ADMIV noted the PA connection to the RRMofPA acquiring an Erie-built E-60. As I sat thinking about it, I realized one of the gaping holes in preservation is the lack of museum's dedicated to hometown builders.

Now, to be sure, there are some museums and park locos in towns where major builders were located... Schenectady, Dunkirk, Lima, Roanoke, Portland and others have them to varying degrees. Curiously, Baldwin is virtually unremarked in its hometown, though up the road in Philly are a couple of nice relics.

As we discuss interpretations of exhibits, I wonder if anything would be more educational than a display of locomotives from a single builder, exemplifying the developments of 100+ years of technology?

I would venture that the museum in North East, PA, east of Erie, has a shot at becoming "the" GE museum and would be the best bet for such a builder's museum.

What do you think? I am not arguing for site preservation, though that would be the ultimate, but at least some collection meaningful to the geographic production.

There are so many towns whose builders have enough survivors to make such a museum worthy... La Grange, Rochelle, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Altoona...

Rob

Though it's a tragedy the shopes themselves were lost, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History fills the ill for Glver.

eledbetter@rypn.org

The Lake Shore Chapter of the NRHS located in North East, PA has a connection to GE in that some of its current and past members are/were GE employees. The LSRHS and GE have worked together on a number of occasions including a couple of excursions, but most notably GEÂ’s donation of the NYC U25B #2500 to the museum. The locomotive was moved from GEÂ’s scrap line to the museum where it sat in Conrail blue for some time (not sure exactly how long) and was then subsequently moved back to GE into the paint shop where she emerged in full NYC colors. Volunteers from both the museum and the company donated their time to painting the locomotive.

The LSRHS museum doesn’t have a very narrow focus; there’s equipment on the property from far and wide including a GN diner, a CB&Q baggage and other passenger cars from outside of the local scope. CSS&SB “Little Joe” that they recently got from the B&O Railroad Museum was built by GE, so that is an appropriate piece for the collection. Inside the former NYC depot, you will find several GE publications and publicity prints and drawings.

Believe it or not, GE actually does have its own museum! There is a museum right on the property at the Erie plant (see attached link). They donÂ’t have any equipment on display, but inside they do have numerous displays, models, drawings, and pictures documenting the history of the Erie plant and GEÂ’s role in the locomotive industry. Pretty neat place to visit. My understanding of the arrangement is that the company owns the museum but the staff is all volunteers, mostly retired GE employees. The latest that I hear is that the company has done very little to support the museum and there has been some concern as to its future. An aged staff and a poor method of cataloging and maintaining the collection is some of the things that they struggle with.

I would highly encourage anyone passing through Erie to stop and see both the LSRHS museum and the GE museum.


Museum of Erie GE History

> There are so many towns whose builders have
> enough survivors to make such a museum
> worthy... La Grange, Rochelle, Wilkes-Barre,
> Scranton, Altoona...

What about Pittsburgh? I don't know about Pittsburgh Locomotive, but there are plenty of Porters still around. There may already be one or two on display in Pittsburgh, but it would be a good location for the type of display you're talking about.

Mention of Porter brings to mind what I see as another gaping hole in Rail Preservation. How many displays depict the role of industrial narrow gauge railways? 100 years ago railways were used in all kinds of industries. Brickyards, road construction, creosote plants, quarries, and many other industries used them. Several of my aunts and uncles worked for a book publisher, Quinn & Boden, in Rahway, N.J. Not only were they alongside the Pennsy Mainline, in the plant they had pushcarts that moved along cast iron track built into the floor. No switches - they turned corners with neat little turntables! An extensive railway system but no locomotives - has anyone preserved any equipment like this? I was in my early 20's and busy with other things when the plant shut down.

Martyhuck@aol.com

Rob,

You make an interesting point, but I am afraid that you will be hitting up against the fact that a lot of early production of the various builders is already in various museums.

For there is a lumber 2-6-0 from Porter/Bell on display at the Port Huron Museum. Built in 1870s.

later in Company history, lots of 0-4-0s around, but even they are being picked over. One of them was on e-bay recently.

Speaking from a ship preservation background, I know that there is only one sailing ship shipyard preserved in the whole country. No major metal
ship yards at all!

So likely the indoors Erie Museum is the best shot.

You might take a look at the Pullman Foundation web site. I hear that the National Park Service has been helping them with their site near Chicago.

