Monthly Calendar-Report for November 2012

Train 20R diverts to a drag-track off Track Two in front of beloved Alto Tower, at right. (Photo by BobbaLew with Phil Faudi.)

—The November 2012 entry of my own calendar is a Norfolk Southern freight diverging off of Track Two, which it came down The Hill, into vast Altoona yard.
The train is being diverted to a slow track.
The train is heavy, and probably used Track Two to avoid “The Slide,” atop The Hill, on Track One.
“The Slide” is steep.
Track Two, not as steep, would not be as frightful.
Alto Tower is now closed. (It’s open here.) It still stands, but no longer controls train-movements through Altoona.
The tracks have also been reconfigured through Altoona. Pockets for helper-locomotives needed for The Hill have been relocated, and now all tracks used are now straight through.
Track Three used to diverge off Track Two right past Altoona’s Amtrak station.
Now Track Two just runs straight through and becomes Track Three up The Hill.
Through eastbound trains down The Hill use Tracks One or Two, so now a crossover was installed to get eastbound trains from One over to the eastbound express-track past Altoona’s Amtrak station.
I’m told all three tracks over the Hill will eventually be operable both ways.
Old Pennsy signal-bridges, like the one in this calendar-picture, have been removed and replaced by new Norfolk Southern target-signals (see photo below).

The trash-train descends The Hill on Track One. The new signals are in, plus the crossover is in from One to the eastbound express-track past Altoona station. Track Three over The Hill is out-of-service, so a second crossover is set to get trains off Track Three over to Two. (Alto Tower, closed, is out of the photo at right.) (Photo by BobbaLew with Phil Faudi.)

Another signal-bridge was on the north side of the overpass for westbounds. —We’re looking south in the calendar-picture (railroad west).
That signal-bridge was also removed.
For many years Alto controlled train-movements through Altoona, and assigned helper-locomotives.
Now it’s all completely controlled from Pittsburgh, which isn’t working out too well.
But that’s more unfamiliarity with operations, not the remote location.
Alto was right on top of things, but Pittsburgh can be on top of things remotely.
Supposedly Alto will be removed and rebuilt at Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona.
Alto has history. It’s significant. Altoona was once the base of Pennsylvania Railroad operations.
It was Pennsy’s shop-town that also manufactured equipment, including locomotives it designed itself.
Pennsy’s line over the Allegheny barrier was an engineering triumph, and Altoona was where it began.
This picture was taken June 18th, 2010 just after sunset, which was after 8 p.m.
We had eaten supper, and since we still had light, Phil (Faudi) suggested we chase more trains.
We would meet at the 17th St. overpass over the tracks, right next to Alto.
Phil could hear a train on his scanner descending The Hill. But the sun was setting.
The old waazoo. Would the train show up before sunset, or the sun set first?
We could hear it whistling for Brickyard Crossing far to the south (railroad west), but the sun was setting.
The locomotive’s headlight hove into view in the distance as soon as the sun dropped below the Alleghenies.
But there still was enough light. 1/45th of a second at f4.0, which I think is wide-open for that lens.
This is the best picture of Alto I ever got.

They’re all pretty good, but the next is fabulous.

Righteous!

—The November 2012 entry of my Oxman Hotrod Calendar is one of the best-looking cars Ford ever marketed, a 1934 Three-Window Coupe.
The car has a 350 Chevy SmallBlock, and a Jaguar independent rear-end.
I don’t know as I’d wanna toss this thing into a corner, but it sure does look nice.
I’ve always been partial to the Three-Window Coupes, which this car is.
“Three-Window” means it only has three windows beside the windshield.

A 1939 Ford five-window coupe.

