Grassroots Railroad Sports?

NickD said:

An Erie Berkshire at Tuxedo, NY. Long nicknamed "the Weary Erie" for its outdated power, pokey schedules, and poor financial health, a lot of the laughs were stifled when these big 2-8-4s arrived on the scene and in 2 years time turned the Erie around into a fast freight hauler. Unfortunately it still had to deal with it's oddly routed mainline that, while double-tracked the whole way, was described as "from Nowhere-In-Particular to Nowhere-At-All." The mainline managed to miss every major city along the way. Binghamton, New York and Akron, Ohio were the biggest cities on the mainline between New York and Chicago. Buffalo, Rochester, Youngstown, Cleveland, Dayton, and Cincinnati were all at the end of branches from the mainline. Some said that “you could forget how much unpopulated land there was in the Northeast until you rode the Erie.”

Was this just poor route planning, an easement/access issue, or were those cities not large/important when the route was plotted?

Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) said:

NickD said:

An Erie Berkshire at Tuxedo, NY. Long nicknamed "the Weary Erie" for its outdated power, pokey schedules, and poor financial health, a lot of the laughs were stifled when these big 2-8-4s arrived on the scene and in 2 years time turned the Erie around into a fast freight hauler. Unfortunately it still had to deal with it's oddly routed mainline that, while double-tracked the whole way, was described as "from Nowhere-In-Particular to Nowhere-At-All." The mainline managed to miss every major city along the way. Binghamton, New York and Akron, Ohio were the biggest cities on the mainline between New York and Chicago. Buffalo, Rochester, Youngstown, Cleveland, Dayton, and Cincinnati were all at the end of branches from the mainline. Some said that “you could forget how much unpopulated land there was in the Northeast until you rode the Erie.”

Was this just poor route planning, an easement/access issue, or were those cities not large/important when the route was plotted?

I'm not certain. I'm not terribly familiar with Erie's early history other than it being used as a pawn to bilk Vanderbilt, that it was originally 6-foot broad gauge, and that there was a lot of bankruptcies. I'd suspect that, like the NYO&W, it may have had to do with the Town Bonding Act, and the larger cities were already being served and so they wouldn't subscribe to bonds. They got their access to a lot of the larger cities later on, through the purchase of smaller railroads that served them, like the Buffalo and New York City Railroad line to Buffalo. In a way though, the Erie's routing was a good thing for New York's Southern Tier region because it drove development in cities in that region, like Binghamton.

Erie had a modest collection of Baldwin AS16 road switchers and they were equipped with conventional electro-mechanical throttles, allowing them to be M.U.ed with other brands of locomotives, as shown here, with three of them paired with an A-B-B set of F-units at Cresco, PA.

The eastbound Phoebe Snow has just crossed the Tunkhannock Viaduct at Nicholson, PA.

An E-L Alco PA exits the ex-DL&W South Bergen Tunnel in Jersey City, NJ. Even before the E-L merger, Erie abandoned their Pavonia Terminal and shifted all operations over to the DL&W's newer Hoboken terminal.

While the Erie never heeded the siren call of opposed-piston power, the DL&W dabbled in Fairbanks-Morse ownership with twelve H-24-66 "Train Masters" and six H-16-44s, which stayed on the roster post-merger. Two of the H-16-44s are shown crossing the Delaware River on the Old Road Bridge. Sadly, the H-24-66s and Alco PAs, when retired in the mid '60s, sat in a yard for a long time, with the E-L offering to donate any of them to preservationist groups, but found no takers, and so marched them off to the scrapyard.

Still in Erie colors, an E-L Alco PA sprints across the wetlands at Rutherford.

E-L Fairbanks-Morses hide out under a coaling tower at Salamanca.

Not just an Alco C424, but the very first Alco Century series locomotive constructed. It was conveyed to Conrail, who then sold it to the D&H when they culled the orphans from their fleet. D&H rebuilt it into a C424m, which involved dumping the 2400hp V16 and replacing it with a 2000hp V12 and rewiring the entire unit, converting it to basically a C420. It was later sold to Genesee & Wyoming, and then to Minnesota Commercial Railroad, where it became their #62. I'm not sure if it still exists there or not, as the last photos I can find of it are from 2003 but I can't find any mention of it being scrapped.

What do you do with railroad artifacts ?  Rust is rust, but then there is patina....So what do I do with stuff found during the archeology dig in my back yard, well actually while turning over my tomato patch ? 

Should it be left as is and mounted for display or de-rusted and painted black as I assume it was originally, then mounted.

