Way Back

NKP1155 · **Joined:** Tue Sep 03, 2013 9:50 am **Posts:** 94

I drug my 6 year old boy to stand near Overbrook Tower and watch the train come in and depart. Still clear as a bell to me, but my kid lives in computer world and such old stuff just left him cold. I tried.

wesp · **Posted:** Fri Sep 13, 2013 4:46 pm

Simply amazing when you think about a train of SRR coaches and those engines out on the mainline in today's era. Much like the story I read about when Pittsburgh Railways stored and operated the West Penn car for Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in the early 1950s.

Wesley

Great Western · **Posted:** Fri Sep 13, 2013 6:33 pm

August 12, 1978 - Passenger Extra 6060 running from Toronto to Niagara Falls - 4-8-2 maintaining scheduled passenger train speeds!

Kelly Anderson · **Joined:** Tue Sep 14, 2004 7:52 am **Posts:** 2477

Frisco1522 · **Posted:** Sat Sep 14, 2013 5:43 pm

As unbelievable as it seems, trains used to run at breakneck speeds on plain bearings and jointed rail. I know it's impossible.
Freight trains running 70 MPH behind steam on plain bearings. Kinda takes your breath away doesn't it? And best of all, no safety vests or hard hats. Whew!

Txhighballer · **Joined:** Mon Aug 23, 2004 10:49 am **Posts:** 773

Would you believe running on train orders..and schedules which were expected to be adhered to? Being in the clear five minutes before scheduled arrival of said scheduled train? Three, four, and even five sections of the same train racing along without incident? It was madness, I tell you..and to do it with steam? Well, now THAT was absolute insanity......

Alexander D. Mitchell IV · **Posted:** Sat Sep 14, 2013 6:28 pm

Can you believe.... thousands upon thousands of people who made their livings roaming around rail yards checking journals and topping up oil, loading and unloading boxcars by hand or with hand carts, filling coal cars and gondolas with wheelbarrows, cleaning and shoveling coal and cinders around steam locomotives, riding trains and setting brakes by hand, riding cars down hump yards to apply brakes, occasionally getting killed or maimed on the job with the survivors getting a pittance?

And these things called "hotboxes"?

Yeah, those were the GOOD OL' DAYS!!!!

junior · **Posted:** Sun Sep 15, 2013 5:11 am

wesp wrote:

Simply amazing when you think about a train of SRR coaches and those engines out on the mainline in today's era. Much like the story I read about when Pittsburgh Railways stored and operated the West Penn car for Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in the early 1950s.

Wesley

Mind you, for those not in the know, that the SRR "Coaches" were not the wooden ones they use daily, but rather 6 steel, former Lackawanna, MU's along with the WM coach now on the Durbin & Greenbrier, a P70 from the RRMofPA and two Lackawanna MU coaches that were borrowed from the Gettysburg RR, for a total of 10 cars.

I was on the May 86 trip with my family - it was the same day as the NS 611 derailment, and my extended family though it was our train that wrecked! In the days before cell phones, people actually had to wait until you got home to know you were safe - oh, the horrors!

Kelly Anderson · **Joined:** Tue Sep 14, 2004 7:52 am **Posts:** 2477

Txhighballer · **Joined:** Mon Aug 23, 2004 10:49 am **Posts:** 773

Kelly Anderson wrote:

Alexander D. Mitchell IV wrote:

Yeah, those were the GOOD OL' DAYS!!!!

I don’t disagree that today’s technology and operations are better and more efficient, but I find it sad that today’s railroaders have as Linn puts it, “forgotten how to railroad”, with the innate fear of plain bearings and other items or events of any sort that smack of being sligthly removed from absolute routine. Like my own experience of where a class one refused to move a steam locomotive dead in tow for less than a thousand yards down a seldom used yard track because the driving boxes “would catch fire”.

Now that is sad. A thousand yards? I think a lot of railroad management now really has no operating experience, and therefore are completely clueless about what makes things go and why, and it's easier to say no and incur no risk than it is to say yes and risk the wrath of whomever. We just have to keep re-educating them....

Mark Jordan · **Joined:** Fri Nov 07, 2008 11:21 am **Posts:** 490

Quote:

I don’t disagree that today’s technology and operations are better and more efficient, but I find it sad that today’s railroaders have as Linn puts it, “forgotten how to railroad”, with the innate fear of plain bearings and other items or events of any sort that smack of being sligthly removed from absolute routine. Like my own experience of where a class one refused to move a steam locomotive dead in tow for less than a thousand yards down a seldom used yard track because the driving boxes “would catch fire”.

They don't want to re-learn it.

One of the young men I trained on a shortline/tourist RR now works for NS as an engineer. Another one is similarly on CSX. They love the old trains, and would do anything to help preserve and operate them. They learned on plain bearings, jointed class I track, and AlCo locomotives.

However, when you have to buy insurance in case you get "fired" for 90 days for doing the smallest error, it's hard to consider doing anything out of the routine. The corporate vs. union status of the RR's today makes anything out of the routine an impossibility. I suppose the corporate mentality is driven by the customer mentality and contracts for "just in time" service, etc. that makes modern day railroading a mental institution.