A “Five-Window” has small side-windows behind the door-posts.
Ford stopped building Three-Window Coupes in the ‘30s. But the Three-Window always looked great. Spare and minimal.
They made great-looking hotrods, even better looking than roadsters.
It looks like the top of this car was chopped some, a move that looks okay as long as the body-sides aren’t sectioned.
Chopping and sectioning are removal of metal to make the car lower.
“Chopping” lowers the car’s roof by cutting out of the vertical door-posts.
“Sectioning” cuts metal horizontally from the body-sides.
Thankfully this car wasn’t sectioned. It had great lines already. Ford, with its rudimentary styling-section, produced some of the greatest looking cars ever.
That was Edsel Ford, only son of Old Henry, who finagled good styling despite Old Henry’s resistance.
Chopping was okay. It made the car look “cool.”
But it probably also scrunched the driver. I’ve seen top-chops so radical they’d make the car undriveable.

Philadelphia Army-Navy Game; November 1955. (Photo by Ray Mueller.)

—The November 2012 entry of my AII-Pennsy color calendar is four GG1-electrics, in the Loewy paint-scheme, at the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia in November 1955. (One GG1 has its internal steam-boiler popping off. That boiler supplied steam for steam-heat for the following passenger-train)
As I’ve said in this blog hundreds of times, the GG1 electric was the greatest railroad-locomotive of all time. Gorgeous to look at, fast and immensely powerful, and it lasted forever. Loewy didn’t do much, but he made the locomotive look fabulous. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to convince Pennsy to use a welded shell instead of riveted. —The prototype GG1 was riveted; #4800.
The welcoming locomotive on the home-page of that GG1 web-site is “Old Rivets,” #4800.
“Old Rivets” was never scrapped. It sits outside at Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania next to Strasburg tourist Railroad.
But it looks forlorn. The weather is deteriorating it.
In 1955 the Army-Navy Game was still played at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium (later John F. Kennedy Stadium).
John F. Kennedy Stadium has since been replaced.
Next to Municipal Stadium Pennsy had an electrified yard, Greenwich Yard.
A trainload of West Point cadets might get picked up in New York City for the Army-Navy Game.
Annapolis (the Naval Academy) was on a Pennsy line, but not electrified.
A trainload of Navy cadets got delivered to what is now the Northeast Corridor, the old Pennsy Washington-to-New York main.
Multiple trainsets might deliver West Point and Annapolis cadets.
And all the trains were powered by the magnificent GG1.
Other trains carrying non-students might also come to the game; Washington DC or New York City. Pennsy’s line west to Harrisburg was also electrified.
And GG1s powered the trains.
You might see 10-15 GG1s in Greenwich yard.
For railfans the operation in Greenwich Yard was more entertaining than the Army-Navy Game itself.
After all, 10-15 examples of the greatest locomotive of all time were there.
And in 1955, when this picture was taken, GG1s were still in the beautiful Loewy paint-scheme with the five gold pin-stripes, the so-called “cat-whisker” scheme.

Photo by BobbaLew.

The single-stripe scheme.

A less-costly single-stripe scheme was later applied, and to me it still looked pretty good. It followed Loewy’s lines.

Lookout! (Photo by Philip Makanna©.)

—The November 2012 entry of my Ghosts WWII warbirds calendar is a P-40 Warhawk, not a P-51 Mustang, the propeller airplane everyone venerates.
I’ll let my WWII warbirds web-site weigh in.
“The P-40 fighter/bomber was the last of the famous ‘Hawk’ line produced by Curtiss Aircraft in the 1930s and 1940s, and it shared certain design elements with its predecessors, the Hawk and Sparrowhawk.
It was the third-most numerous U.S. fighter of World War II.
An early prototype version of the P-40 was the first American fighter capable of speeds greater than 300 mph.
Design work on the aircraft began in 1937, but numerous experimental versions were tested and refined before the first production version of the P-40, the Model 81, appeared in May 1940.
By September of that year, over 200 had been delivered to the Army Air Corps. 185 more were delivered to the United Kingdom in the fall of 1940, where they were designated the Tomahawk Mk I.
Early combat operations pointed to the need for more armor and self-sealing fuel tanks, which were included in the P-40B (called the Tomahawk Mk IIA in the U.K.).
These improvements came at price: a significant loss of performance due to the extra weight. Further armor additions and fuel tank improvements added even more weight in the P-40C (Tomahawk Mk IIB).
Curtiss addressed the airplane’s mounting performance problems with the introduction of the P-40D (Kittyhawk Mk I), which was powered by a more powerful version of the Allison V-1710 engine, and had two additional wing-mounted guns.
The engine change resulted in a slightly different external appearance, which was the reason the RAF renamed it from the Tomahawk to the Kittyhawk.
Later, two more guns were added in the P-40E (Kittyhawk Mk IA), and this version was used with great success (along with their mainstays, the earlier B-models) by General Claire Chenault’s American Volunteer Group (The Flying Tigers) in China.

