Monthly Calendar-Report for December 2012
Despite the death of my beloved wife of over 44 years almost eight months ago, I managed to keep doing these calendar-reports.
Things are messy.
There has been lawn to mow, leaves to mulch, and soon there will be snow to throw.
Plus there’s working-out at the YMCA.
There also has been a dog to walk, plus the 89 bazilyun other responsibilities my wife pursued, like laundry, cooking, and making the bed.
Plus there’s the usual surfeit of errands, many of which I have to take the dog along.
(Although I’m no longer carting my wife to medical appointments.)
But here I am doing this December calendar-report.
I worried about the seasons changing, but here we are.
This worrying seemed to be a grief-effect, although eight months is still fairly recent.
Train 20V eastbound splits the 258.9 signals on Track One approaching Portage. (Photo by BobbaLew with Phil Faudi.)
—“Norfolk Southern milepost 258.9, Track One, no defects.”
So reports my railroad radio scanner tuned to 160.8, Norfolk Southern’s operating frequency on this division.
This photograph was taken February 13, 2010.
We (I and my wife, who was still alive then) had travelled to Altoona to chase trains with Phil Faudi (“FOW-dee;” as in “wow”).
It was an easy trip. It had snowed, but roads were clear, and the snow-berm thrown up by the plows was no more than two or three feet.
But up in the Alleghenies it had snowed much worse. In Gallitzin (“guh-LIT-zin;” as in “gull”), location of our bed-and-breakfast, the snow-pack was three to four feet deep!
Paths had been carved into streets to allow auto-passage.
The main drag was closed to allow massive front-end loaders and dump-trucks to remove snow.
Mike Kraynyak (“crane-eee-YAK”), proprietor of our bed-and-breakfast, was trying to blow out his tiny parking-lot with only a snowblower.
The snow was a foot-or-two deeper than the maw of his snowblower.
A friend was shoveling snow off the steps to his upstairs deck. That snow was almost two feet deep!
We went down to Horseshoe Curve, but it was completely inaccessible.
Its parking-lot was blocked by a six-to-eight foot snow-berm thrown up by plows.
I found myself sinking hip-deep as I tried to cross that snow-berm.
I gave up. It would be the first of many trips to Altoona since without visiting world-famous Horseshoe Curve.
“Are you sure you wanna do this?” I asked Faudi.
“Sure,” he said. “I know lotsa places we can still photograph trains. Grade-crossings for example.
We have fabulous Winter conditions.”
And so it was. This picture approaching Portage is one of those fabulous snags.
258.9 is the location of defect-detectors.
Trackside devices monitor passing trains for defects: dragging equipment, hot wheels, etc.
If no defects are found, “no defects” is broadcast on Norfolk Southern’s radio-frequency for train-crews to hear.
If a defect is found, it’s reported or its location is reported, and the train must stop.
Those defect-detectors are about five to eight miles apart.
Over the years I think I’ve only heard one defect reported. And that’s over hundreds of transmissions.
Those defect-detectors, which I know the locations of, tell me if a train is coming.
They also tell Faudi. But a train-engineer also must call out the signal-aspects as he/she passes. Faudi knows those signal locations.
The snow and cold were causing problems. Ice-sickles had formed in tunnels where water was leaking. Equipment had to be moved in to break off the ice-sickles.
This was probably our best chase with Faudi. The weather was difficult, but I got some of my best photographs.
The screaming chicken! (Peter Harholdt©.)
—The December 2012 entry of my Motorbooks Musclecars calendar is the best one they have.
They also used it as a cover-shot.
It’s a 1973 Pontiac Firebird Super-Duty Trans-Am.
To my mind this Firebird is the best-looking car-design to ever exit Detroit.
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| Z-28 Camaro with the Endura bumper. |
The Firebird is not the Ferrari grill. It’s original, and its front-end design is better for the lines of the car, which are fabulous.
About the only superiority of the Camaro over this FireBird is the taillights. The round taillights of a Camaro look better.
