :
Maine Central #501 is a W Class Consolidation, built by Alco in 1910. It's the first of the 28 Consols that Maine Central owned. It operated through 1953, being retired by the arrivals of RS-3s and GP7s. #501 was the last steam engine to operated over the Maine Central's Mountain Division in 1953. which was the #501's last run as well. #501 and #519 (at Steamtown) survived scrapping because they were officially property of the European & North American Railroad, which the MEC was leasing. In '55, MEC purchased out the lease option for E&NA and took back ownership of #501 and #519 and both were preserved. #501 was moved to Conway in 1983 and all through the '90s and '00s there were attempts to restore the #501 to operation by the #470 Railroad Group (they oddly don't own MEC Pacific #470, the last MEC steam engine to operate) but they officially ceased in 2007, although no work had been done on it in 6 years at that point.Conway Scenic has since purchased the #501 and plans to restore it to operation again, but has said it will be a 10-12 year project and hasn't officially started the restoration yet.
B&M #4268 is a genuine B&M F7 and was actually one of the original F7 demonstrators. It hung around on the B&M until 1976 before being retired and hung around their Billerica shop until at least 1980. By that point it was pretty much a gutted shell, with no engine or generator or traction motors. It was moved to Conway in 1992 and placed on display. In 2011, the #460 Group announced their intentions to return the #4268 to service and purchased a New Hampshire Northcoast GP9 to part out and take the engine, generator and motors from (Technically meaning #4268 will be an F9 now). It was supposed to be done this year, but 2020 happened.
Maine Central #470, a 1924 Alco-built Pacific, hauled the last steam-powered train on the Maine Central. It hauled a passenger train from Portland, ME to Bangor, ME and back on June 13th, 1954. After that, it deadheaded back to the Waterville shops where it was winterized and then shuffled onto a display track in Waterville.
Footage of #470's last run. It's on Vimeo, so it doesn't embed correctly.
As well as a Trains magazine scan of the issue documenting her last run.
Even in delapidated condition, she was a looker. I like the later Maine Central "speed lettering" that they applied to the cabs and tenders.
Around 2012, Waterville became very concerned over the condition of #470, both from a safety and a cosmetic standpoint. They put out a contract to cosmetically restore it, but most of the groups that wanted to restore it also wanted to move it out of the state. Instead, the New England Steam Co. offered to move it to the Downeast Scenic Railroad and restore it to operation. It was moved to Hancock, Maine in 2016 and the NESCo has been going great guns restoring it, even having a new tender body built for it.
The Downeast Scenic will be a return to home rails, since it is the old Maine Central's Calais Branch from Calais to Bangor.
Maine Central #519 is at Steamtown and is rusting away out in their yard. It'd make a nice engine for their operation if its not too far gone, although it looks like the stack isn't capped. Those are three big things for keeping an engine in decent shape: a cap on the stack, a roof over its head and a fence around it. Steamtown says they want to eventually have 4 running engines, so this one would make a lot of sense. It's reasonably powerful, but not too large and heavy.
While on the subject of Zephyrs and Maine Central, lets no forget the "Flying Yankee" I saw it in Edaville when I was a kid.
LS_BC8 said:While on the subject of Zephyrs and Maine Central, lets no forget the "Flying Yankee" I saw it in Edaville when I was a kid.
It's at the Hobo Railroad in Lincoln, NH now. A group cosmetically restored the exterior and interior a few years ago, and did a pretty good job.
Now it sits off it's trucks, and the tarps they had covering it deteriorated and blew away and the group has no more money to finish the job or cover it back up. The state owns it, but a separate group was trying to fund the restoration. From what I've heard, they blew a ton of money trying to get the original Winton 201A engine operational (a 567 or 645 won't fit without a ton of modifying of the car, and even then it'd be tight) and ran out of money before they got it running. The 201A engine went out of production in the early '40s and all the parts might as well have been buried with King Tut, so if they planned to operate it more than a couple times a year (and the state's plan I believe listed something like 5 trips a DAY!) it would have caused issues. Somebody on RYPN was contracted to come up with an alternative power plan (they were suggesting a Detroit 12V-71 for propulsion with a Detroit 4-71 for HEP) but nothing more was done with the plan after the money ran out. There was also the issue of how the heck do you turn the thing around or operate it in reverse safely. Back in 2017 it was supposed to be moved to Concorde, to a former B&M site, to be a simple static display but the plan fell through
NickD said:In reply to aircooled :
Maine Central #501 is a W Class Consolidation, built by Alco in 1910....
