[PRCo] Re: East Broad Top Railroad won't run this summer | News | CentreDaily.com

[Fred Schneider]

I only personally visited two of Sloan Cornell's railroads.   Penn View Mountain back in the 1960s … wasn't impressed but can't say too much.   Taxes on gross receipts from tourism are not unusual.   Right here in Lancaster we have a tax on area hotels to support a convention center.   Put that into real perspective … the convention center is downtown.   What this tax really means is a tax on suburban hotels to pay to build a downtown hotel that competes with an almost bankrupt downtown hotel that was built in the 1970s … but it kept the politicos happy.   It brings conventions to Lancaster and thus the politicians can say, "Look what we did for you."   Sorry Bob but I am a cynic about politicians trying to correct that which cannot be changed.   

Gettysburg?   I visited it after I had the perspective of working for quite a few years in engine and shop service for the Strasburg Railroad.   I observed the owners teenage daughter working in sandals as a railroad brakeman.   She looked to be about 15 or 16 the day we were there.    Occupations such as a railroad fireman, engineer, conductor, brakeman are considered hazardous and are prohibited under federal law for those persons under age 18 unless they have graduated from high school.  I think they can work at 17 if school administrators certify that they have gone as far in school as they will ever go.   There were some other things which disturbed me that I cannot remember at this point which is several decades later.   All I can remember now is having said to Ed Lewis, "I've seen enough, I think I want to move on before I see an accident."    The chap I was with, Lewis, was my boss at Strasburg and also, at that time, Strasburg's President.

Therefore it came as no surprise to me when they dropped the crown sheet on that steam locomotive because there wasn't enough water in the firebox.   

What I was taught when I first began firing locomotives was, as soon as you climb into the cab of a locomotive, the first things you do, before anything else ….

1) look at the water glasses….

2)  blow down the water glasses to make sure the passages in them are not plugged.

3)  confirm the water glass reading using the gauge cocks.

Add water if necessary and possible, or run like hell ...

Then check the fire …. 

It becomes an instinctive thing for a fireman … each and every time you climb into the cab your eye falls on that water glass first and your hand reaches for the water glass blowdown valves.

What I was able to unearth from my channels, including a pipeline into the FRA and people at Strasburg who served on the rules committee, was that Cornell's fireman at Gettysburg was not properly trained; that the water glass was never blown down; that it was clogged with sludge and therefore failed to show how much water was in the boiler.   The fireman said he was surprised that the engine failed to use the normal amount of water on that particular trip and that by itself should have been sufficient warning that the water glasses were clogged.   Note I said glasses.   Engines have two of them.   Why wasn't the engineer also paying attention to his glass?   Were they both untrained?  Well, I just now went looking on line and found the FRA Report of the accident … says the same thing I was told.   

Here is the FRA report on the accident.   

     http://www.communityhotline.com/upload/SIR9605.pdf

My comments on it? 

     (a)  One can only shake one's head at the bewildering lack of understanding about how to maintain and run a steam engine.   You get the feeling that every time those guys opened their mouths to give testimony, they attached feet to the insides of their mouth with Superglue.   

     (b)  Sloan Cornell's son, testified that he gained experience by surreptitiously firing Pennsylvania Railroad engines when he was about 15 years old.  He also said he was 48 at the time of the accident in 1995.  That would have him born in in 1947 and firing PRR steam engines in 1962, five years after the PRR quit running steam.   Shall we be charitable and suggest a typographical error?

     (c)  Note the limited amount of variation cited in boiler water level in the water glass (1/2 inch on the plugged glass and the expert testimony that water level in a water glass will bounce up and down as much as four inches).   Let me add something to that … that expert testimony probably means on level track.   Going up hill on a 1.6% grade at full throttle, the entire glass will be black with water.   You really have no idea how much water is really in the boiler.   Then come over the crest of the hill and push the throttle part way closed and the water will drop down half way or more to the real level.   Then some doofus comes across the highway crossing in front of you without looking and the engineer dumps the air and all the water sloshes to the front of the boiler and the glass shows nothing.   The Gettysburg Railway is an up-hill, down-dale railroad.   With that kind of a profile, if they only had 1/2 inch of sloshing in the water glass, those glasses or the spindles were plugged shut and the people should have either enough brains or enough education to understand it or they should not be playing with 400 degree water in pressure vessels.  

     (c)  The scale in the plugged spindles?   Scale normally forms on the bottom of a vessel when it is boiled like the bottom of a coffee pot.   Forming in the spindles?   I would agree with Lin's testimony as CMO at Strasburg but I would also suggest that if the glasses were spindles were blown out regularly as they should have been, no crap would have accumulated.   Simply bad operating practice. 

    (d)  Notice in the report the unique design of boiler stay bolts that permitted progressive collapse of the crown sheet instead of allowing the boiler to rocket off the locomotive frame.   I had been told this by several people before reading the FRA report this afternoon.   Can you imagine how many passengers in the open car behind the locomotive would have been killed if it had been a conventional US firebox design instead of this Canadian configuration? 