Firebird uses a single taillight that follows and fills the rear cove. It doesn’t look as good as the Camaro.
And the Firebird doesn’t need that screaming-chicken, a strident graphic added to Trans-Am Firebirds.
The stripes applied to a Camaro’s hood looked better. My Vega GT had one of those stripes. It looked great. —I think the Camaro was double stripes. (My Vega was single-stripe.)
Extraordinary about a Super-Duty Trans-Am is that rear-facing hood-scoop mounted to the carburetor. It’s aimed at a high-pressure area in front of the windshield. That hood-scoop was lettered “SD-455.”
Wrong about this car is its size; the Camaro and Firebird looked great, but were too big.
They were smaller cars — pony-cars — but they were Detroit sedans.
Four seats!
Their doors were gigantic and heavy.
And great as it looks, this car is “Super-Duty.”
That means it has a gigantic hot-rodded 455 cubic-inch motor, a heavy boat-anchor of an engine.
Such a car would likely cream anything in a straight line, and probably win the stoplight drags.
But I’d hate to toss it into a corner.
That giant cast-iron engine throws off the car’s balance.
The car would want to keep going straight ahead.
Correct that with throttle, and you end up spinning off the road.
Unless you’re Mario Andretti.
A BMW 2002 could beat that Super-Duty Trans-Am on a curvy rural road.
Its engine is only two liters. 455 cubic-inches is well over seven liters (7.4561141).
But given a choice between this Trans-Am and a BMW 2002, I’d take the Trans-Am.
It’s a gorgeous car.
A train-load of bulldozers is about to leave Enola Yard. (Photo by John Molesevich.)
—The December 2012 entry of my Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar is a Norfolk Southern freight-train of bulldozers about to leave Enola yard (“aye-NOLE-uh;” as in “hay”) across from Harrisburg. PA.
Enola yard was built to cure the bottleneck Harrisburg was becoming.
The original Pennsy was Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, but so much traffic was moving over Pennsy both terminals started clogging.
Gobs of traffic was being fed into Pittsburgh, and then moving through Harrisburg.
With electrification, engine-change was also needed at Harrisburg to continue east or west —non-electric to electric, or reverse.
Facilities in Harrisburg could not be expanded. Space was limited. Enola was Pennsy’s solution. Cross the Susquehanna (“SUSS-kew-HAN-nuh; as in “and”) at some point other than Rockville Bridge, change power in Enola, and then continue.
Now that power-change is no longer needed. Much of Pennsy’s electrification is de-energized. All that remains wired is the old Pennsy main from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, and now that’s Amtrak. The electrified lines that fed Enola are now diesel.
I thought that wire was forever.
But overhead wire is costly to maintain.
Diesels are not as appropriate as electrification, but the added cost of maintaining, plus time lost to power-changes, makes dieselization more attractive.
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| Photo by BobbaLew with Phil Faudi. |
| The train at left is Norfolk Southern’s Executive Business Train, but at right is 36A with a solid section of tractors. |
Tractors, and bulldozers, fit trailer-on-flatcar railroad equipment.
Used to be standard width for highway was eight feet, 96 inches.
But then it was raised to 102 inches. We had buses at Transit 102 inches wide.
Now tractors and bulldozers often exceed 102 inches, in which case it gets trailered on the highway as “oversize load.”
This is not that serious a problem to the railroads.
A large ‘dozer or tractor doesn’t get into the width problem.
A load has to be really wide to not clear opposing traffic; at least on the old Pennsy lines which are quite wide between track-centers.
I remember noting this on the old Baltimore & Ohio West End. It has double-track, but narrower than Pennsy.
On B&O’s West End a fairly wide load might close opposing traffic, but not Pennsy. On Pennsy the load had to be really wide.
So ‘dozers and tractors amount to a lot of traffic. I’ve seen trains of solid tractors.
And the train pictured is solid ‘dozers.
It’s interesting this train requires only one locomotive. It’s probably short and light enough.
Previously this train might have rated two units. Except now a single unit might put out as much power as the two earlier units.
