I spent a beautiful weather day yesterday visiting the Pa.RR Museum and Strasburg RR and just wanted to take a moment to say how impressed I was with both operations and what a credit to all invloved they both are.

It had been a good while since I last visited Strasburg and I was amazed at how much commercial growth there's been in Lancaster County although it's still predominently dairy farms ( thank goodness).

I also came away grateful that our industry has a Strasburg to set the gold standard on how a steam tourist enterprise should be operated as everything about it is absolutuely top shelf.

Thank you Strasburg....and please keep up the great work!!

Ross Rowland

Thanks for the complements Ross!
The urban sprawl has been a concern of ours for many years, but thankfully it has mainly been north of us. That is why we contribute to the local Farmland Trust to help preserve our view scape.
We try very hard to do a good job with our operation/presentation as the budget allows. While we appreciate the nice comments, there are other outfits out there that do wonderful work as well.

Rick

Hi all

Today what the Strasburg Railroad shop produces in order to keep tourist lines and main line steam running is amazing . But we should not forget Strasbug is not the only railroad shop in the U.S. that produces this fine quality work .
The TVRM also produces same type of work , and there is Wasatch , I know that I spelled that name wrong .
In order to keep steam alive , in the U.S. we need these shops in order to keep steam running . In order to produce the parts either from scratch, or from a broken casting .
Just how many tourist lines in the U.S. depend on these little locomotive shops , in order to keep running ? I know that what I just said is and off topic , to original post .

So Just how many tourist lines , depend on these type of shops to keeps running ??
Pat.

The Western Railway Museum relies on Lock-n-Stitch in Turlock, CA to repair broken castings. They are not a railroad shop, but are excellent in their work.

The South Shore Shops in Michigan City were heralded to help out museums with their talented staff even other electric rail lines.

I don't know if they do that much any more.

There are several ligitimate railroad machine shops here and there, some which will take on outside work. There are many industrial machine shops which can do railroad work given good instructions. There are some companies like Backshop Enterprises that still support specialty work on historic railway equipment.

We're very fortunate that we have Strasburgs and TVRRs and Backshop Enterpriseses and contractors and consultants that are truly expert in this work.

For those of us who don't have well equipped shops, we need to develop our own networks of vendors from any useful industry that can work with us on an as needed, project by project basis. This is where specialized knowledge is important....as anybody who has tried to talk locomotive boilers with an industrial boiler shop knows.

There's never been more or better technology available to repair old or build new replica historic railroad equipment - there's just not as many dedicated shops using less technology doing it relative to a century ago. It forces us to think and strategise, and that is a very good thing to get in the habit of doing.

dave