The Orrville cars 101, 103 and 104 have arrived at the Florida RR Museum in Parrish, FL and were offloaded from the trucks that brought them on Saturday, Oct 3rd. After repairs, they will go into service on the museum's weekend trains and, with other ACL and SAL cars, will allow the museum to represent Florida passenger trains of the 1950's.
-JH

Jim, is that the same museum that has that former Fort Street Union Station NW5? If so, has there been any plans on getting her back in operation?

2 of these cars were built for New York-to-Florida trains: the #104 is nee-ACL and the #101 is a nee-PRR car built for the Silver Meteor, but the #103 is nee-AT&SF, although the actual original number of #3155 may be incorrect. Keeping with the interpretive/representative focus of the museum, will this car be lettered for a Florida road or will it receive AT&SF lettering instead? Thanks in advance!

Yes, the museum does have the NW5 but there are no plans to rebuild it for operation as it is reported to have a broken crank shaft and it has no traction motors.

As for the Santa Fe coach, I don;t know what is planned for it's lettering yet but I will push for it to be lettered and correctly numbered for Santa Fe.

-JH

Correction: the museum acquired the #103, #104, and #106, but not the #101. As previously stated, the #103 is nee-AT&SF, the #104 is nee-ACL, and the #106 is nee-SAL.

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,3855190

http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?11,3859139

Sad to see these Orrville RR Historical Society cars get wrecked after Train Expo 2014. At least 2 of 3 coaches are sort of going home to Florida. RPCX (PRR #3125) "Paul Revere" had survived the Derailment and was used in This Year (2015) NS 21st Steam Excursion Service beyond NW 611 & NKP 765.

Questions:
- How has the Orrville RR Historical Society been since the Derailment?
- Has leasing RPCX (PRR #3125) "Paul Revere" to NS 21st Steam been helpful to their club?
- What is their current total passenger car roster?

Thank You! Enjoy! ^_^

How is ORHS doing since the wreck? In a couple of words, "tough times". From a recent blog post:

https://akronrrclub.wordpress.com/2015/ ... -new-site/

Their working relationship with the Wheeling essentially ended badly, and as far as I'm concerned, it was entirely the Wheeling's fault.

Three comments

1) "Mainline" railroads aren't in the entertainment business, the Disney people are

2) The Akron rr club article is a bit obsolete, there's better and more interesting info at

http://www.orrvillerailroad.com/news.html

3) What we call the "Orville trips" were great while they lasted.

BOb H

Yeah, I know, railroads don't owe us anything (and I would actually question that truism, since they are to a point a "public utility", and what is the responsibility to the public of a company/industry that gets certain privileges - like eminent domain?). However, when they contractually agree to move someone's rolling stock from point A to point B, they owe them the safest possible move, which did not happen in this case. I'm guessing just about every railroad's equipment handling rules call for deadhead passenger cars to be placed at the rear of a freight train (I know for a fact that is the case with CSX). The Wheeling placed them at the front, then tried to back the entire train around a fairly tight curve, with predictable results. Instead of quickly acknowledging culpability, paying to repair the cars and making the society whole, they forced them into an insurance claim process that resulted in the society losing the cars to the insurer. They lost many of their best operating cars in this mess. Then to add insult to injury, the railroad says, "OMG, things might go wrong handling passenger cars/trains, time to bail". ORHS's 20+ year record of having a safe excursion operating program with the Wheeling didn't have to end this way. Just saying.

Something that occurred to me: Is it possible that the need to have PTC for any line that operates passenger trains have anything to do with all of this, and if so, why not just say it, or does that only apply to regularly scheduled service and not extra moves?

Disclaimer: The views expressed are entirely mine and in no way represent those of any other entity.

Without getting into the blame game with the railroad, what does "losing the cars to the insurer" mean? Were they considered beyond repair and scrapped? Since the goal of the insurance was to protect the cars in precisely this kind of event, what went wrong? Was the coverage inadequate? What can other groups learn from this experience?

Also, based purely on what I read at the links posted, it sounds like the new site could be a good move for them in the long run. Is that a reasonable assumption?

