Monthly Calendar-Report for August 2009

A-Bone.

—That’s what hot-rodders called ‘em. “A-Bone.”
The August 2009 entry of my Oxman hot-rod calendar is a 1929 Model-A roadster on a 1932 Ford frame.
A fairly standard procedure.
This car also has the doors welded shut, and then smoothed to take out the door creases.
The only way in is to vault the side.
And of course there’s no roof to bang your head, and it better not rain.
I don’t see wipers on this car either.
Apparently this car has been through numerous rebuilds, including changing the front-end.
It had a track-T nose which was swapped to a ‘32 Ford grill-shell, but unfortunately it’s been chopped.
That is, it lacks the bottom.
The complete ‘32 Ford grill-shell is gorgeous.
My friend Art Dana (“DAY-nuh”), the retired Regional Transit bus-driver with fairly severe Parkinson’s, had a Model-A roadster hot-rod, but it was on a heavily altered 1946 Ford chassis.
It was flat-gray, with the full 1932 Ford grill-shell. Gorgeous.
It had a souped-up ‘56 Pontiac V8 — the car pictured has a 327 Chevy.
It also has triple two-barrels. Art tried triple two-barrels on his Pontiac, but had to give up. It kept backfiring through the carburetors. He had to install a Holley four-barrel.
Regrettably, Art had to sell his hot-rod. The car was due for inspection, and the wiring was all screwed up. There also was the impossibility of 6-volt lights on a 12-volt system.
I suppose I should have helped him; I successfully rewired an old Chevrolet pickup once.
But there was no time. Inspection was in two weeks.

Photo by the so-called “old guy” with the dreaded and utterly reprehensible Nikon D100 camera.

Pedal-to-the-metal.

Art swapped his hot-rod for the so-called “Cherry-Bomb” pictured at left, a 1949 Ford custom hot-rod.
Art has built many hot-rods, and custom motorcycles, over the years, and always had one cardinal rule:
“The bitch has gotta run!”
Ain’ no fun havin’ a hot-rod, or custom motorbike, if ya can’t use it.
A few weeks ago Art’s Cherry-Bomb was in my garage over my pit.
We were trying to remove the steering-box, so it could be rebuilt.
We were unsuccessful, but a friend familiar with 1949-‘51 Fords removed it.
They eventually got it reinstalled, so Art backed it out of my garage.
Art is a wreck with the Parkinson’s, but he put the hammer down.
“The bitch has gotta run!”
A hot-rod epiphany.


W-30. (Photo by David Newhardt.)

—The August 2009 entry of my Motorbooks Musclecars calendar is a 1970 W-30 Oldsmobile 4-4-2; one of the most collectible of all musclecars.
By 1970 all the old musclecar names had become rather moribund. The premier G-T-O Pontiac was “The Judge;” and the premier 4-4-2 Oldsmobile was now the W-30.
The original G-T-O and 4-4-2 were still being made, but “The Judge” and the “W-30” were the fastest and most powerful.
Plus Oldsmobile was trying to make the 4-4-2 handle well, as was Buick with its GS-model musclecar.
That’s like trying to get the Queen Mary to pirouette. The average musclecar was rather large; mid-size.
Plus they were saddled with the heavy old tractor suspension layout — a solid rear-axle.
Hit a bump with one wheel of a tractor axle, and the opposite wheel gets effected.
Plus a solid rear axle is heavy. The differential is part of it. Too much vertical momentum to keep the tires in contact with the pavement on a bumpy road.
But add anti-rollbars front and rear, plus chassis tuning, and they could handle fairly well.
But look out if you’re racing it in an MGB — it might plow you into the weeds.
A case of incredible mind-bending power in a heavy, unbalanced car. The sledgehammer approach.
I once witnessed a race at Lime Rock sportscar circuit in Connecticut between a sledgehammer Camaro and a scalpel Porsche 911 (“POOR-sha 9-11”).
The Camaro was an aluminum 427, so was blindingly fast in a straight line.
Throw a corner at it and it was a handful — the Porsche won.
The Camaro also broke in practice; broke its oil-pump. That’s back when the garage-area was a large open grassy field; the “paddock.”
The Camaro’s engine was swapped in the open — no closed garages.
The MGB was tractor-layout too; but not the Lotus Elan (“eee-LAHN”), which would have danced circles around the Olds. —Just don’t expect to buy groceries with a Lotus Elan.
The W-30 Oldsmobile was a fabulous musclecar, but not the GSX or the “Judge.”


