Many in eastern railway preservation circles and who read TRAINS will recognize the name of Wayne Laepple who sadly passed away on Monday 7/10 from a heart attack, two days shy of his 76th birthday.

Laepple, a native of Hatfield, Pa., was a graduate of Bloomsburg State University worked at the Magee Transportation Museum in the late 1960s and was associated with Ed Blossom's Dushore Car Co. He was also a teacher for a spell before becoming General Manager of the Graham County RR in North Carolina in the 1970s.

When he wasn't volunteering at the Rockhill Trolley Museum, Wayne was a short line manager "boomer" during the 1980s-1990s at the Gettysburg Northern and East Penn Railways before becoming a reporter for the The Daily Item newspaper in Northumberland.

In recent years Wayne wrote features for TRAINS Magazine and volunteered at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, Friends of the East Broad Top and the WW&F Railway Museum in Maine.

Wayne had an outgoing personality and a natural curiosity about not only railroading but life in general. He was also a great teller of stories and of railroading's past. In particular, I always enjoyed hearing about the adventures of his deceased father in law who was a PRR hogger that ran K4s and Q2s. He also liked trains and trolleys equally, something you don't often see in railway preservation circles.

Wayne Laepple, you will be missed by an entire fraternity!

K.R. Bell

When the edge of history sweeps across people you know, and you thought or assumed would be there indefinitely, and then you realize that you yourself are only a decade younger...

May he rest in well-deserved peace.

Very sorry to hear this. My condolences to his friends and family. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Wayne about ten years ago regarding a project I was working on at the time. He was always patient with my questions, easy with encouragement, and enthusiastic about providing me with any information that he believed could be useful to my research. Good guy.

Very sorry to hear this, he will be missed greatly. I corresponded with him only a few weeks ago about the latest project he was working on, I'm sure one of many.

Sincerest condolences to his family.

Jason Lamb

From Trains Newswire:
https://www.trains.com/trn/g-wayne-laep ... ies-at-75/

Wayne also frequented RYPN. Always rising above the fray, and instead using it as a networking resource. He was successful in this endeavor many times on behalf of the WW&F.

Not mentioned elsewhere, Wayne was the chairman of the "Build 11" Fundraising committee. We published what was to be his final report just hours before we learned of his passing.

He is already sorely missed by his friends at the WW&F.

Very sad. I was just talking to him Saturday afternoon at Stewartstown. He was a helluva guy, and will be missed.

I feel blessed to have known Wayne as a friend and fellow traveler in the short line railroad world. He was generous to all in the rail preservation field and set an example to strive for. A great guy who will long be missed.

- Alan Maples

Shocked! Knew Wayne and worked with him.

I consider Wayne a good, true friend. He taught me everything I know about trackwork at the Rockhill Trolley Museum, and much of what I know about restoration. He assisted me in several projects, and recently suggested another source for a 3' gauge locomotive for a current project. As others have pointed out here, he rose above any fray and assisted many people in any ways that he could. His steady guiding hand will be missed in many areas, especially on the WW&F. He will be missed.... nay, he already is.

I was very sorry to learn about Wayne's passing. He and I worked together on his project to produce reproduction Baldwin builder's plates for the WW&F. He listened to my suggestions and he was a pleasure to work with. He will be greatly missed.

Aw, [BLEEP].

And this had to happen while I'm on a lengthy road trip.

I'll have more to say when my laptop with a defective adapter doesn't have a dying battery.

Wayne Laepple was a model of excellence in the rail preservation community.

I first encountered him as what was probably the "CMO" position at the North Shore Railroad's ex-DL&W depot offices in Northumberland, Pa., shortly after the start of the two "designated operator" lines on SEDA-COG Joint Rail Authority trackage in central Pa. in the summer of 1984, with three ragtag Santa Fe CF7's. Company president Dick Robey was (and remains) a dyed-in-the-wool railfan as well as a businessman, and hired Wayne and another admitted railfan, Mike Herman, as his underlings both in office and as operating personnel (classic jack-of-all-trades shortline railroading). Along the way, all of them demonstrated an affection for railroad history and fandom, willing to answer fan inquiries and even donating some replaced hardware like cast iron signs to museums or for sale to benefit museums. It was under Robey and Laepple that the Railroaders Memorial Museum was given essentially free access to the Nittany & Bald Eagle RR (the ex-PRR Bald Eagle Branch from just north of Tyrone to Milesburg and Bellefonte) for demonstrating and "breaking in" the restored PRR K4s 1361, as well as allowing the start-up of the Bellefonte Historical RR RDC operation out of Bellefonte which continues to this day.