Ted Miles

ted_miles@nps.gov

At least until a couple decades ago, Pittsburgh was a living history museum in so many ways.

The demise of the native steel industry has taken its toll in terms of loss not only of rail but industrial infrastructure. The decline of the industry in the decades before the '80s preserved much of what was older because it wasn't economically replaceable.

Quite a bit of WABCO and Porter ended up as Crown Metal Products. Backshop bought out the Crown air pump line, Pittsburgh Air Brake has the valve stuff, and Castle Ridge Products will still make parts for your Crown engine.

The old garage that stood behind the ancestral bungalow across the street from the Streets Run branch of the B&O recycled old rails from the "Dilly Line" track that served small coal pocket mines on the hillsides in Hays as rebar. Much of the Pittsburgh trolley line to Worshington was built on old mining grade.

Dahntahn Pittsburgh has been working hard on converting itself to a less industrial vital economic center with some degree of success which has been a truly mixed bag for preservation. Old riverside stillmulls have been removed for redevelopment. You can't see the air any more, a samich and a coldarn doesn't taste like slag, but many people find that beneficial.......

I wonder it the time has come for Pittsburgh to take more pride in industrial heritage and make it a brand identity for the city again?

dave

irondave@bellsouth.net

Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, in Washington PA, has a Baldwin-Westinghouse electric locomotive and a B-W diesel, and has recently acquired a Porter diesel. On the B-W's the operative word is Westinghouse.

Electric City in Scranton has a gas-mechanical from nearby Vulcan (in Wilkes-Barre). It was their plant switcher. We are in an old Dickson building which we mention but there are no Dickson artifacts in out collection.

Philadelphia has Baldwin 4-10-2 demonstrator 60000 and a probable 1840's Eastwick & Harrison 4-4-0 in the Franklin Institute collection but there is no museum per se to commemorate Baldwin's, J. G. Brill or even Cramp's shipyard which built many WWI and earlier USN ships.

Eastwick & Harrison? Harrison invented the equalising suspension used on steam locos with multiple driving axles.

Electric City Trolley Museum Association

The Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, just 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, has been active in preserving some of its industrial heritage. It has two Baldwin-Westinghouse locomotives in its collection, a vintage 1920 electric steeplecab (Class B 50 ton from the Monongahela Valley Traction) and a 1930 diesel electric locomotive that was used for many years at ARMCO Steel in Butler, PA. This 70 ton end cab is believed to be the oldest operating diesel locomotive in North America! Recently, the Museum added Porter 45 ton diesel locomotive 1311 that was built in Pittsburgh and later operated in nearby Canonsburg for Pennsylvania Transformer. Of course we have a number of trolley cars including one built at Pressed Steel Car Co. in McKees Rocks. We have also preserved considerable Westinghouse archival material from their E. Pittsburgh electric railway division.

This year is our 50th anniversary and a number of special events are planned!

Pennsylvnania Trolley Museum
sbecker@pa-trolley.org

The Glover site would probably have been the best to steam builder site to preserve, even though it was only a minor builder. Sadly, it was bulldozed, without a whimper from our community. I think the old Plymouth locomotive works in Ohio has recently been vacated, possibly a good place to gather all those little critters for display. Schenectady has ideas for some kind of industrial exhibit, but the remains of the old Alco works are pretty much in use by other firms and the city has tons of financial and drug-related problems to solve first.

http://www.crisny.org/not-for-profit/railroad/alcohist.htm
ryarger@rypn.org

> The Glover site would probably have been the
> best to steam builder site to preserve, even
> though it was only a minor builder. Sadly,
> it was bulldozed, without a whimper from our
> community.

More than whimpers but not as effective as local political forces. The site was essentially so complete (apart from no more on-site casting) that new Glover engines could have been machined and assembled in Marietta as recently as a decade ago.

Cobb County public utilities wanted the site and got it. Everything on it was demolished and removed and a drive-through water bill payment facility was built on one tiny corner of the property.

Some seed money set aside to preserve the remaining stuff was never used until the demolition was well under way, so much was lost. The entire archival history from the reconstruction era through the Eisenhower era was shoved still in file cabinets out the second floor windows of the laboratory building and hauled to the dump.

The most impressive machine tool - a huge planer with milling heads attatched - was cut up rather than disassembled with a wrench because they waited too long into he demolition to discover the crane wouldn't lift it.

