[PRCo] Re: I hear the train a comin'.......or......

[Fred Schneider]

At that speed and with ten cars they ought to be able to hand fire the Berkshire instead of using the stoker!!!!!  
I remember a great line, Herb, that came from a friend who visited the NKP back in the final days of steam out in Ohio.   He back home telling us that he had told that one of the jobs of a Nickel Plate road foreman of engines was, the event of an accident to beat the ICC inspector to the scene and make sure that someone inadvertently forgot to put a tape in the speed recorder on the engine.   The Nickel Plate had one way to run those engines across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois back in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and that was FAST.   

Lamentably, I never got a chance to see them on their home turf.  I was invited to go to Bellevue, Ohio with several local guys in 1957 and my father's response was to remind me of every place I had been that year and then to point out that I was going to stay home and do homework.  Stay home, yes.   Study?  Fat chance.   Comes under that old line about leading the horse to water.  I wasn't thirsty in 1957   

Took a few more years to wake up and discover that there was some merit in studying.   

Yes, I have my homework done for tomorrow's class.   I did wake up.   Now I have fun going to school.  

One question ...  What is the track speed?   I imagine it is class 2 ... 30 miles per hour for passenger and 25 for freight.   

In the late 1980s or early 1990s the Pennsy K4s that was on display on the Horseshoe Curve was operated from York to the village of Railroad over the old Northern Central.   I think that track was either class 1 or excepted ... 10 miles per hour.   They only had about three coaches behind the engine.   I was heckling the fireman at York before they left ..... "Will the stoker screw run slowly enough to fire this engine with this light load at the speed you are going to run it?"   The response was, "We're not even going to try.  We're hand firing."   



On Sep 18, 2011, at 1:50 PM, Herb Brannon wrote:

> the train I worked at Cuyahoga Valley Railroad this weekend
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjGTJvMXVI
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> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtuJj-KTj0>
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> videos by my railroad coworkers "on the ground"
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> Herb Brannon
> In Cuyahoga Valley National Park
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