OK thanks. Interesting stuff. It really is a sort of prototypical "steam locomotive" look wise.
I just stumbled on to this vid of an F-unit cab ride along the Carrizo Gorge Railroad. There's some amazing views & I lost count of the number of tunnels they passed through, but some of those drops look like they'd be a one-way trip.
In reply to 914Driver :
So is Southern #722, looking just as rough.
She was torn down for a restoration at Great Smokey Mountain Railroad's shops in Dillsboro back in the early 2000s and still sits like that today.
In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :
Doing some research, that's the old San Diego & Arizona's Desert Line from Tijuana to Plaster City that was built in 1906. The San Diego & Arizona Eastern, as its now known, operates four segments of the SD&A, the Blue Line, the Orange Line, the Desert Line and the Coronado Line. In 1984, they didn't want to fix the collapsed tunnels and bridges to retore operation on the Desert Line but some people felt it was a worthwhile investment. So it was repaired and operated from 1999-2011 it was operated as Carrizo Gorge Railway. During the '08 downturn CZRY embargoed part of the line, and then in 2012 the SD&AE decided to sign a lease with a different operator, so now it's run as Pacific Imperial Railroad.
Boom. When boilers go bad:
Of all the lightweight trainsets, probably the biggest flop was the C&O Train X/NYC Xplorer/NH Dan'l Webster.
While Robert R. Young was in charge of the C&O he famously railed against passenger train operations as they were. He saw the decline in passenger ridership, even cancelling his brainchild luxury train Chessie before it made a single trip. In an interview, he said that trains were too tall, heavy and slow to lure passengers away from the automobile. The irony was that the photo of him from this irony was that the photo for the interview was of him in a Pullman lounge, and that while he particularly called out dome cars for their topheaviness, the 1944 Chessie was the first usage of a dome car.
C&O entered into a development program for a new lightweight train with Pullman. C&O referred to the program as Train X, and displayed a test car based off of ACF's Talgo trainset. This design placed a 2-axle under one end of the car, while the other end was supported by the car ahead of it. It had a 33" lower floor and was about a 2' shorter roofline. The cars would also use an all-aluminum design, which would cut weight and make them easier on track and safer at higher speeds. Oddly, better ride quality was hyped as an inherent benefit of the reduced weight, which ran contrary to common thinking.
C&O even released a couple ads hyping the Train X and even had a contest to name the train, offering a $1000 award to whoever picked the winning name. A name was never settled on and presumably no one was awarded the money.
And then C&O dropped the program. In 1954, Robert Young seized control of the New York Central in a proxy battle. The C&O was largely a freight carrier and was doing quite well, while the NYC was in poor financial shape and had built a lot of it's reputation on its passenger service, so that is why Young cancelled the C&O's Train X and transferred the Pullman program over to the Central. The cars remained essentially unchanged from the earlier development, being lightweight aluminum and using the Talgo concept.
But the cars needed a locomotive to pull them, and towing the futuristic, low-profile, lightweight passenger coaches behind a plain old EMD E7 would not do. So an all-new locomotive had to be designed to use with them that had to be just as revolutionary. For whatever reason, Baldwin was the company that built the new locomotive. I can't imagine that at this late of a date railroads would willingly turn to Baldwin (the company was 2 years away from leaving the industry and had lost most railroad's confidence), so perhaps Baldwin was the only manufacturer willing to embark on the venture. They may have been gambling on this program being the future and turning around their sagging fortunes.