The Flying Tigers, in echelon formation. (Note infamous shark’s mouth; the calendar-plane doesn’t have that.)

Some additional models, each with slight improvements in engine power and armament, were the P-40F (with a 1,300 horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin engine), the P-40G, P-40K (Kittyhawk Mk III), P-40L, P-40M and finally, the P-40N, of which 5,200 were built (more than any other version.)
While it was put to good use and was certainly numerous in most theaters of action in WWII, the P-40’s performance was quickly eclipsed by the newer aircraft of the time, and it was not considered one of the ‘great fighters’ of the war.”
So here is photographer Makanna in the open back seat of his chase-plane, probably a Texan trainer.
The P-40 is right behind.
“Now buzz me,” Makanna radios the P-40 pilot.
I hope he’s using a strong telephoto.
The P-40 flies right into the photographer’s face.
The P-40 apparently didn’t crash into Makanna’s chase-plane.
Although it looks like it almost did.
And Makanna snagged a great photograph.
How many times has this view been published? —Mustangs, Corsairs, Thunderbolts.
None looks as dramatic as this one, or should I say scary.

Grain west of Bellevue, Ohio, on the Norfolk Southern main to Chicago. (Photo by Dave Ori.)

—The November 2012 entry of my Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar is a Norfolk Southern grain-train on the storied main to Chicago.
I think the train is westbound; the lighting tells me that. I think the line is the old Nickel Plate, although it may be ex-Pennsy. In fact, it may be ex New York Central.
What interests me most is the locomotives are high-hood units. That is, the short hood in front of the cab is not the cut-down version offered to enhance forward vision.

An EMD GP30 (note shortened front hood in front of cab).

The manufacturers started offering locomotives with the short hood cut down. But not every railroad specified it. In fact, some railroads continued operating their Geeps long-hood forward.
Southern Railway and Norfolk & Western, the original components of Norfolk Southern, ordered Geeps with the high short-hood.
Both units, SD40-2s, are ex Southern Railway.
#3327, the lead unit, is ex International Railway. probably in Texas.
#3325, the trailing unit, is ex Central of Georgia.
Two SD40-2s for a heavy grain-train aren’t much power.
But Ohio is relatively flat.
A heavy grain-train could get by with two SD40-2s across Ohio.

Photo by BobbaLew.

A General-Electric Dash-9.

Such a train on the grades of the old Pennsy in PA might require three or four General-Electric Dash-9s, plus helpers across the Alleghenies.
This picture is only somewhat interesting. It lacks the drama of some Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar-contest photographs, like slugging it out on difficult grades, or threading narrow valleys with torturous curves.

1971 Plymouth GTX. (Peter Harholdt©.)

—The November 2012 entry of my Motorbooks Musclecars calendar is a 1971 Plymouth GTX.
The GTX was Plymouth’s response to the phenomenally successful Pontiac G-T-O.
But not as successful as the RoadRunner, which I prefer.
Both the G-T-O and the GTX cost a fair amount, relatively speaking.
The RoadRunner was aimed at making musclecar performance available for not much money.

A ’69 RoadRunner.