Two Pennsy K4 Pacifics (4-6-2) lead the 10-car “Manhattan Limited” into Chicago in 1939. (Photo by Otto C. Perry©.)

—The August 2009 entry of my Audio-Visual Designs All-Pennsy B&W Calendar is two Pennsy K4 Pacifics leading a passenger-train into Chicago.
A track crew is also installing crossover switches; the train has to go slow.
All my train calendars are rather dull, although the Norfolk Southern Employees’ Calendar is fairly dramatic.
I run the Audio-Visual Designs All-Pennsy B&W calendar because it demonstrates Pennsy’s greatest mistake: doubleheading.
The K4 Pacific is a late-‘teens design.
Pennsy steam-locomotive development essentially stopped with the K4.
The were investing HUGE sums into electrification, and the fabulous GG1 (“Gee-Gee-One”) electric locomotive.
Electrification also left them with a surplus of steam locomotives; so many it was imprudent to develop better steam power.
But train weights were getting beyond what a single K4 could successfully handle, so they started doubleheading.
Doubleheading is two locomotive crews; twice the expense.
It wasn’t a single crew controlling multiple units; what you see now with MU-ed diesel locomotives.
But Pennsy could afford it; they were fabulously rich.
So while competitors were fielding better steam locomotives, Pennsy was getting by doubleheading older power on its trains.
From about 1920 through 1940, Pennsy did essentially no steam-locomotive development, so -a) they missed out on Lima (“LYM-uh;” not “LEE-muh”) SuperPower, and -b) they didn’t have a freight steam-engine to deal with the massive WWII carloadings, so had to go with plans for a steam-engine from a competitor (the Chesapeake & Ohio T1 2-10-4, reconfigured as their J1).
They had two excuses: -1) their massive investment in electrification; and -2) the surplus of steam-locomotives electrification left them with.
Their biggest mistake, if there was one, was deciding it was more prudent to doublehead ancient designs. —The K4 was extraordinary when developed, but in a few years it was an antique.
After WWII, Pennsy tried to develop state-of-the-art steam engines, but had little success.
By then diesel locomotives made more sense. The last steam engines Pennsy used were from the ‘20s and earlier — except the Js.
Pennsy made two grievous errors: —1) was holding off on dieselization too long; and —2) was doubleheading.


A Norfolk Southern double-stack train passes the newly restored Southern Railway depot at Anniston, AL. (Photo by Ty Burgin.)

—The August 2009 entry of my Norfolk Southern Employees calendar is a Norfolk Southern double-stack train.
Double-stack is the technology railroading gravitated to in the new century — although its an old technology.
It’s a variation of the trailer-on-flatcar (“TOFC”) technology that began after the war.
The first double-stack service was instituted by Southern Pacific Railroad in the late ‘80s.
The containers are the same steel shipping-boxes used on container ships.
Wheel-less, the containers are stacked two high in well-cars, rendering about a 20-foot stack height — usually the loading-height to clear double-stacks is 24 feet or so.
Bridges had to be raised and tunnels opened up to clear double-stacks.
The tunnels on the old Pennsylvania Railroad mainline would not clear double-stacks at first, so were opened up. —There were only a few.
The massive “Heartland Corridor” project across WV and VA is to open up all the tunnels on the old Norfolk & Western mainline to clear double-stacks.
I remember driving a bus out West Ave. along the old Water-Level. The tracks had been visibly lowered under a footbridge to clear double-stacks.
The Water-Level had the earliest double-stack service into the east because of no tunnels. Tracks could be lowered under bridges.
As I recall, the old Erie main, now Norfolk Southern, across the bottom of New York, from Buffalo, also was tunnel-free.
Plus it was originally configured for six feet between the rails, the original Erie track-gauge — so had bigger load-size limits.
By comparison, the old Baltimore & Ohio West End, the original B&O main, is very restrictive. —Most of it is still two tracks, originally it all was, but it’s very tight.
Once B&O accessed Pittsburgh, that became its main. That line is more open. The West End is now mainly coal — plus it has a number of treacherous grades. One that’s especially steep faces loaded coal-trains headed east.
Photographer Burgin is apparently not that serious; i.e. entering a slew of photos into Norfolk Southern’s employee calendar contest every year.
He’s only using a Nikon D80, which probably would have been fine for what I do. (I have a Nikon D100.)
My nephew in northern Delaware has a D80, and does quite well with it.
Burgin’s photo is comparable to anything a D100 could grab.
And the D100 is fairly old. Nikon has fielded updates of the same camera; first the D200, then the D300, and now the D5000. —There may be something even more recent than that.
Supposedly the Canon “Rebel” is the supreme digital camera, although I always felt the Nikons were comparable.
And I don’t know as the D80 was available when I bought my D100, which was at least six years ago.
I also don’t know if the D80 will do multiple frames, although this picture looks like one of multiple frames.
Usually one shoots too early with a single shot.
Filling the frame with an onrushing locomotive is nearly impossible.
You need multiple shots; the equivalent of the old Nikon motor-drive.