The locomotive that Baldwin came up with was known as the RP210, sometimes called a RP210H. The locomotive was supposed to have a low roofline, but Baldwin's big De La Vergne-based engines were big tall straight-6s and straight-8s. So Baldwin instead decided to use a German engine, a Maybach MD655 turbocharged 1000hp V12. Rather than a generator and traction motors, it also used a Mekydro hydraulic drive to power just the rear truck, making it have a 2-B configuration. There was also an auxiliary 440hp Maybach with a 480V generator to provide head-end power for the passenger cars. With a front end that used similar sharknose styling to other Baldwin locomotives and an 11' high roofline, the RP210 looked like a sportscar compared to the conventional locomotives of the era.
New York Central ordered a 9-car trainset, to be pulled by a single RP210 locomotive. The locomotive and cars were painted in a unique dark blue and yellow paint scheme. It looked suspiciously like a C&O livery, and its rumored that that was chosen because at the time Robert R Young was trying to get the ICC to allow him to merge the C&O with the NYC (the ICC ended up not allowing it to go through.) The Xplorer was to be run between Cincinatti and Columbus in daily service.
Around 1955-1956, the New Haven, floundering under the poor management of Patrick McGinnis, also decided to get in on the RP210/Train X program and placed an order as well, in hopes of it turning around their fortunes (New Haven was also playing with their weird Budd RDC train Roger Williams and a Fairbanks-Morse-powered Talgo called the John Quincy Adams at the same time). But New Haven wanted to run their train, named the Dan'l Webster, from Boston to New York City, and to enter Grand Central Terminal it would need to be able to operate on electrical power. So, Baldwin delivered two RP210s to New Haven (which planned to run a locomotive at each end in a push-pull configuration), which had a different front end that was a bit like a mix between an Alco FA and a F-M C-Liner, and then New Haven sent them to their Van Nest electric shop. New Haven installed two 150hp electric traction motors in the normally unpowered trucks and then needed to put a 3rd-rail shoe for operation on GCT's 660V third-rail electric system.
The New Haven crew originally installed a single 3rd-rail shoe mounted in the center of the truck. But experience had shown that two shoes as widely spaced as possible were really required. That way, if the train made an unexpected stop in a spot with a break in the third-rail, like a switch turnout, the other shoe would hopefully reach the next energized rail segment. There was concern that if one of the RP210s was in a spot where it couldn't contact the rail, the other one wouldn't have enough power to push the whole train (they only had 300hp each in electric mode, after all). There was also the nicety of redundancy in the event that one shoe failed, you would have a backup to draw power off of. Since the truck design didn't have room for two shoes, they instead designed a bracket that allowed them to mount an experimental shoe the length of the truck.
There was also another electric issue to overcome. Between 47th and 59th Street, the complexity of the track structure did not allow for a length of unbroken 3rd rail. So an energized rail had been placed in the roof of the tunnel and NYC and NH electrics had a small telescoping pole with a shoe mounted in the roof to allow them to connect to an electric supply. But because the RP210 was so much shorter than a conventional locomotive, that pole, when extended, still missed the overhead rail by a foot or so. New Haven ended up using diamond-shaped pantographs off of MBTA's Blue Line Revere Extension subway cars.
The work was completed just prior to the New Haven's inaugural run of the Dan'l Webster and the Van Nest crew urged the New Haven to postpone the run and let them do some testing with the experimental 3rd-rail shoe to make sure that it was going to work. But New Haven wanted to launch their train ahead of the New York Central and had already scheduled the event and didn't want to postpone. So on January 7th, 1956, the Dan'l Webster, with the New Haven president and 225 newsmen, politicians and railroad managers, left Boston and headed for GCT. At the crossover from New Haven's track #1 to New York Central's track #2, opposite JO tower at Woodlawn Junction in the North Bronx, the 3rd-rail shoe on the aft unit misaligned with the rail and caused a large arc that set fire to grease packing in the truck. The train made an emergency stop at Woodlawn station and the fire department extinguished the fire, but the rear locomotive and car had to be removed from the train. The rest of the train continued successfully into GCT, but while the fire-damaged equipment was being towed back to Van Nest, the coach derailed near Pelham and snarled up traffic, causing a 4 hour delay for commuters. Not an auspicious start to the new train. Times Magazine even wrote an article on the fiasco called "The Devil & Dan'l Webster." The equipment was repaired, the 3rd rail shoe was redesigned and the train entered regular service on March 25th.
