Media outlets in New York City are reporting the passing of one of rail preservation's nost notorious mavericks/eccentrics, Bob Diamond, over the weekend:

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny ... story.html

https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2021 ... emembered/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/nyre ... -dead.html (Behind the NY Times' paywall)

If you've not had the pleasure of reading about his travails over the years:

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I liked Bob, he was okay. He just didn't know when to say when, and that took its toll on him.

"You can't fight city hall".

C.

Regrettably, Bob's personality sometimes got in the way of his otherwise good intentions.

I worked at NYCDOT in the late 1990s, when Bob was working on a trolley line in Red Hook and for a time the Surface Transit staff was staff liaison for the project.

At the time, a ex-MBTA "picture window" PCC was under restoration and a vintage car Oslo Norway Car 3 was there as well. http://tmny.org/tmny0003.html I recall going on a site visit to Red Hook.

To put it delicately, Bob had little patience for completing the formalities necessary to advance the project.

BH

I may have been the last guy to operate a PCC under its own power in Brooklyn. About 20 years ago, Bob Diamond and his band of volunteers were working on getting ex-Shaker, ex-Buffalo #70 running for their little line in Red Hook. The line ran for about 2 blocks on private property along the waterfront. I came over there to do some final troubleshooting and testing. When it came time for the "road test" apparently nobody there had ever run a PCC, so they wanted me to do it. We went about 200 feet before we encountered an illegally parked auto blocking our path and so we backed up, that was it. Most of that stuff got really messed up during the Sandy storm and ultimately was scrapped. I think #70 is still around somewhere though.

I don't have any photos unfortunately. At the time the neighborhood was really dicey, and I really didn't want to walk through there with a camera.

Diamond was a true visionary. Unfortunately like many visionaries he had some personal issues that got in the way of advancing the project beyond the initial prototype stage. And if one day someone does finally excavate the Atlantic Avenue tunnel and we find that fabled LIRR locomotive, I guess his memory would be vindicated.

I'll be honest. I gave, and give bob a bit of shit in regards to how he handled the NYTM/City dispute that left many PCCs and a diesel switcher scrapped on site in the early 2000s.

But for all his flaws and quirks, he still took the time to respond to my emails when i was little and had just found out about the trolley museum. That means quite a bit.

Rest easy, bob. I hope they blow that tunnel wall and find that engine under Atlantic Av.

IRT to the post above: Most of the trolleys were stored offsite in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Things came to a head with the redevelopment and most were scrapped there. Three out of the four which remained were eventually destroyed by sandy; but i believe at least 2 were sold to a trolley museum somewhere on the eve of their scrapping.

And then they pulled another out of a warehouse; i think that one is still there.

This sums it up perfectly. In the late 1990s, it looked as if the Red Hook trolley had a chance of succeeding had these personal quirks not gotten in the way. Regrettably, while at NYCDOT Surface Transit 20 years ago, I was briefly exposed to Bob's dark side.

I hope someone gets back down in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel and clears up the locomotive situation one way or the other.

It's all water under, um, the pier I guess now but: Diamond had initially acquired IIRC 3 Boston "picture window" PCCs. He had space in a warehouse building on the pier at the end of Van Brunt Street. One of the Boston PCCs was in there along with an Oslo single trucker which was privately owned. Later Bob acquired (again, IIRC) about a dozen ex-Shaker cars which had been acquired by Buffalo but never used there. Most of these were stored in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is quite a distance from Red Hook. One car, #70, was brought to the warehouse in Red Hook and his volunteers got it running again. The other two Boston cars were stored outdoors outside the warehouse and sort of around the corner.

Bob insisted that he had a deal for "free storage" at the Navy Yard but the latter disagreed. He was supposed to be paying a storage fee and had built up a large debt to them. So eventually they got a judgment from the court and took the PCCs as scrap metal to pay the judgment.

The equipment down in Red Hook remained. After Sandy struck the area, it was all pretty messed up, and by this time the property was being developed. The Oslo car was removed by its owner and wound up at TMNY where it is operating. One of the Boston cars wound up at Shelbourne Falls. I think another remained at the waterfront as a static display and the other may have been cut up. Shaker #70 was moved to another storage location.

2 bostonians made it to Shelburne - I believe you're right about the shaker car. Another car in a warehouse was eventually moved out; it's still there.

I never met Bob Diamond, and regret that now. As a fan of the early LIRR (by which I mean the road's 19th-century pre-PRR antiquity), I'm still amazed by his discovery of the Cobble Hill Tunnel, a monument of early railroad civil engineering that was all but forgotten even by LIRR historians. He was truly a visionary.

However, the locomotive claim has always bothered me. Can anyone offer a coherent summary of why Diamond believed there was a locomotive buried in the tunnel, and why it was specifically the Hicksville (a Planet-type 2-2-0 built by Locks & Canals in 1836)? Was it simply that this was a notable pre-1860 locomotive whose final disposition is unknown? Early LIRR equipment rosters are pretty sketchy at best (note that Vincent Seyfried in his 7-volume LIRR history didn't even attempt to compile any pre-1860s roster info), so to argue that there being no record of a locomotive being scrapped means it was in fact never scrapped and must still exist seems like a huge inferential leap, or wishful thinking inserting itself into a (very large) gap in the data. What am I missing here? (I want to believe it, but I can't.)

-Philip Marshall

I don't know the why, but the rumor goes that while they were scrapping out the tunnel one of the older engines being used for a work train ran away to the sealed false wall. Scrap wasn't worth as much, and there was an enroaching deadline which meant the best thing to do would be to leave it there, as rails can be removed by a team of unpaid laborers while an engine cannot.

As it goes, in the 1910s a telephone company found a mysterious hole - and then immediately filled it in.

Although it sounds improbable, it's impossible to think there's not something big and metal down there - there was a GPR survey done by a trusted firm to try and find the train and they found a signature of a roughly 20ft long metallic object.

An article with more background on Bob Diamond and his tunnel and trolley projects:

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/09/06/the-ultimate-obit-the-real-unabridged-authorized-warts-and-all-saga-of-brooklyn-trolley-king-bob-diamond/

For what it's worth, here is what Inglis Stewart had to say about the Hicksville in his 1925 article in the R&LHS Bulletin on early LIRR motive power:

"It seems not to have run after 1848, but was owned as late as 1853. It was then deemed not worth repairing. Its disposition could not be ascertained."

He also notes that it was one of the first locomotives in the US to carry a whistle, as mentioned in a contemporary account in the Long Island Democrat newspaper.

Stewart was born in Queens in 1859 and mentions elsewhere in his article hanging out at the old LIRR roundhouse in Long Island City in the 1870s talking with old timers, so he is as close to that era as any source that has come down to us.

-Philip Marshall

Im sad to hear about Bobs passing, I have had interest in the Buried Planet story for some time (You would have me as to whether or not one actually is buried down).

Javier Lopez