I photographed 2102 and 4070 leaving Kent on a Friday morning for Pittsburgh and the infamous Horseshoe Curve trips. What I remember most about that is that they had failed to arrange for a front-end loader to add coal to the tenders for the trip, and improvised a bucket brigade to take coal from the pile up the gangway to the tender, using whoever was around, including fans who had come to watch the departure, to help coal the '02. I have a photo of that somewhere as well.

Mind you, Steam Tours ran a couple of successful solo trips over the Curve the previous October, I was on one of them. I believe the thrown rod incident happened on the first Horseshoe curve double-header, on Saturday. I only heard about it second-hand at the time from a friend who had been on the trip. They got back to Willkinsburg about 3 am. 4070 did not run the Sunday trip, but the MRHF crew found a foundry that could pound the eccentric rod straight again, and it may have run the next weekend, and was able to run under steam back to Cleveland after the trips. I photographed it in Akron when it got back. It sat overnight on the former PRR CA&C line across from the E-L McCoy St. yard before Chessie came to get it to go on a freight back to Cleveland on a Sunday afternoon.

Yes, I was too, and they were nice trips and they ran full. I recall getting off the train as soon as possible and trotting up the street to one of the only fast food joints within walking distance. I placed my order and said "I would suggest you start cooking as much of everything as you possibly can right now! This place is about to get swamped!" The guy looks at me, one other customer, and the empty downtown and rolls his eyes. By the time I got my order, the line was out the door and down the street.


You are probably correct then. I rode one of the successful double header runs. I was guessing it was before the incident, but if they were able to get it repaired and allowed to run again, that would make sense too. It's been far too many years for me to recall for sure.

While a freshman in college, I rode the October 14th 1973 trip (Kittanning to Brockway round trip). We departed Kittanning at 9:30am, stopped for an hour in Brookville to take on water, and made Brockway at 3:00pm. Having to back up (no turning facilities in Brockway), the engine lost traction on the one percent grade out of Brockway. It took four tries and nearly an hour to clear the hill. Another stop for water and coal in Brookville put the train nearly three hours behind schedule. P&S added a two diesel locomotive escort for the trip back to Kittanning. All in all, if you add in the two photo runbys, we ended up riding back in the dark (few cars had light or heat) with about 12 hours aboard the train.

Kevin,

I was on that trip; man in out car thought he was having the "Big" one and they put him on O2 the rest of the way back; we had to stop to have on online coal operator open on a Sunday to replenish the tender with coal that wasn't good locomotive coal and the diesels got us back!

Paul

I had a conversation with fellow RyPN contributor and fellow Akron native Tom Davidson last week, and mentioned this thread. Turns out Tom was involved in Steam Tours early on, I think he might have owned something like one share of stock (mind you I believe the initial price per share of Steam Tours, Inc. was around $100, a significant sum then). He and another guy in their early 20s at the time volunteered to be the night hostlers the night before the Sunday test run, "keeping it hot" overnight, so the crew wouldn't have to start from cold in the morning. He said that between the two of them, they couldn't keep up enough pressure hand bombing it to even run the appliances without running the stoker, let alone get to operating pressure.

Anyway, his memory about the Firestone tank car is that Firestone did give or loan the car to Steam Tours. The major concern about that car was that since it didn't have any internal baffles, if they had it directly piped into the tender and gradually drew down the water level, a partial load might slosh around enough to derail the car at speed. So, they decided to use it to refill the tender when it was nearly empty, which would account for it being spotted along the route of the one excursion described above.