The New York Central's Xplorer began a system-wide promotional tour on June 3, 1956, which included exhibition at New York's Grand Central Terminal. The train entered revenue service on July 15, 1956, as the Ohio Explorer, between Cleveland and Cincinnati. While it didn't have the issues of the Dan'l Webster, it became immediately apparent that it had the same issue as every other lightweight train: the ride quality was abysmal. Why railroads were convinced that better ride quality was a direct result of lighter car weight is unknown, but the real world proved it wrong.
In addition to the poor ride quality, the Baldwin RP210 locomotives were an unmitigated disaster. The Mekydro hydraulic drive was prone to overheating and leaving the train stranded. This was especially prevalent on the Xplorer, as NYC was using one locomotive to tow the 9 cars, instead of the 2 locomotives per 9 cars that New Haven was operating. The Maybach diesel engines were also very troublesome, and road mechanics were unfamiliar with the foreign powerplant. Not helping matters was the fact that all the service manuals provided by Maybach via Baldwin were written entirely in German. And there are reports of mechanics having to go purchase metric hardware from VW dealerships, since metric hardware wasn't particularly common in 1956 America. The NYC's Collinwood shop crews came to refer to the train as the Xploder. New Haven also struggled with the electric system and after numerous redesigns and the arrival of EMD FL9s resulted in it being shifted to the non-electrified Springfield route.
In August 17, 1957, the NYC's RP210H and cars were demoted to commutation runs between Chicago, Illinois, and Elkhart, Indiana, as trains #741 and #210. In late 1958, it was finally withdrawn from operation. The New Haven's Dan'l Webster lasted less than 15 months in service, from March 25, 1957, until June 5, 1958. The whole program looked bad for everyone. Pullman's cars rode terrible. Baldwin's locomotives were hideously unreliable and would be the last locomotives ever produced by the company. New York Central's stocks tanked only 6 months after the retirement of the trainset and Robert R Young would commit suicide over the bleak future of the company. And New Haven was not far from it's third bankruptcy.
What is really strange is that the trainsets actually got a second lease on life. In June of 1963, a gentleman by the name of James F Jones, who owned the Pickens Railroad in South Carolina and operated an excursion service called Jones Tours, purchased the old Xplorer set, which had been dormant for 5 years, dragged it down to South Carolina and got it operational with plans to run excursions over Southern Railway and Seaboard Air Line to Charlotte and Atlanta, with farther trips to Alabama and Florida on occasion. In '64, he also purchased the Dan'l Webster set from New Haven, which had stored theirs at Cedar Hill, and shipped it south as well. Jones reportedly purchased it for scrap price, while New Haven had spent $1.3 million on it when new.
Both sets were repainted in the Xplorer style livery but in dark blue and silver and did actually run some excursions. Due to the reputation of the units though, Southern and Seaboard both insisted on the trainsets being towed behind a GP9 while on their rails, which had to be quite a sight. The Maybach drivetrain was still operational and used for running them on Pickens Railroad's rails. In 1967 they were both parked on a siding in Traveler's Rest, SC, visible from the road, and remained there until they were cut up for scrap in 1970.
On the subject of trainsets, any idea what this is? I spotted it on Google Maps looking for something else. It's in New Haven, CT, which may be a clue.
In reply to 02Pilot :
My first thought was an old Amtrak Acela. But the first unit on each end looks like it's a combination locomotive/coach, judging by the windows. The Acelas power cars were strictly a locomotive, and had no windows in the side. Also, that looks like a New Haven FL9 in the foreground. Where in New Haven is it, exactly? I was looking over by the Metro North shops and Kawasaki Railcar and didn't see it there.
In reply to NickD :
It's northeast of town, at the yard in Cedar Hill, between East Rock Park and the Quinnipiac River.
Edit: With a little further investigation, I think the yard may belong to the Providence & Worcester.
Second edit: Two features stand out. One is the raised roof sections just behind the cabs, which I assume house pantographs. Second is the circular logo behind the cabs, which is likely the CT state seal, which appears on many of their units.
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