I would have loved to be old enough at the time to ride and appreciate these trips. I wonder if anyone, Linn perhaps, has any recollections about these once in a lifetime sojourns. It seems quite English to me, old steam under wires and all that. Something that will probably never happen again here.

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.p ... 87&nseq=49

Wonderful!

Joshua

If you think that's amazing, you ought to see it in video with 1223 running what looks to be about 60mph for all she's worth.....and 7002 just loping along....

Given the traffic density on lines around us, trips like this will probably not happen again. 1223 and 7002 are permanently "museumized" and will be preserved in a static manner. As long as the "homeland security" mentality prevails in this country, excursions like we ran will probably be very few and far between.

Our Philadelphia excursion, where we were given a 65 mph speed limit, occurred the same day as the 611 Dismal Swamp derailment. Tightlock frenzy ensued, along with other requirements, and that ended our excursion into the excursion business.

The locomotives performed very well, and to the best of my knowledge their premiere performance of lifting the train out of 30th street station's lower level was not captured on video. If it was I would love to see it. I know there was lots of concrete freed from the underside of bridges. Amazingly we only lost a couple class lights, had one cut forehead, and I think a window.

7002 was a dog at Strasburg. When she hit about 40 mph she came alive and ran like a top. 1223 was a wonderful engine at Strasburg and she proved up to the task on the mainline. Fortunately she didn't get her nose out of joint about taking second position on the train.

Everybody has their list of things they missed in their lifetime, but I consider getting down to Strasburg several times to watch 1223 in operation as one I actually didn't miss. Up here, one of the last regular local passenger assignments of D16sb's was Oil City, PA - Olean NY, and they drew it until 1946, I think. My father rode behind them as a 'commuter' of sorts going to school and remembered them well. They were natives in the town I live in now.

Linn, I was always impressed by how authoritatively it could accelerate a train from a standing stop, and have good memories of how really sharp the exhaust tended to be. You certainly got the sense that this was a well-honed design for stop/start short passenger train operations, doing exactly what it was designed to do by PRR.

I'm just glad I got to see it, hear it, and ride it, as much as I did, when I could. I can't fault anybody for making the decision to store it either - that locomotive represents the 'run vs. preserve' arguement exquisitely. But you still can't truly appreciate the design and engineering unless it's working... the basic problem with all steam, everywhere.

I was fortunate be be on both the Philadelphia trip & the circle trip to Harrisburg. Those engines could really move. But my fondest Strasburg memory was of my dad taking me for a ride on the SRR as a kid & riding behind #4, which I had seen as a younger kid steamed up in Birdsboro on an Iron Horse Ramble- my first ever steam trip.

I feel the same way. 10 years or so ago I tried my hand at a little photoessay on 1223 and 7002 to practice my then-new HTML skills; for what it's worth you can find it here:

http://www.steamsafari.com/strasburg/index.htm

Thanks for your observations.
Compared to modern high density main lines, the Main Line between Paradise and Harrisburg, the original Main Line between Lancaster and Columbia, and the Royalton branch, are not very busy. The line between Columbia and Shocks Mill is the high density bottleneck.
What about an excursion to the new Harrisburg Airport station for its dedication, with a side trip on the Middletown & Hummelstown? This route would cut NS out of the deal.

Railroading is very different today than it was 20 years ago. I said the same thing 20 years ago and listened to railroad vets say the same thing 40 years ago. It has been my observation that railroading was much less different between 1950 and 1980 than it was between 1980 and 2007, insofar as operations and equipment goes.

Since solid bearings were outlawed for interchange equipment has become very standardized and our old stuff is viewed by modern railroaders as totally alien. Any modern railroad is fixated on safety and reliability with the least amount of labor. Our historic equipment is not designed for that level of reliability or safety. It operated at a time when labor and material support was within easy reach. Tool cars are a necessity on the mainline today, but even they cannot provide the support that was available in the day when there was a locomotive terminal of some scope in practically every decent sized town.