I made an emergency trip from Colorado back to Marietta in the midst of an ice storm to triage the patterns and tooling, dies, equipment, and new old stock parts in buildings without remaining roofs - the demoilition was going from the top down.

Yeah, a corner for a drive through could have been sculpted away from the property without seriously compromising the integrity of the remaining site, and a much better job of management of the conservation / preservation could well have been done, but none of that came to pass.

The material saved forms a very nicely done display in Kennesaw, GA now well worth the visiting. It is far too clean to provide the feeling of the old plant, but does interpret quite a bit even if everything is way too shiny and pretty and there is nothing to trip over on the floor. No atmosphere but some nice collections of tools and bits of not nearly rusty enough iron.

dave

irondave@bellsouth.net

Plymouth, Ohio has a historical society that maintains a museum. I believe that they also have one Plymouth Locomotive on display. It would be hard to find a town more closely associated with its ferro-equines.

JR

While they are not locomotives, the Society for the Preservation of Carter Railroad Resources is dedicated to preserving the railroad cars build by a specific builder, the Carter Brothers of Newark California. Our museum is located about 2 miles from their final plant (that site now covered by condos)



http://www.spcrr.org
hees@ix.netcom.com

If anyone has a desire to start the museum, now would be the correct time.

If the town actually starts to clean the area up, two things will happen, first, land prices will go up in proportion to the betterment of the area, and second any building that might be on the edge of being able to be saved will be looked at as an eyesore and be demolished in a short time.

One of the best ways to get a town to clean up an area, is to start something that makes a section look better then the surrounding area, especially if it brings other people in. It works even better if it magnifies how bad an area has become. Once people start to see the condition of an area, especially if they normally avoid the area, they will let friends know, who will pass it on to their friends, and eventually it will get up to the political level.

Once this happens, the political pressure will get too high and the town will really start to act. If Schenectady is like most run down cities, that relied on a super-sized company(s) to keep it alive, they will say that we need to clean this area up, but until it gets thrown into their face by a large group of the residents that action is actually desired, nothing will happen. Similar things, have happened, happen, are happening, in the old mill towns in New England.

Hopefully something like this will get started.

Take care,

Rich

> Schenectady has ideas for some kind of
> industrial exhibit, but the remains of the
> old Alco works are pretty much in use by
> other firms and the city has tons of
> financial and drug-related problems to solve
> first.


Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum
rcizik5519@earthlink.net

I agree dave. I saw some pictures of the exhibit and it way too clean. I will be building an industrial exhibit at our proposed museum interpreting a period machine shop and it will actually look like a machine shop. Rust, grease, dirt and authentic wood block floor!

Was that exhibit design the best that modern museology could come up with?

Rick


rick@todengine.org

Yinz will be glad to know that there is a Porter preserved near 'da Burgh. Pennsylvania Trolley Museum at Worshington, Pa (sic) has 45 ton Porter centercab b/n 7384 in fully restored and operational condition and operates it several times each summer season. PTM also has 1930 Westinghouse semi-boxcab diesel Armco Steel B73, also restored and operational. Another Westinghouse product is 50 ton steeplecab electric Mon West Penn 3000. BTW, have any of yinz seen 7384's builder's plates? The museum shore would like to have one to put back on the loco. We'll even go a Primanti's sammich and a cold arhn in trade.

> What about Pittsburgh? I don't know about
> Pittsburgh Locomotive, but there are plenty
> of Porters still around. There may already
> be one or two on display in Pittsburgh, but
> it would be a good location for the type of
> display you're talking about.

> Mention of Porter brings to mind what I see
> as another gaping hole in Rail Preservation.
> How many displays depict the role of
> industrial narrow gauge railways? 100 years
> ago railways were used in all kinds of
> industries. Brickyards, road construction,
> creosote plants, quarries, and many other
> industries used them. Several of my aunts
> and uncles worked for a book publisher,
> Quinn & Boden, in Rahway, N.J. Not only
> were they alongside the Pennsy Mainline, in
> the plant they had pushcarts that moved
> along cast iron track built into the floor.
> No switches - they turned corners with neat
> little turntables! An extensive railway
> system but no locomotives - has anyone
> preserved any equipment like this? I was in
> my early 20's and busy with other things
> when the plant shut down.


K3PRR@Earthlink.net