Griping photographs and videographers,
How much did you financially contribute to 3985, 844 and the steam program ????

Oh hang on....... diddley squat........ is the answer..... same as me,
got the satisfaction of seeing her run, the helicopter didnt 'ruin' my video or photographs (except the one i intentionally shot of the chopper)
Thanks Steam Crew and UP most of us are really really grateful that you do this at all.


Mike Pannell
Cheyenne

I think the 3985 this week and Owosso last year were two different animals.

If the UP did indeed charter the chopper then more power to them. I believe the folks who restored the 315 in Durango did this a few months ago during an event (though they flew out of earshot during runbys). If this is being done to promote the organization or to put some money in the coffers, than have at it, especially if they're "waved off" during runbys for paying passengers.

A few years ago one of the local news choppers followed a Steamtown train to the Nicholson viaduct to shoot promotional material. A lot of the chasers complained about that. Lets see, promotion of a museum vs. private amateur videographers... To the chasers I say, "too bad".

The Owosso thing was a little more troublesome. This was done by one person, to produce videos for a website that charges a fee to it's members. A lot of patrons came to ride one train and to shoot another the next day (since all trains went the same place). To me the aerial antics were in bad taste and (at the altitude I saw the helicopter flying) dangerous as well.

Dave Crosby

Mr. Mitchell: Regarding the 3985 on the head of the APL stack train, you do not have a CLUE as to what you are talking about. The weight of the train was 7657 tons. The train consisted of 145 cars. It WAS NOT an empty stack train. The run WAS NOT mostly downhill. If you would like to see the entire run, it is available by WB video productions. I own it, and it is quite good.

I often buy a ticket and ride if I can work it out. I also have donated to various preservation efforts. This time I was 1500 miles away. I looked at several videos on YouTube by videographers who had come out to tape the event, and in all but one the helicopter significantly interfered in their sound recording. I think the one it was not in was probably too close to Denver for the helicopter to be flying low enough to tape the train. Like I said, it's one thing to get a reasonable amount of footage and get out, but the chopper was there, flying really low, for just about the entire trip. There was a clip from the videographer in the helicopter up earlier and it only identified him as a male in his late 20's. It did not say he had an official relationship to either the Circus or UP. I can't find the clip in any searches of YouTube right now. I had left a critical comment to him about his interference in other people's videos. He may have taken the clip down since.

After having suffered through the TO helicopter attack at Trainfest last year, I find my sympathies clearly with those individuals who spent their own scarce $$ to travel to and document the event. Having tried to find film or video of something else recently that I know a great many people photographed years ago, without much success, I can tell you that the more people who can successfully capture images of a historic railroad event, the better. Photographers die, their families dispose of images they don't care about, houses burn down, images fade from improper storage, etc. Corporate priorities and direction can change, and in-house archives may or may not survive in either institutional or private hands. A certain passenger railroad of my experience really didn't have much of a systematic effort to preserve it's corporate imagery over at least it's early existence. Sometimes it's up to the "fans" to preserve images.

I submit that preserving images of railroad history is an important part of the historic railroad preservation movement, and that we need multiple sources of recording those images besides "official" ones. I stand by my original sentiments.

And of course, no video seller has ANY cause to "hype" what's in their videos to stimulate sales--to the point of exaggeration?

Let me repeat what I said, with emphasis added as appropriate:



Over the years, there's been a LOT of online debate over the 3985/APL run (August 1, 1990), with that run (and the videos shot that day) held up by people who weren't there as both examples of "steam is da greatest thing evah, diesels s*ck!!!" and "so what? That's what a UP 4-6-6-4 should be able to do...."

Doing a little research, I see that Archer Hill is the spot in question east of Cheyenne, and Bob Krieger stated in a post at TrainOrders.com that they came over Archer at 35 mph on that run from Cheyenne to North Platte, Nebraska. Cheyenne is 6,000 feet above sea level; North Platte is 2,800 feet; I stand by my "mostly downhill" statement unless someone wants to tell me that North Platte has lost several thousand feet in elevation in the past 20 years (blame global warming?).

Mr. Mitchell: If you want to use the elevation above sea level of Cheyenne and North Platte to support the “mostly downhill” statement, that’s fine. What you are doing is disregarding the terrain of the railroad for the 220 miles between the two cities, including any uphill grades the 3985 encountered along the way. The line is not a straight descent. Regarding Archer Hill, eastbound it is 2.5 miles UPHILL on a .7% grade, and the train did go over it at 35 mph. But I guess we have to dismiss the 3985’s performance on this grade, because North Platte is lower in elevation than Cheyenne? I am still trying to figure out where the “debate” regarding the weight of the stack train is coming from. It was the railroad that released the tonnage figure for the train. Maybe they were lying? As a fan of both steam and diesels, I have noticed one thing: Any time a steam locomotive hauls a train of significant tonnage, the diesel aficionados will find any way they can to try and discredit it, i.e. “the stack train was empty”, “the trip was mostly downhill”, or “big deal, it was only a passenger train”. And by the way, I do not subscribe to global warming.

The "debate," such as it is, is/was largely people who failed to understand that 145 stack spine cars do not equal 145 coal hoppers, or people anxious to exaggerate the "awesomeness" of 3985's work that day versus others trying to bring those folks back to reality. Some of the claims about that run have achieved urban legend status, such as claims the train arrived in North Platte early (it arrived 30 minutes late, according to an account by Bob Krieger), or that the 3985 replaced five UP diesels on the run (that's what brought the train into Cheyenne, but that's not to say that five diesels would have been assigned Cheyenne-North Platte).

My only "dog in this fight" is the Laws of Thermodynamics. If UP, NS, or anyone else were to repeat this stunt today with the likes of 3985, 1218, or the like, I would certainly want to be there to see it, and I'd pony up a donation to the cause if I did (and I have paid for photo freight charters here and there). But I wouldn't use that run as a case to argue for the return of steam to our rails, like many others seemingly do with the APL/3985 run.