As promised I was in Great Meadows today and took a couple of photos of the ex-BAR, ex-BR&W combine. The owner has been slowly doing a restoration of the car. Not sure how he plans to finish it.

Tim -

Considering the condition of the car in the photo earlier in this thread, I'd say that the current owner is doing a fantastic restoration job. He could letter it for the BAR or the BR&W or for the Podunk & Eastern Kalhoonies for that matter. The important thing is that the car is being saved for posterity.

Les

The owner of this car also owns the former Lehigh & Hudson River Railway station. When they purchased it from the Estate of the bankrupt L&HR it was in awful shape. I have attached a photo to show what it looks like today.

Before Hells Gate Bridge was completed Great Meadows was a stop on the PRR-NH Federal Express between Washington, DC and Boston. Imagine it being 1911 and getting on a Pullman sleeper in the middle of the night as you journey to Washington or beyond!

Those 3 went to Wycombe. Then, the cabooses went to Jim Thorpe, Pa., and the frame of the milk car to Stewartstown, Pa., all by truck, I think in the Fall of 1978. It was interesting to see an additional car on the Stewartstown RR while its North Central connection was sill washed out from Hurricane Agnes. The sagging milk car body with its wet horse hair insulation was demolished at Wycombe. There was a small fire from a cutting torch which scorched some journal packing and made Mr. Freeman think that NHIR had run the car with a hot box. There was also a box car shaped tool car from an Erie Ave. wreck train that wound up at Grenoble and may still be there. Sam Freeman may have had 5 cars in all at Buckingham, possibly there was an old tank car on a flat car frame? Maybe that car without the tank went to Stewartstown and the frame of the milk car went to Jim Thorpe?

This does look like the body that was stored by the McHugh Bros. shop in Penndel for a few years. There was some confusion when it was sold. Either the buyer wanted one of the other 2 wood cars, or 2 buyers both wanted the "Jim Crow" combine.

Bob Histand, the Wycombe miller and owner of the trestle, rolled it down the ramp just before he demolished the beginning of the trestle to get more head room over the bins underneath. Earlier, he had unloaded boxcars into the warehouse at the far end of the trestle. I had to jam a boxcar with off center doors against the bumper to get any part of the car's doorway to line up with the warehouse doorway! I think that he was receiving packaged peat moss.

As far as I know, the cars at Buckingham were owned by the late George M. Hart, not Sam Freeman. In the early 1960's, I used to go to Buckingham to chip and scrape paint on those cars. The tank car mentioned above was a Reading diesel fuel car, and I believe the baggage car from the Erie Avenue wreck train was at Jim Thorpe, too.

You're correct, I got Sam Freeman and George Hart mixed up. The Buckingham cars were Mr. Hart's. The tool car that was moved to Grenoble was box car style, not baggage car. It had a wooden partition and man door behind at least one of the sliding boxcar doors. Only the milk car frame and trucks left Wycombe. And, the more I think of it, the ex-tank car went to Stewartstown and the remains of the milk car may have gone to Jim Thorpe. I don't remember a baggage car style tool car, maybe it left earlier than my memory of NHIR which starts mostly in 1975, or it moved by some other route.

This was at Wycombe in 2007, I believe most, if not all of it is gone now.

Great pictures & progress at Great Meadows! Here's two I took in 1976, the only thing missing were the C420s!

That could be the triple combine (baggage, mail, and express?) that New Hope Steam Rwy. used as an orange gift shoppe by New Hope freight station in the mid 1980s. They filled in one set of side doors.