Piece in question:

I am sure there is more to be found, this was a 10 X 10 area of what was once the site of the Rindgemere RR station in East Rochester NH. I have also found a couple box car lead seals with the B&M logo, one in the same area and one about 70 feet away where my beans were planted, the threaded end of a couple tie rods with the nuts still on them. They may have been part of the old RR bridge, but seem to be to far from where the bridge was.

Note:  MC = Maine Central

In reply to lrrs :

Most of that stuff was bare metal or red oxidxe primer. If you want to make it a display piece and aren't concerned with historical correctness, you could shot-blast it and rub it with oil or paint it black. If you're donating to a historical society or selling it, you might be better off leaving it as is and letting the owner do what they want with it. Don't really have to worry about hurting value too much because that sort of stuff isn't hyper valuable, like lanterns or builder's plates or whistles or bells.

Erie-Lackawanna E8 #833, formerly Erie #833. Note the odd little bug deflector over the headlight. This was not an Erie thing, but was in fact added after the Erie-Lackawanna merger, and was oddly added to the E-units but not the F-units. The #833 was the last locomotive assigned to the Cleveland-Youngstown commuter train, which ended in January of 1977. It was then renumbered to Conrail #4022 and was one of their trio of office car special E8s. Of the three Conrail E8s, the #4022 was not heavily upgraded electrically like its sisters were, but it had the best engines, which were culled out of former Reading Baldwin VO-1000 switchers that had been repowered with 1200hp EMD 567s. Bennett Levin and his Juniata Terminal Company purchased #4022 and another Conrail office car E8, #4021, from CSX in 2001 with the overall goal of reuniting #4021 (PRR #5711) with the third Conrail E8 #4020 (PRR #5809), which he previously purchased from Norfolk Southern. Levin never had any concrete plans on what to do with #4022/#833, other than to store it properly and prevent as much deterioration as possible. He wasn't that interested in it, because it wasn't a PRR locomotive (he restored #4021 and #4020 to PRR colors and ran excursions with them until PTC shut that down) so he sold it off to the New York & Greenwood Lake in 2006, who returned it to Erie colors and the #833 number. It was parked at Port Jervis and basically abandoned there when the NY&GL went out of business in 2012. Erie #833 did go down to Spencer, NC for the Streamliners At Spencer event in 2014 and Levin said an NS Road Foreman asked him to look at it when it would not load. It was running on just the #2 engine with the #1 engine tagged down with internal water leaks. Nothing was in the condition it was when it left Juniata Terminal back in 2006.

In reply to NickD :

As of this summer, #833 is no longer in Port Jervis, nor are any of the passenger cars. The #935 road switcher (not sure of the type designation) was still there when I went through.

In reply to 02Pilot :

#833 has gone to New Jersey to SMS Rail Services, along with the passenger cars, some of which were in rough shape. The Alco RS-3, #935, was supposed to go to Delaware-Lackawanna, which would have been a good home for it, but some sort of legal issues has cropped up. The other NY&GL equipment at Passaic has also been parceled off to new owners, and I believe all of it was saved. I know the one GP9 at Passaic is supposed to come north to be used on the Adirondack

An E-L RS-3 with a westbound passenger train at Port Jervis. Look, there is actually only one passenger car, tucked at the very rear, with three RPOs and two express cars at the front. Mail contracts were much more lucrative than passenger service, and so late in the private passenger service era, a lot of trains essentially became mail trains with a passenger car or two tacked on the back.

A similarly mail-heavy passenger train at West Cameron, NY, with a TOFC for good measure. Erie-Lackawanna was a pioneer in Trailer-On-Flat-Car trains and they made a good chunk of the E-L's money through the '60s.

SD45s at Millrift with general merchandise. While many railroads steered clear of the 45-series due to it's engine troubles and reputation as a fuel hog, Erie-Lackawanna purchased SD45s, SDP45s and SD45-2s. D&H actually purchased three SD45s, three of EMD's four demonstrators and the first EMDs ever purchased by the D&H, and in 1971, after just two years of owning them, they traded them off to the E-L for a trio of U33Cs. After Conrail was formed, the SD45s were sent back to the D&H, who immediately turned around two years later and sold them off to Mexico.

Three Alco Centuries and two SD45s at Waverly. Out of Alco's Century series, E-L only purchased the nearly-identical C424 and C425 models, avoiding any of the other variants. 

Erie-Lackawanna F-units in helper service provide a push over the Starrucca Viaduct. I like the boxcar with the Ship It On The Frisco logo

A big GE U36C and a U25B head eastbound through Corry, PA. It's surprising how much taller a U36C is than a U25B. The U33s and U36s introduced the "hammerhead" radiators that became a GE hallmark for decades.

Ex-DL&W MU cars and an Alco PA at Hoboken.