May I take a moment to sincerely thank both UP and the IRM for their forward-thinking efforts?

I think the most prominent factor involved in saving an SD40-2 is simply that there ISN'T any particular significance, other than the happenstance that it was a C&NW unit. Far, far too often in rail preservation we are star-struck with saving the "gee gosh wow" items of the industry, and not the low-down, ordinary that truly made the industry what it is. Witness a dozen GG1's saved, but only one E7, and no ex-PRR F-units. Witness the excitement over UP Big Boys and Centennials, but not the lowly GP9 or SD24. Business and dome cars aplenty, but barely any Pullman day coaches or commuter cars (save for the ubiquitous DL&W MU). E-units aplenty, but yawns at saving an F40PH. It was everyday railroading that paid the bills and kept millions employed for decades, not special excursions and equipment.

Can you imagine if, fifty years from now, fans crowd the park at Horse Shoe Curve to see a trio of SD40-2's roaring in Run 8 on a heavy train?

Why, yes, yes I can!

That's the whole reason I got involved with the group I did, The Conrail Historical Society.

... trailers. Which look like an "ole fashioned" passenger coach. And of course they're out of context. Context would require every trailer to be coupled to a motor. And who saved those?
Ironic that with all these South Shore cars and Lackawanna cars laboring at non-electric museums, electric railroading is remarkably well preserved and our "best kept secret".

Actually, not all of the ex DL&W mu cars that were saved were trailers. There were groups that did acquire the motors. Unfortunately, for the most part the pantographs were removed as where the traction motors. It would indeed be wonderful to see at least one motor-trailer set preserved. My vote would have been for one of the combines to be part of the pair. However with the state of RR preservation in my home state, I have little hope of ever seeing this come to pass. Kudos to those who are preserving some of NJ's railroad history.

Actually at least some of the DL&W MU trailers were converted for that service from conventional coaches dating from before the electrification. They can be spotted by the different ( higher) roof line. So they would be slighly less out of context out from under the wire.

BTW, since this is an IRM thread, I should have mentioned that sometimes MU motor-trailers are preserved in context as a pair under wire. This photo, taken a week or two ago, is from the IRM Members Photos section on their web page.

http://www.irm.org/gallery/album161/aad

6847 is "Home".
See http://www2.irm.org/cam/cam5hilg.html, far left side of the cameras view.

(Valid until the next switch move in yard 2, which could be 5 hours or 5 days from now)

Jeff

I find this an interesting analogy. Why use PRR F-units in this example? Certainly there are quite a lot of F-units from different railroads still around. Beyond the paint and any PRRisms under the covers, just what would be special? Perhaps the decision not to save any PRR F-units was a wise one, as the population of other survivors was large enough. On the flip side, perhaps the decision to save all those GG1s was probably a foolish waste of resources that could have been used other ways.

I would think a better observation might be this - witness a dozen GG1's saved, but only one P5, and no (fill in your favorite extinct PRR electric).

Someone said that electric railroading is "remarkably well preserved". I disagree in part. While I think we have done a great job with trolleys, interurbans, and the like, I also think we have done a poor job preserving the heavy electrics. We have a severely lopsided population of survivors, with many classes from many roads gone. We have most other classes down to single examples (one in peril). Most of the heavy electrics are in very poor condition internally.

So yes, I agree with you. Just think what we might have if half of those GG1s were initially turned down in favor of something else. Saving some of the more mundane equipment - or better yet the less-than-great equipment - does have a lot of value. We can see how things really were, and be able to get a reference point when we study these machines. To use the GG1 class again, just think of what we could learn about the GG1 if we had the R1 or DD2 to compare it against. Or if we could compare the GG1 to the O or L class electrics. The comparisons could go on forever, and we could get a grasp on just what was going on inside the minds of the designers and engineers.

--
Will

EMD F-units were a substantial part of the PRR's dieselization. Enough F's survived late enough--into Conrail days--for actual preservation to be a viable option, unlike, say, Baldwin Centipedes, Sharks, or Alco PA's. But you're completely right--in the grand scheme of things, we're all right, because enough F's of other heritages have been saved elsewhere, and the Ohio Central could even fulfill its fantasy for a while with Tuscan-red-painted F's from elsewhere.