Train 201, a peddler, southbound on the Abingdon Branch from Abingdon, VA to W. Jefferson, NC, crosses the Holston River on Bridge 11 — the highest and longest of the 108 bridges on the rugged 55-mile line. It’s October of 1955. (Photo by O. Winston Link.)

—The August 2009 entry of my O. Winston Link “Steam and Steel” calendar isn’t much, but I include it because it depicts the railroad world I was born into — a peddler freight propelled by a wheezing steam locomotive delivering assorted freightcars to sidings out along the railroad.
Truck freight delivery wasn’t as established as it is now, so that more often freight was delivered by placing boxcars on sidings.
The town of Haddonfield, south of where we lived in south Jersey, had a slew of railroad sidings.
Also seen were “team tracks” next to railroad stations. Those stations often had a freight-house. Freight would get unloaded into wagons (propelled by a team of horses — although by the late ‘40s, when I was born, the horse-and-wagon had been replaced by the motor-truck.)
A peddler freight from the yards in Camden, powered by a wheezing Pennsy Consolidation (2-8-0), would trundle out to Haddonfield to place cars on those sidings.
This usually included a hopper-car of anthracite coal, which got shoved up onto a coal-trestle in a coal reseller’s yard. On the trestle the hopper-car could be unloaded down through its hoppers into dump-trucks below, for delivery to customers.
There still were a few houses heated by coal furnaces. And anthracite burned cleaner.
Our house was heated by fuel-oil, but Davidson’s house behind us was still coal.
A dump-truck would back up Davidson’s driveway, and then dump all its coal into a chute into the basement.
My paternal grandfather’s house in Camden had once been heated by coal. It still had the coal chute.
But it had been converted to fuel-oil.
At that time railroads were the main means of shipping freight, even to its final destination.
Peddler freights were expensive and time-consuming.
Railroading has since gravitated to what it does best: move vast quantities of freight over long distances.
A sterling example of this is the double-stack freight-train. 200 or more shipping containers get moved from a loading yard to an unloading yard, usually far from the loading yard. (The loading yard may have been transfer from a container ship.)
Trucks perform what was once the duty of the peddler freight; delivery to final destination.
A fabulous highway system has been built, far more flexible than railroad sidings, but it’s not very good shipping freight over long distances.
Which is where railroads shine. Stick 200 or more shipping-containers on a train, and then drag the whole kabosh from pillar-to-post at highway speeds.
A truck might be able to drag two trailers — over highways two or three times the width of the railroad; often wider.
All a railroad needs is low gradients — 1% or less is good. Anything more than 1% (even 1%) will require additional power. —Exceed 4% and the drive-wheels won’t adhere to the railheads.
The railroad might have to wiggle all over to get that gradient. —Which is why they often follow river valleys.

Neither my Ghosts WWII warbirds calendar nor my Oxman legendary sportscar calendar are worth running this month.
—My Ghosts WWII warbirds calendar is a Grumman “Duck” amphibious biplane (“bye-plain”); that is, two wings.
Excuse me, but I’ve never liked multi-winged aircraft — they look ancient compared to some of the fabulous WWII warbirds.
The Duck is all struts and cable-braces. Even on the tail surfaces.
—My Oxman legendary sportscar calendar is a black 1936 Delahaye 135M Competition Convertible.
Fairly dramatic (i.e. not a Hitler Mercedes), but still a 1930s cars. All the ‘30s styling cues. Upright radiator grill, and pontoon fenders.
To my mind sportscars didn’t really start looking good until the ‘50s.
The best was the XK-E Jaguar — although the Lotus Elan looks pretty good too.