Do we honor our builders?

This year has been one of wonder and dismay as far as remnants of our railroad and industrial history are concerned. One of the rarest surviving products of the American Locomotive Works has been steamed for the first time in 50 years, in the very season the remaining shells of the plant that built her are demolished. While we stand along Schnectady's Erie Blvd facing west photographing the last days of the ALCo buildings, please realize we are standing upon the filled-in, sealed-up and paved-over bed of an even greater transportation landmark, the Erie Canal. Please spin around to face east... the barren fields and deserted strip mall sites were actually the site of the plant infrastructure that built the majority of the steam locomotives. Those buildings have been gone for years. The industrious fan may Google map their way into town to find the sole ALCo locomotive in Schenectady, a Great Northern RS-3 plinthed well out of site of it's crumbling birthplace. We can skip it. Afterall, it will always be there, right? It's preserved.

If you are riding with me, we'll likely head east to Green Island, NY astride the Hudson River adjacent to Troy, the Collar City. Just down river the multiple alignments of the Erie Canal are well marked and not so well marked.  Here, one could excuse the casual buff of focusing on the canal and ignoring the railroad. One could look for the site of the Gilbert Car Company railroad car plant, or seek out the remains of the great Ford operation, but over there on the north end of town is the Renssalear & Saratoga locomotive shop. While rail activity on the site dates back to the 1840's, the giant shop building is from the era right after the Civil War. They built all kinds of stuff there. Now it is home to a junk yard. The entire rear appendage of the building bit the dust about a decade ago. Each year, I wonder if any of it will still be there. Yes, those who know where to look will find a handful of depots and a very nice roundhouse in the immediate vicinity, but nothing like the forlorn cathedral of mechanical erection at Green Island. Go see those other places, though, they have no more or less a guarantee of existence than any other historic site. 

If you have time, let's head south to anthracite country. We should probably take a picture of the inscribed cornerstone of the old Dickson Mfg. Co tool shop in Scranton, PA. There are some other Dickson touchstones around, but not much of where they built mainline steam locomotives and compressed air mine lokies. Dickson, in many ways, was an ultimate example of the American dream... a powerhouse of machinery the rose up literally in the epicenter of the union movement.  It eventually made its founders rich, but lead to squandered inheritence and later abosorption in to ALCo. Yes, the same guys from Schemectady. There are a few Dickson locos left, but none around here.

If we swing down to Wilkes-Barre, we can see what the Breaker Brewing Company boys are cooking up and take a trip over to the Vulcan Mfg. Co. It doesn't look like much now, but this is where some of the best-built industrial locomotives in America were assembled, not to mention some legendary export classes of mainline steam. Fortunately, the archives are in state custody and professionally cared for. As to these old buildings, well...

The Lehigh Valley Railroad ran right behind us. Like many great, early systems they built some of their own locomotives. But unlike most, they had master mechanics who were inventors as well as builders. We are some years too late to see the Delano Shop, where the great Alexander Mitchell designed the first 2-8-0 (and later built many of them), but we can ride down to Weatherly where one of the Beaver Meadow locomotive shops is under restoration to reuse for the community. Back in 1841 or so, Hopkin Thomas was the master mechanic here. He may have invented the tire for cast iron flanged wheels here. There's some debate about that, but the rest of his genius is well known.  For as much as Fell's grates and Wootten's firebox are credited with igniting anthracite's potential as a fuel, raise glass to old Mr. Thomas who figured out how to make it all happen... And invented an injector for that other key ingredient of steam power, water.

We don't have time to head down to Eddystone, but there's not much to show you of Matthias Baldwin's old company. A nice office building, and some others scattered around. Of course, compared to the fate of ALCo this is a virtual theme park.

Yes, when you have time, please visit Altoona and Baltimore, where you can do more than imagine the rail history of their great shops, you can touch some of it and feel it all. But for these other great erecting halls, don't be frugal with the digital images. Buy another hard drive. Those pixels need to be preserved.             

The old construction halls were for the time, old construction tech, really, no wonder they are going down, the Clifton Forge shops, bricks are falling out of the chimney.

The old Pullman Plant near chicago burned totally to the ground from an errant welding piece stuck in one of the huge wooden beams that smoldered till it took it down. Another one gone.

The future roars on burying the past. Ask the Egyptians.