The only problem with that analogy is that said analogy was never an option, in any way, size, shape, or form.

The ONLY reason so many GG1's were saved--and that they were scattered from Green Bay to Dallas to Jersey--is because Amtrak offered their remainders to "qualified preservationists" at the rock-bottom bargain price of $5,000 per locomotive, at a time when shipping such an odd item was still viewed as routine by railroad transportation departments and the scrap value of a GG1 was around $25,000. Several of the GG1's saved were bought personally by individuals for presentation to local museums. At least one G (4873) was bought from NJ Transit or the scrappers for the value of the scrap metal, and when it became too much of an albatross for the owner, he scrapped it and recouped his investment.

The option to buy a PRR electric for such a bargain price never occurred with the P5, P5a, Westinghouse experimentals, E33, E44, or any of the other PRR electrics. The one E44 saved was snagged from Amtrak after their convoluted trade with Conrail; I think the E33 originally saved by the Va. Museum of Transportation was grabbed from the scrapyard.....

SHOULD we have saved so many of them? Hey, if a museum in St. Louis, Dallas, or Green Bay wants to show off a "landmark of 20th century railroading" next to a UP Big Boy, who the heck am I to argue with them? And does the RR Museum of Pa. REALLY need yet another PRR electric locomotive? Wouldn't they be fulfilling their mission much better with something many more folks used on a daily basis: the MP54 or a Silverliner?

I believe there are actually two DL&W motor-trailer sets preserved essentially intact, i.e. without having been stripped of parts for use in tourist trains. Steamtown has a motor-trailer set that I believe is sitting over by the administration building. The cars are intact but deteriorated. URHS in New Jersey also has the ability to make up a motor-trailer set; they have one motor car and a quartet of trailers of various sorts: a coach, a combine and two of the Barney & Smith club cars. Again, these cars are apparently intact but deteriorated. Rochester & Genesee Valley has a DL&W motor car preserved intact, and there are a few other intact-but-derelict examples lying around, but no other motor-trailer sets I know of. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the closest operational approximation is likely the Illinois Central motor-trailer MU set at IRM.

OK, I can see my flawed analogy. The GG1 deal was certainly "different".

Back in the 1960s and 70s, when the last of the old line electrics were finally retiring - was there even much of an effort to save any? Certainly, with the state of railroading back then, the NYC and PRR and others probably could not afford to donate them because of their relatively high scrap value. In looking back, I do not see much of an effort at all. The preservation community seems to have spent their resources saving steam. What are there, something like 1100 surviving steam locomotives in the US? I think we could have afforded to turn down a fraction of them in order to save a few more P5, L6, P and Q-motors, and so forth.

--
Will

It's STILL a flawed analogy.

Go ahead. Add up ALL the PRR locomotives of ANY type--steam, diesel, electric, gas--"preserved" in the 1960s and 1970s by anyone other than the PRR or LIRR itself.

I can come up with exactly four: three doodlebugs (4662, 4666, and 4668), and PRR 0-6-0 643, grabbed from its second owner, a steel mill. (PRR B6sa 60 wasn't "preserved" from its abandonment in western Pa. until the Wilmington & Western got in in 1983 or 1984.) The 2-10-0 4483 went to Westinghouse near Pittsburgh from the PRR collection. Ditto the 0-10-0 "Reuben Wells" in Indianapolis. I think the PRR donated the P5 that St. Louis has.

And I won't even mention the NYC.

Whether this was negligence on the part of Northeastern fans because the PRR did their work for them, lack of opportunity because of the PRR's finances in the era, lack of suitability for their power to operate at steam lines of the era (Wilmington & Western, Rail City, Steamtown, etc.), or whatever is another whole round of discussion. But given opportunities, suitability, significance, and practicality, I sincerely think a Westinghouse experimental, L6, O1, etc, would have to have been WAY, WAY down on the list of priorities for PRR fans.

Now, of course, if one of those ex-Great Northern FF2's had stuck around, would someone out west be demanding its repatriation?

This is an interesting line of discussion, touching on the evolution of rail museums. Its my observation that a transition happened in the 1970s-80s, where it seems the greatest amount of rail preservation occurred by non-profits which were morphing from trolley-only groups to multi-modal rail groups. Also at this time there were new non-profit groups with a specific railroad or site focus were created or grew significantly. Much of this was in the Midwest and western states.