Plymouth didn’t expect to sell many RoadRunners, but the RoadRunner sold like hotcakes.
Thousands sold — well over 20 times as many as expected.
The GTX concept, introduced in the 1967 model-year, was eclipsed. The RoadRunner, introduced for 1968, skonked it royally.
People loved the RoadRunner concept. Hotrod performance for an affordable price.
The GTX did not go away. It was still an attractive concept. The gigantic and powerful 440 cubic-inch engine was standard.
But it wasn’t as attractive as the RoadRunner — a hotrod for the proletariate.
The GTX stayed in production as a standalone model through the 1971 model-year.
The calendar-car is 1971.
Both the GTX and RoadRunner were based on Plymouth’s intermediate sedan; as was the original Pontiac G-T-O, based on Pontiac’s Tempest intermediate.
But the GTX was based on the Plymouth Satellite, and the RoadRunner on the Belvedere.
Though intermediates, they were slightly different.
A 1971 GTX is the second generation of the model.
Between 1967 and 1971, Plymouth’s intermediate body was upgraded at least twice. —Although I think the earlier ones look better.
And compared to GM and Ford intermediates, the Chrysler intermediates, Plymouth and Dodge, were fairly large.
Though not enormous.
I once rented a 1970 Plymouth Fury (the full-size model), and its hood was big enough to land an aircraft-carrier based Corsair fighter-plane.
Yet despite their largeness, the Chrysler intermediates attracted a lot of buyers, especially the RoadRunner — with Dodge it was “SuperBee.”
The early RoadRunner, pictured, looked great.
When I was in college (in the middle ‘60s), a friend purchased a 1964 Plymouth with 383 four-speed. It replaced his aging Chrysler 300, I think 1960 or ’61.
That Chrysler had a cross-ram 413.
(“Cross-ram” means the intake manifold had very long runners to prompt wave-action to boost intake at about 2,500-to-4,500 rpm. The twin four-barrel carburetors were out beside the valve-covers. —413 cubic-inches displacement, which is large.)
That 300 was very fast, good for 140 mph or more.
I can imagine him buying a RoadRunner.
Another friend bragged about beating a RoadRunner with his hot-rodded ’56 Chevy. He had wrenched in a 350 SmallBlock with four-speed floorshift.
The difference, of course, is the ’56 Chevy owner had to make his car a hotrod.
The RoadRunner owner just purchased his car from the dealer. The RoadRunner was already a hotrod! —A musclecar with a hotrod motor.
So too would be a GTX. But it might be out of the prospective owner’s price-range.

The Crestline, Ohio roundhouse at its zenith. (Photo by Glendale Hoffman©.)

—The November 2012 entry of my Audio-Visual Designs black-and-white All-Pennsy Calendar is an aerial shot.
Another aerial; Classic Trains Magazine publishes one every month.
They’re interesting, but boring to look at.
Apparently Pennsy passenger-trains from Chicago east changed engines at Crestline. The line from Chicago was straight enough to permit steam-locomotives with long driver wheelbases, for example the S-1 (6-4-4-6) and T-1 (4-4-4-4), both of which were duplexes: multiple cylinders driving a single driver-set.
Only one S-1 was built. There were many T-1s. but they weren’t too successful: too smoky.
A duplex is not articulated, that is the front driver-set hinged to the rear driver-set so it can swing side-to-side, making negotiation of tight curvature possible, like crossover switches.
The driver wheelbase of a duplex is solid, not hinged. Even though there may be two driver-groupings each powered by a cylinder-set; hence four cylinders for a 4-8-4, identified as 4-4-4-4, the T-1.
Take on a curvy railroad, and a long wheelbase might derail.
Apparently the S-1 is in this photograph, out-of-service to the lower-left of the roundhouse.
This roundhouse had to be enlarged to fully swallow the T-1 and S-1 (also some Q-model freight locomotives).
A T-1 is almost 123 feet long, and the S-1 is slightly over 140 feet long.
One stall had to be enlarged 30 feet to swallow the S-1. It looks like it was the first stall at lower left. The S-1 is outside aimed at that stall.
All that investment was for naught with dieselization. The T-1s are impressive, but nothing compared to an E-unit diesel.
It might take four E-units to equal a single T-1, but those four E-units were better than the T-1.
Diesels could be multipled; a single engineer controlling all four units. Multiple steam-locomotives are multiple crews; a crew for each locomotive.
One can also see the stalls enlarged to swallow T-1s. They appear to be at the roundhouse’s extreme right.