Paul,

I remember these trips and there was a "Bad" Pall that hung over the entire day:

-Crewman being nasty to everyone!
-Forming "Human Chains" to keep everyone back.
-Crewman physically threatening passengers (myself included)
-Repeated slipping to get out of Brockway, Pa.;this they blamed to leaves on the rails!
-Running out of fuel and having to get an online coal operator to open up to fill the
tender.
-Getting pulled back to Kittaning, Pa at near 11 o'clock pm!
-Getting stuck in a tunnel causing sickness among some passengers!

This was a "Shock" to my system after having just ridden the trips out of Jacksonville, Fl and speaking to Bill Purdy which was a Class operation.

It's been a long time but if one of the original Operators would contact me, I still have some questions after all these years!

My memory of Steam Tours (and Allegheny Railroad Co. was "a project of Steam Tours, Inc.") is that the youngest members I saw back then were in their mid-30's, so anyone left would be late 70's at youngest. The video linked to in a post above that shows the P&S trips had some inaccurate dates, among them when the engine was sold to Rails Diversified, Inc., which was somewhere around 1979, certainly not before the 1977 trips. I know the engine was in the Brownsville Monongahela roundhouse for several years in that period, and actually never made it back to the Akron area after the 1977 Kent trips.

Regarding the inbound move over the EL, in my post above:

I found a letter to the editor in an old newspaper, from Steam Tours, thanking the personnel on the Erie Lackawanna for their cooperation in making this move. It is signed by W. B. Smith, Secretary-Treasurer, Akron Ohio. Not much of a lead, but perhaps helpful in locating any of the old officers of that company.

The move was made on June 24, 1973. It was memorable to this young railfan for a couple of reasons:

I had never seen steam pass through my hometown - pretty impressive

Also, earlier that day, Dad and I were set up in our usual train watching spot, when an EL freight stopped to make a setout. (We had no idea about the impending steam movement). The engineer stopped the engines directly across from us, climbed down, and announced that "There's a STEAMER coming out of Hornell!" (I'm pretty sure he was speaking in capital letters). We rarely had any direct contact with train crews. His enthusiasm, and the courtesy shown to us, made it one of my best railfan days, ever.

JR

Bill Smith was (to 19 y/o me anyway) older, at least 40's. So, he'd be 80 something now.

I don't recall the time but it was a very long day. Fortunately my grandmother, who graciously accompanied me on the trip since I wasn't old enough to drive yet, had packed a large picnic basket with plenty of food. I do recall it was after dark when we got back, and I'm pretty sure she wasn't quite as impressed by just how long the trip was as I was.



Well, "restored to RDG 2102 appearance" would be stretching things a bit. The elephant ears were removed. She was put back to roughly Reading appearance. The tender was lettered for the "Allegheny Railroad", which was the name of a large river and mountains in the area. It was a fabrication of Steam Tours and never actually existed aside from the lettering as far as I know.

Here's a photo of her with GTW 4070, wearing what, as far as I can recall, is the same paint scheme.

https://historicpittsburgh.org/islandor ... 3.1.018.PF

It wasn't used as a canteen. As mentioned on the flyer, it was parked on a siding at/near Oakland at a coal mine. The train was stopped and the water transferred into the tender. The tank car was never in the consist.

This lead to at least 2 events. 1) A 1/2 hour or so delay parked on the mainline while they pumped the water into the tender. Let's just say most passengers weren't overly impressed by that. 2) On a more personal note, it had a young railfan, who was heading for Brookville, wondering why on earth a coal mine had a tank car spotted on the loadout tracks. What possible use could they have for that? We made the trip frequently to our hunting camp, drove past the mine and I'd never seen one there before. Later that day, the mystery would be solved when we filled up from it.

Whether or not Firestone objected I don't know. I do recall hearing they had a good relationship with them, since Steam Tours was based in Akron. I'm not sure what problem they'd have with making it into a water tank for a couple weekends, but I really don't know.

Correct, it was still owned by Steam Tours when it was in Brownsville, and did some trips in the Pittsburgh area, both long trips on Conrail to Altoona, including the infamous Horse Shoe Curve fiasco, and also some shorter trips to Brownsville on the P&LE from the P&LE station.

Some of both also featured GTW 4070. I don't recall dates for any of them.

I did a bit of work on the engines in Brownsville, just the typical grunt work that a young volunteer kid gets assigned, cleaning, scraping, painting etc.

Bob -

The tank car may not have been in THAT consist, but I seem to recall that the Reading 4-8-4 ran a trip out of Chicago with the Firestone tank car in the consist. Somewhere I have a photo of the T1 going through South Holland, Illinois, but of course, I can't find that photo right now. Maybe someone else has one.

Les

I did a bit of checking on the internet and found this photo of 2102 on what is most likely a fantrip and which shows the tank car in the consist:

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... id=1929896

Not sure if this is the same trip that I recall (which was on the old Grand Trunk Western) but it sure could have been.