Awhile back I inquired if anyone had information on the passenger cars that were already on the Dabo property when it was acquired by ORHS, including cars of New Haven heritage and several unidentified Pullman heavyweights. Does anyone know the identities of these cars? Thanks in advance!

Admittedly a little awkward in my language. When a vehicle (at least an automobile, I'm guessing the same goes for a railroad car) is involved in an accident, the insurer of the party at-fault - in this case the railroad - determines the cost of repair versus value of the vehicle, and decides whether the vehicle is a "total" loss. That does not mean the vehicle is demolished beyond repair, just beyond the appraised value of the vehicle. The insurance company then offers the owner of the vehicle "fair value" for the damaged vehicle as settlement, and takes title to the vehicle for disposal. In this case the auction of the cars.

I'm not saying the move to Art Davis' old place is necessarily a terrible move for them. They will own the site, which has its good and bad points. However, the way they made money the past 30 plus years was by running day and weekend-long excursions, first on NS and Conrail, then on the Wheeling. It appears they have lost that source for at least the foreseeable future, if not permanently. Maybe this isn't the end of their best years, but thinking back on other organizations ending up in similar circumstances, it doesn't look good. It also looks to the outside observer that the Wheeling was piling on one kick in the teeth after another by cancelling their lease on the yard they were using, right after wrecking their cars. Maybe this move to a new facility was a long-term plan? The reports I've seen don't indicate that was the case. It looks like they were forced to scramble for a solution on short notice, and got lucky with a suitable alternative site, but were still put out doing so.

New member here, thought I'd throw my two cents in to set the record straight, generally speaking:

The derailment included RPCX 101, 102, 103, 104 and 106. The 3125 (privately owned, not owned by ORHS) was not in the consist. The 101 and 102 have been repaired. 101 is in Orrville, 102 is parked at SIPS in Bellevue. There are still small bits of cosmetics to deal with to make them complete. The cost to repair the 103, 104 and 106 exceeded the insured amount but not the market value. All three are repairable. Many scenarios were considered to repair at least one more car but the cars were parked on a private siding in Bellevue and the owner needed use of that siding. With no time to left to repair them in place and considering the cost to truck them back to Orrville, there would be little money left to return any of them to service. Hence they were sold - a very good thing - rather than be scrapped.

The acquisition of DABO, Inc. as an investment had been in the works for quite a while. By coincidence, soon after the deal was finalized in June 2015, the lease was lost on the W&LE track. A customer is now receiving revenue loads of gravel on that track. All ORHS equipment, supplies, parts and materials are in the final stages of moving to the DABO property.

Concerning NH cars at DABO, EMU 4670 was stored there by a private owner and was scrapped earlier this spring. ORHS still owns RPCX 3850, ex NH #315 "Westerly". We haven't completed chasing down the histories of the remaining cars at DABO. If anyone has an interest, I'll post what we find out. Everything there will be offered for sale in hopes to preserve them.

Excursions were the primary source of income but we consider ourselves only temporarily out of the excursion business. We're looking at different scenarios to continue in some fashion.

Hope that info helps settle things.

Eric Schlentner, VP, ORHS

Thank you Eric for commenting on the record. It does clarify and straighten out some misperceptions. The Wheeling is not the total heel they appeared to be (wrecking your equipment, then evicting you from your base of operations for good measure, apparently for no good reason, in addition to ending excursions). However, the wreck was totally their fault, and insurance or not, they should have paid for all repairs to make you whole and able to retain some of your best rolling stock, not just paying the appraised value of historic equipment. I know people in your organization and how hard they have worked over the years to run a first-class, safe, and professional operation with well-maintained equipment, as well as having been a passenger on a few occasions. Hopefully you are right that ORHS will once again run excursions. Good luck.

I forgot to mention about the mainline excursions. I'm sure most of you know that running on the main is quite the luxury. With traffic levels increasing it was getting difficult to have the track time and space to run safely. Typically, nothing could be in the way or moving in your "track space" while you were out running, basically shutting down that section of railroad. We were well aware that the time would come when that luxury would no longer be available to us. The timing of that happening may have made it seem like we were being piled on. It's been a long string of unfortunate occurrences, to say the least.