It may well have been us as we left the NEC for the connection with the RDG. very near where they shot a lot of the footage for the movie. As I recall we needed to make a number of see-saw moves to get onto the RDG. main enroute to Bound Brook Jct. so it may well be our whistle you're hearing???
Ross Rowland

I alwas liked the scenes from Rocky that show all those Pittsbugh & Shawmut 50 ton offset hoppers at Cambria on the Reading headed to the dumpers at Port Richmond as well as the view from the B Street bridge showing tracks from one side of the cut to the other. A few blocks east of B Street was Coral St. where the Reading had a Diesel Pit and a full 250 ton wreck derrick outfit stationed there. Today it's Conrail's Richmond Industrial Track. The Diesel Pit at Coral St. is a used car lot....and you can count the customers that are left for us to serve on the fingers of one hand.

My favorite scene is Rocky running past the Conrail SW drilling cars on Front Street. The senior Mr. Levin's Engineering office was located in an ex-Reading freight house that had an active yard behind. Around 2 pm the "Belt Line Job" would come down Front Street and drill Philadelphia Cold Storage and the Spring Garden freight house. I remeber 4 or 5 man crews, street running on Delaware Avenue, one wheel derailments, and having a ball running that SW.

Today it's all gone except for the Spring Garden freight house which is now a pretty good strip joint.

EBL

Now THAT's an appropriate adaptive reuse for a railroad structure.

Field trip, anyone? Strictly in the interest of, err, umm, studying the architecture, of course.

;)

JAC

Ross:

Can you recall which whistle you had on the 2101 while you were in Philly? That would help to narrow it down some. It sounded like perhaps a six chime,definitly not a steamboat whistle. thanks in advance!

I believe it was a custom made 6 chime made by the late Bob Swanson of Vancouver, BC. on loan to us by Mr. William F. Howes,Jr.??
Its been 30 years but that's my memory of it.
Ross Rowland

Ross, I doubt that you had Swanson's whistle on 2101 at that time. As I was told the story, Swanson built that custom whistle in early 1977 to Howes' specifications to match the Nathan K5LA air horn which Swanson had designed and Chessie System (for which Howes was a VP) was then having delivered in large quantities atop their EMD GP40-2's and SD40-2's. If Howes has a six-chime replica from Swanson, he didn't mention it to me when I last inquired about the status of the "K5LA steam whistle" (he still had it, last time I spoke with him--and rightfully so, as Howes paid for it himself out of his pocket at the time).

If you indeed had a six-chime at the time, it was 1) most assuredly ex-Reading, and 2) original as opposed to replica. As far as I know, only one party has had the wherewithal to reproduce a Reading six-chime, and as of a few days ago the design/replication work was ongoing but production not actually begun yet. (Incidentally, this group of whistle replica makers has been very careful so far to reproduce the function but not the exact appearance of "collectible" whistles--for example, they have been reversing the steps of a step-top whistle, just to assure that it cannot be passed off as an original.)

You are probably correct Mr.Mitchell. The only thing I can say for sure is that we would not have been using either a "hooter" or "steamboat" type whistle as I never liked the sounds of them on a locomotive. Whatever was on her during her service as AFT1 was a traditional 5 or 6 chime "passenger" whistle. Perhaps someone on here can tell us the exact whistle she carried then??
Ross Rowland