The first trip of the fest left close to on time with two ALCo Centuries and the Mikado. The tran looked quite full.

Rob

wow, what a day. Suffice it to say that 5 operating ALCo's, the Pacific, the Mikado, three visiting E units, the City of Lima, open backshop ( free reign, no guides), plus the trolley musuem and layouts and sale tables over there all added up to a great day. On yeah, a great day at regular admission prices!

Tomorrow promises more!

Rob

Well, today was dampened a bit from the derailment last night. Seems that after the Gap train got back, during a swtiching move a coach picked a switch and went this away and that. It trapped #3254 on the far side of Bridge 60 and blocked all access out of the Steamtown yard. So the Moscow trip was cancelled and refunded, and the side-by-side run bys were cancelled. The rest of the events went on without skipping a beat.

We replaced the Moscow ride with the excellent trolley ride.

I will post pics and a full recap on my blog later.

All in all, we had a GREAT time with the events. We did not chase nor ride the Gap train as there was plenty to do in town.

Rob

Was quite disappointed to see this scene this morning:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=210192

All in all, I found the event as a whole to be very enjoyable. It had been a few years since I was last through the museum so revisited all of that. Tim Stuy's presentation on the dining car operations was excellent -- even my wife enjoyed it! The NKP sleeper and the work that the EL Dining Car group is doing is quite impressive.

The trolley museum is certainly worth a visit. We replaced the Moscow train ride with the trolley ride out to the ballpark. A very nice ride, and I highly recommend it!

Yes, the Trolley was very full every time I looked over to see it, and so were the Scranton yard trains on Saturday. Sunday's bonus was that the yard train went on a different set of rails than the day before, since it was held up by the derailed excursion. This route went in among the STEA collection, instead of keeping its distance. Plus the $3.00 cost was waived, since the train really couldn't go anywhere.

Overall, the event was a success, with a few items that could be improved upon, such as the parking situation. And the real problems could have been much worse. No injuries with any incident.

So I guess the big question is will there be a Lackawanna Railfest 2008?

-Justin Franz

If parking got to be a problem for this event, I wonder how it will be for the NRHS convention at Steamtown in 2010?

I was interested in how the presentations would fare in having to compete with all-day excursions. My own experience has been that doing a program in this situation is a waste of time for the presenter. Comments have indicated this was pretty much the case on Saturday, while the Sunday programs did very well when there was not a fantrip to compete with. In this kind of situation you pretty much have got to use local talent, it is an insulting abuse of presenters time to have them drive a long distance to find a half dozen people in the auditorium. It is the hosting organization's responsibility to make sure there will be an audience when they request a person's time and effort, it is not the presenter's job to do their publicity for them.

The presentations might do better in the evening, if they had a location open at that time to host them, but if the fantrips run late and everybody is exhausted it would be a wash out anyway.

Considering how much of the equipment that was initially invited did not make it to the event, the organizers should be seriously concerned how they would have fared if the three E-units had not been available to bring the private cars and the Amtrak train to town.

And considering that they do not seem to be able to run events (including Railcamp) without using diesels, the NPS should revise their mission statement for Steamtown to support railroading in general rather than just steam railroading. What they are doing in practice makes their steam-only mission statement a complete joke. Just my humble opinion.

Statement from the Steamtown Special History Study:

"Because the purpose of Steamtown National Historic Site is the preservation of equipment and rolling stock related to the era of steam railroading, none of the diesel-electric locomotives is considered suitable as a museum locomotive, although some of them are old enough to be considered historic."

They need to read what they have written. Many diesels ARE equipment related to the era of steam railroading, their use overlaps steam through several decades of railroad history.

Your taxpayer dollars at work, funding an ignorant and distorted view of history.

Oops, Sorry!

MX

Hi,

I am posting several entries to my blog today with reports and photos from the weekend. The first two are up now, I will try to post 3 or 4 more later today.

Rob

http://www.robertjohndavis.com/blog/

Thank you for the kind words. We like to believe that we have been successful in sparking interest beyond the railfan crowd. Based on the number of NKP sleeper fact sheets we handed out we estimate that we has about 1000 people through the car this weekend. We got a great reaction with families - especially women and children. Several times an older member of the family would start talking to younger members about their train travel experiences.

Here is an interesting thing we saw happen. My wife was one of our on car hosts and she fielded a lot of questions from women. When she was not on the car I noticed that women were less likely to ask questions. We had the telegram request forms in their holder on the car and a small child asked her what a telegram was. She got the kid's attention when she started by saying it was like a really old form of text messaging - right down to the need to abbreviate. That got the child's attention!

For those of you who didn't get to Scranton last weekend, we will have an open house with our NKP sleeper, the New York & Greenwood Lake passenger cars as well as Erie 833 next weekend. On Friday from 6pm to 7:30 pm we will have an open house on the cars at the former Lackawanna Station (now the Radisson Hotel). We are asking a $5 donation to walk through the cars. In side the hotel we will have a cash bar and complimentary hor'derves. One Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 10 & 11) we will run several trips from the Hotel to Tobyhanna, Cresco and Analomink. We still have a few tickets left. You can get details at http://www.eldcps.org