Prior to that in the 1950s-1960s, it seems to me that most rail preservation was by wealthy individuals, the railroads themselves, and philanthropists. The pattern was to use some sort of formal museum model (focusing on display), or tourist railroad model (where accuracy to historical representation was less a concern).

Because there were so many examples of this happening in the Northeast of the US, I am guessing that the railfan/rail preservation community got used to the idea of rail preservation happening almost exclusively by the Nelson Blounts and Ellis D. Atwoods. Well, in regards to steam and railroads - trolley preservation in the Northeast has been exemplar of the non-profit museum, and they stayed to their trolley focus. I think it has been in the 2000s when finally the formation and evolution of stronger railroad-focused non-profits with their own preservation plans happened in New England and nearby areas.

Of course there are exceptions, I am just trying to guess at some reasoning for an apparent existence of preservation apathy in the Northeast. There are still a number of wood passenger cars up there with no home. Well, less so now.

I was using PRR as an example. Frankly, I do not care much about what railroad any locomotive served under, as I am interested in what is under the paint.



Yes, WAY, WAY down is right. It also seemed to be WAY, WAY down when the Milwaukee ended their electrics, or NYC*, or Conrail - but I will not beat that horse.

The oddballs, experimentals, and mundanes are significant - very significant - from an engineering standpoint. We can see why the successes, like the GG1, were such good designs. We can see the evolution in the electric technology within, and not just a snapshot as it was in the mid-1930s.

But I know railfans don't exactly flock to take pictures of fusepanels and transformers. I suppose this is my big complaint.

*well, OK, the S-motors seemed to get respect. Well, some respect...sort of.

--
Will

A few comments from a Northeastern boy--

The trolley museums, especially in Connecticut, "kept to their focus" in the 50s. That's why NH 2-8-2 3016 (aka "E&P 97" in "It Happened To Jane") went to scrap at Modena, Pa in 1958/59. Neither CT trolley outfit would give it a home. Nor would The Danbury Fair, or three different towns in CT.

In the mid-70's, a reasonably-well financed and thought-out attempt to preserve one of the last two NH EP-5 "Jet" passenger electrics met with the attitudes of "It's way too modern for us, we're a 1920s steam railroad" at one CT location, and the alternate repository, one of the same CT trolley museums, turned it away: "It's heavy railroad electrification, we don't do that stuff".

As for NYC P-motors and T-motors, by 1969, there were only 3 or 4 Ts left; the transfer of 255 and then 273 to PRR's Sunnyside Yard (where they replaced the last DD1, as third-rail-powered locos for the wire train) was the reason those two lived, in the case of 273, long enough for the Albany group to get it from Amtrak. We'll leave the recent sad part of that story out for now.

The last 9 or 10 P-motors were quickly retired by PC in 1973/74 and sold for scrap just as quickly. PC did not donate, for many reasons, some quite obvious.

The last three S-motors hung around long enough to be "wards of the State" (MTA) and at least one was donated (PC 4715) to Branford; it later went to IRM.

The NH electrics were all gone by 1966 (retired 1961, stripped and scrapped by 1966 or so), besides the EF-4/E-33 "Virginians" and the 10 EP-5 "Jets". Again, PC did not donate anything, so the two surviving E-33s were obtained by their current owners from GE, after Conrail traded them in about 1981.

As for "negligence" by northeastern fans, let's look at this clearly. First, steam was the focus of almost every preservation/minded fan in 1958-1966. Second, exactly where was the stuff to go? Until the first few "tourist roads" started appearing in 1960-63, there was no place for preserved rail equipment, except an occasional unused industrial siding.

By the time many groups had the resources (space, money, interest in other-than-steam), most of that stuff was gone.

The broke-but-won't-admit-it Northeastern railroads of the 1950s needed every last scrap sale dollar, unlike the Western and Midwestern roads that donated so many engines. And I'd bet that most Northeastern communities couldn't wait to see the smoky things go away, and wanted no part of glorifying them.

Be glad for what we have. Work diligently to get it under cover, to restore, to interpret.

Howard P.
Singed Eyebrows, CT