Les

There was a trip on the recently-single-tracked GTW mainline east of Durand where 2102 had a bearing issue and blocked the mainline for a while. The pictures I have seen of this train did have the Firestone tank car in it. If you wonder why GTW wouldn't allow steam excursions in the 1970s and 1980s - despite being very excursion-friendly - that is why.

I thought I could find a photo of this somewhere. My longtime friend Bob Farkas photographed 2102 extensively when it was in the Akron area from the late '60s to the late '70s. Here it is on it's first post-restoration test run, on a Sunday in August of 1968, with the Firestone tank car, passing Akron Union Station, on the B&O eastbound main, heading for the PRR branch to Hudson (originally CA&C) to turn on the wye there before returning to the PRR South Akron yard/roundhouse. By the time 2102 returned to Akron in April of 1971 for it's trips on the AC&Y the tank car was no longer around. I have heard a couple of different versions of how Steam Tours came to have that tank. One version is that Firestone either loaned or donated the car to them, the other was that it was expropriated for awhile.


http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPi ... id=3451833

I road both Kittanning to Brockway and Brookville to Kittanning the next year. The trip to Brockway was excellent, fall colors, even saw Erie Lackawanna in town. The next year my dad was pissed we were so late back to Brookville. He waited hours for me. The first trip was when I was 14. Hard to believe those trips were almost 50 years ago!!

I had just graduated from High School in '74, and remember hearing about these - and although it really wasn't far away from me, driving any distance to an unknown area in search of chasing a steam train wasn't in my personal skill set - yet.

The local railfans had a field day with these trips, including the 'Super Shawmut Fan', Jim Breakey (sp?), dec'd, who did an entire show to the local railfan groups - I got to see that much.

At least I can say that was the 'last' major steam or excursion event in my back yard that I missed, never made that mistake again.

Funny you mentioned that out of fuel story, that would have been in Early Conrail; I heard about the 4070 and that 'push the train in Ohio' episode years later, and it was why anybody in Conrail that remembered that would not allow a steam trip on the main again because of breakdowns. Took years to get over that, you had people with long memories that literally had to retire and die off.

No, that was only part of the problem... There was a much bigger issue.

They ran some double header trips with 2102 and 4070 from Pittsburgh to Altoona and back. A long run with a very long train of somewhat random coaches, and locos that were unproven on day long mainline trips at speed. I must have ridden the first weekend I guess as things went OK on my trip but we were pretty late getting home. That certainly wasn't all that unusual for those kind of trips.

It was on a later trip that things got real ugly. GTW #4070 threw an eccentric rod and bent a side rod as they were ascending Horseshoe curve. They dumped the air when the rods started flailing around, and the slack action and likely uneven braking on the ragtag coaches broke the train into three pieces. The resulting mess took hours to clean up and make the engine suitable to limp home or wherever they took her to get her out of the way. Since it was a loaded passenger train with crews trying to put things together, it shut the whole mainline down, or damn near. (I wasn't there, so I don't know if they were able to run any trains at all by it or not, but reports were it was a total cluster and delayed lots of trains.)

They also gave some real serious thought about "What would have happened if there was some little old lady who just happened to be walking between cars when the train broke into 3 pieces? She could have fall down between the cars and since they don't stop instantly at speed, that really wouldn't end well...."

You're correct about the end results though, for many many years after, Conrail simply said "nope" if you even thought about running an excursion.

That would have been great to see. We lived near Freeport, the southern end of the Pittsbug (no h) and Shawmut lines and have a camp near Brookville. The Shawmut was one of the big attractions in town for this young railfan, and far more impressive than the then fledging Brookville Locomotive Works. Brookville did give my grandfather and I a tour of the entire shops, but that took about 5 minutes, and only took that long since we spent time looking at each loco they were building. Let's just say nobody was mistaking the place for Lima. It looked like a typical truck shop.

The Shawmut on the other hand was a thriving business with frequent coal trains and lots of tall trestles. I'd see bits and pieces of the line every trip, so to finally get the chance to ride on it was a dream come true. I suspect it's why my grandmother agreed to go along on the first trip. I'm very glad I was able to ride the line, it's some of my best rare mileage, due to the personal connection. It makes me sad to see that much of it is gone now.

There was one other factor:
Just about the time that enough "institutional memory" of those horrid experiences had faded, Stanley Crane rode an office car special around the Curve shortly after taking the company reins, and shortly thereafter the Curve's fourth track (and fourth tracks elsewhere) was removed. I had division bosses and yardmasters on CR, the "railfan" ones that would push for, say, PRR 1361 or BM&R 2102 to do an Altoona-Johnstown round trip or the like, tell me the issue that always made it a "non-starter" was that now-reduced track capacity.