Our Amtrak corridor may be light density, but after rebuilding last year, trains were constantly late. The factor of safety in today's railroading has increased many fold. Running on markers and loose railroading is not officially tolerated today, but that is how they ran trains all the time when our equipment was in regular service. There is a zero-tolerance mentality for oddities in today's railroading and our stuff needs tolerance.

I am thankful for Union Pacific, BNSF, and some of the regionals who do have some tolerance.

linn,

speaking of old time excursions; can you say something about the Hello Dolly movie.

I watched the movie recently and you have to love those scenes along the Hudson River. Was it really the new York Central near Yonkers, NY?

Or did you another river in some other state? And how did you get the railroad to accept the home built yellow parlor car? Does it have roller bearing trucks?

Thanks,

Ted Miles

Hello, Dolly-- filmed at Cold Spring and Garrison, NY, 1969. Those towns are on the NYC's Hudson Division, about 30+ miles north of Yonkers.

No problem with plain bearings back then, and there were still some steam men on the Hudson Division rosters. It had only been 16 years since the last steam locomotive departed from Harmon.

I'm sure Linn has many more details of that sojurn; I was just a teen-age railfan observing and photographing 1223 and her train at Cold Spring one afternoon.

Howard P.
Flashback, NY

Hello Dolly was filmed right about the time I came on the payroll at Strasburg. I remember one of my jobs was to wash the fake dirt off the sides of the cars. This was applied by 20th Century Fox because the cars looked too shiny.

Huber Leath was CMO at that time, and he went with the train. It was filmed along the Hudson at Garrison. Huber got to run on the NYC main for, I believe about three weeks. He told me that the fastest he went was 67 mph. They had a mechanical problem - I think it was a lead truck brass burned up - and the closest NYC shop got it fixed pretty quickly. This was not a big issue then - even on the NYC main.

Flash forward to 1998. We ran N&W #475 and two wooden coaches to Harrisburg to film "Thomas and the Magic Railroad". It was a deadhead move and AMTRAK wanted to have two diesels attached - one at each end - for protection and cab signals. We talked them into using one on the rear for the westbound move and we installed cab signals on #475. They gave us 30 mph - which was fine for #475. It was a nice run except for dragging the diesel along. Eastbound, being towed backwards, we had a driving journal run hot. Short story, we made it to Strasburg without sticking AMTRAK and the journal "healed", but the AMTRAK pilot was not a happy camper. This would have been small potatoes in 1968.

To illustrate my point in an earlier post about our old stuff needing tolerance, here is the reason #475 ran hot. The N&W poured their crown brasses in place rather than pressing them in. There was a sub-surface casting defect that didn't show up when the brass was machined in '93. With the continuous backward motion at 25 - 30 mph, this small piece broke off the front edge of the brass and rotated up into the top of the brass and made a wedge which wiped the oil and overheated the axle in a 1" wide circumferential ring. The piece was small enough that it wore away by the time we got to Strasburg and the only indication of a problem was the ring on the axle. We magged the ring to check for cracking and finding none, she ran cool the rest of the year. When we dropped the axle in the winter to clean up the journal we only then could see the small missing wedge from the brass, which finally told us what happened.

I was on that trip...I recall the panic from my family as all the news broadcasts were reporting "the derailment of a steam train" and since everyone knew that my parents, brother and I were on this trip, they assumed it was our train.

In the days befor cell phones, the panic was not eased until we returned home, very late at night. We knew nothing until we got home of the 611 derailment.

I have a shot somewhere of the 02&23 peaking over the north entrance to the expressway, just off JFK, on the Upper Level of 30th Street just after we boarded the bus to tour our home town...

Also remember 90 pulling us back to Strasburg and then also, watching the 33 try to shove the cars clear of the switch, doing nothing but spinning it's wheels.

We never knew at the time that that would be the last time those trips were to run...no one did...but we were glad we did it.

What type of whistles did these engines have on them on The Strasburg/have now at the Museum?

Is there any place on the web that has a recording of these whistles?