Wayne quickly showed himself to any that conversed with him as all-around intelligent, gentlemanly, and in his 30's already a seasoned veteran of the balderdash the railroad industry can sling a person's way. At some point later Robey abruptly dismissed Wayne with no warning. I never did find out what transpired there, and my gut feeling was that Robey wanted to shift away from "Swiss Army Knife" all-purpose management to specific duty people, a job unlikely to sit well with a flexible person like Wayne. I never got any details from Wayne, but it obviously left an extremely antagonistic hostility between him and the company that you just didn't "go there." (Note his obit deftly sidesteps his tenure there.) This led his tenures with the Gettysburg Northern and East Penn lines, before returning to the Central Susquehanna Valley for the Daily Item gig.

One point of trivia: the North Shore RR's employees were called in on a contract basis to do occasional repairs or maintenance as needed to a couple local industrial loco users, including specifically the nearby PP&L Sunbury Steam Electric Station in Shamokin Dam. When their old West Pittston & Exeter RR Alco S3 finally quit for the last time in 1988, Laepple and Herman were among the crew that helped reactivate both Porter fireless 0-6-0 steamers the plant still had to service instead of standby winter-only thaw shed switching, for what would be their final service stint before being replaced by an ex-SP SW900m late in 1988. So Wayne was among the very last to maintain commercial, non-tourist steam in North America. (The plant, once one of the largest coal-burning power plants in the nation, has recently been demolished and replaced with a far more efficient natural-gas plant.)

In an era when seemingly most rail preservationists focus exclusively with/on one location or organization, Wayne was a true "boomer," going wherever needed to lend whatever expertise was needed short-term while maintaining a low, inconspicuous profile. Among lines/places I know he helped one way or another: The RR Museum of Pa., Rockhill Trolley Museum, the EBT, the Gettysburg RR (post-Cornell), the Tioga Central, the Bellefonte Historical RR, the White Deer & Reading RR Museum, the WW&F in Maine, and others I'm sure that I just don't know about.

One year I got a call from him out of the blue, telling me his "car pool" companions to the annual spring work party at the WW&F had to cancel, and would I like to come along and help? I mentioned my newlywed bride was now living with me and I wasn't sure she should be alone in my part of Baltimore for the several days--"Bring her along, too--she can work, can't she?" So, yeah, road trip to help the WW&F rebuild. Wayne was effectively the supervisor, gauging and eyeballing the all-hand-tools building process the old-fashioned ways--in his ever-present fedora of course, which aided in the time-capsule experience. And as a bonus, WW&F steamer 10 was in use on the work trains, as it was SO much faster to shuttle work trains with than their Littleput diesel #52. And at Wayne's insistence, I worked one round trip for more ballast as the fireman........ Jenny kept herself useful shoveling ballast, while I did whatever had to be done--tie-lifting, ballast-shoveling, rail-lifting teams, spiking, and more. And he covered the travel and lodging for us, and we donated to the crew food funds....

I'd also get calls from him inviting me up to various music concerts, usually blues or jazz, and always at a venue with good craft beer (brewpubs, etc.). Like me, he had a diverse taste in good music, a musical omnivore if you will, as well as an acquired taste for good beer for the rare times he could throw Rule G out the window.

You'll find the most fascinating people in life are those that maintain a diversity of interests and knowledge, graciously share with others, and would say "I don't have TIME to retire or die!" That was Wayne to a "T". Left unmentioned in Mr. Bell's original post was that Wayne' heart attack was as "he collapsed while preparing to carry out mechanical work on a General Electric 65-ton center-cab switcher in Watsontown, Pa."--a loco I believe is headed for preservation elsewhere.

Requiescat in Pace, Wayne. You were one of the good ones, and will be missed.