    (e)  I was bothered by the design of the gauge cocks built into the water glass so that plugged spindles leading to a water glass will also make the gauge cocks also fail to work.    That does not come out in the investigation.

Bob, that sort of thing gave tourist railroading a black eye.  You don't simply march in, buy a steam engine and pronounce yourself qualified to run it.   I am not going to say that sort of thing did not happen in the railroad industry in the past.   But I am thankful I worked for a railroad where we hired a former man who was at the top of the seniority list when he retired … a man who knew how to run steam … to train us.  Unlike the FRA, I have no problem with not having an organized school to teach people how to run engines.   The railroads never did.   You started as a fireman, worked with every engineman on the division and eventually got promoted to the right side of the cab.   Maybe that needs to change now but that was the way it was done then.   The instructor at Strasburg was a man named Harry Grimes who had worked for the Reading Railroad and had  risen in seniority to get the Harrisburg - Allentown passenger train just before it was taken off.  He had worked a lot of years on steam.   Our air brake instruction and maintenance people came from the Reading.   Our boiler overhaul training and inspection cadre came from the Pennsylvania.   Eventually we trained our own.   There was a great story about the PRR people confirming that the side firebox sheets on 90 were so badly worn that they had to be replaced and they told us that isn't something little railroads do.   Linn Moedinger orchestrated doing it anyway in spite of being told he shouldn't and when the job was done the Pennsy people came back and inspected it and said, "My God, this is better than work we've seen come out of Altoona."   Where did Linn and his shop forces go from there?   Today they run a contract business.   You probably read that they had been doing some work for the EBT.   They have been doing some work to keep UP 3950 and 844 on the road.  Florence and Cripple Creek (later Rio Grand Southern) 20 has been at Strasburg for years on a contract for the Colorado Narrow Gauge Museum to overhaul when they have time … cheaper that way.  The tiny Strasburg grew from using scavenged machinery to new stuff because the old belt driven stuff slows down work.   There are hundreds of guys there now.    Have shop, will fix.  

But I am a bit scared of amateurs playing with machinery that they don't understand.   I know that everyone of us on this list, myself included, probably grew up playing with other peoples' toys.   But we all did it under supervision, right?   I ran the local PRR interlocking plant in high school.   I've run trains down the PRR mainline at 75 mph.  I've run streetcars on Pittsburgh Railways tracks.   We've all done things like that but we had people teaching us who knew how.   But we do not need people ill trained people sitting on powder kegs.

Now let's change subject.

By the way, I was not aware that the Everett Railroad, which I knew to be a successor of the Huntington and Broad Top Mountain, had moved, bought two parts of the former PRR lines between Hollidaysburg and Bedford, and now has offices in Duncansville.   They also have bought back an old H&BTM engine that has had several other owners since 1954.   See this link….

     http://www.everettrailroad.com/index.aspx



On May 21, 2012, at 1:07 PM, robert netzlof wrote:

>> Remember Sloan Cornell's various
>> operations?  Penn View Mountain Scenic Railroad ---
>> gone ---
> 
> Enemy action in that case. The township in which the railroad was located had, sometime in the 19th century, enacted a whopping license fee and gross receipts tax on amusement parks, presumably to discourage the frivolity and licentiousness, not to mention sabbath breaking, attendant on such enterprises. Come the 1960s, the township supervisors dredged up the ordinance, declared the Penn View Mountain to be an amusement park, and sat back to watch the money roll in.
> 
> Cornell moved his equipment to a purpose-built shed in Blairsville and entered into discussions with Penn Central to lease the Indiana branch, with a view to becoming a common carrier, and thus not an amusement park. That came to naught, but he was able to obtain trackage at Gettysburg.
> 
>> ...the engine went to Gettysburg?
> 
> Along with all the rest of his equipment.
> 
>> Knox and Kane … I think the scrapping was finished in 2010.
> 
> Not quite. There are still quite a few miles of track in situ.
> 
> Again, enemy action, this time in the form of a tornado which took down the Kinzua Bridge and a local bad-ass who thought it fun to torch the engine house.
> 
>> Gettysburg Railroad …. the boiler explosion resulted in a total
>> rewrite of FRA rules for tourist steam railroads
> 
> That one must be laid on Cornell or perhaps his son, who was the head cheese at Gettysburg at the time, Sloan having relocated to the Knox and Kane by then. Whether it resulted from poor finances or a poor attitude toward maintenance is debatable.
> 
> Omitted from the foregoing is his brief ownership of the former P&E from Johnsonburg to Irvineton, a clear stab at establishing freight service. It may be that Cornell's early bad experience with the township bent his thinking too much toward operating as a common carrier, thus causing resources which could have improved the tourist operation to be diverted into providing for freight service which never quite materialized or evaporated after money had been spent to serve it.
> 
> Bob Netzlof a/k/a Sweet Old Bob
> 
>