#9946 is a General-Electric Dash 9-40CW; “40” meaning 4,000 horsepower (a special Norfolk Southern order, not the usual 4,400 horsepower, the GE Dash 9-44CW, although NS ordered 1,090 units), “C” meaning six axles (“B” equals four axles, “C” equals six), and “W” meaning wide cab (as opposed to narrow-cab hood-units, which I’ve seen).
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| Photo by BobbaLew with Phil Faudi. |
| This loco is a narrow-cab hood. |
Railroads often do this, an idler for safety to protect the locomotive and its crew in case of a crash. One sees this on unit-trains of hazardous materials, for example the ethanol-train, which is solid tank-cars loaded with ethanol.
P-51D Mustang. (Photo by Philip Makanna©.)
—Mustang!
Can there be a WWII warbirds calendar without a Mustang? The gorgeous hotrod fighter-plane everyone worships.
The December 2012 entry of my Ghosts WWII warbirds calendar is a P-51 Mustang.
The Mustang was propeller aviation’s apogee at that time. A fast and powerful hotrod of an airplane, that was also highly maneuverable and had long range.
It solved a problem of the Army Air Corps’ long-range bomber-runs from England over Germany.
Earlier fighter-planes didn’t have the range. The bombers were on-their-own over Germany, sitting ducks for Hitler’s Messerschmitts.
The P-51 was not only a better fighter-plane than the Messerschmitt, it also had longer range.
A P-51 could accompany an entire bombing-run. The bombers were no longer sitting ducks.
As I usually do every month, I’ll let my WWII warbirds site weigh in:
“One of the most effective, famous and beautiful fighter aircraft of WWII, the P-51 was designed to fulfill a British requirement dated April 1940.
Because of the rapidly-mounting clouds of war in Europe, the UK asked North American Aircraft to design and build a new fighter in only 120 days.
The NA-73X prototype was produced in record time, but did not fly until October 26th, 1940.
The first Royal Air-Force production models, designated Mustang Mk Is, underwent rigorous testing and evaluation, and it was found that the 1,100-horsepower Allison engine was well suited for low-altitude tactical reconnaissance, but the engine’s power decreased dramatically above an altitude of 12,000 feet, making it a poor choice for air-to-air combat or interception roles.
At the same time, the US Army Air Corps ordered a small number for tactical reconnaissance evaluation as the F-6A.
After the Royal Air Force found the aircraft’s performance lacking, they tested a new engine, the 12-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin. This gave much-improved performance, and led to the US Army Air Corps fitting two airframes with 1,430-horsepower Packard-built Merlin V-1650 engines. These aircraft were re-designated XP-51B. Practically overnight, the aircraft’s potential began to emerge.
Since the Royal Air Force had good success with the Mustang in a ground attack role, the US Army Air Corps bought 500 aircraft fitted with dive brakes and underwing weapons pylons.
The first Merlin-engine versions appeared in 1943 with the P-51B, of which 1,988 were built in Inglewood, California, and the P-51C, of which 1,750 were built in Dallas, Texas. Both new versions had strengthened fuselages and four wing-mounted 12.7-mm machine guns.”
La creme-de-la-creme. (Photo by Buck Wyndham.)
Years ago I saw a P-51 do aerobatics, hammerhead stalls and loops and power-dives.
I think it was “Old Crow.”
I was in awe.
That’s goin’ to my grave!
Ever American, by law, should be required to witness a P-51 doing aerobatics.
And hear the crackle of its unmuffled Packard-Merlin V12 engine.
(It’s interesting Packard got even more power out of that engine than Rolls-Royce, the Merlin’s original developer.)
It’s on the sound-file.
When I was a child my father used to take me to a park where enthusiasts flew tethered model-airplanes.
The model-airplanes had tiny nitro-methane engines, and flew in circles around their operator, tethered to the control-strings which operated the rear horizontal-stabilizer.
They were fairly fast, and crashed fairly often. A balsa-wood model-airplane would be utterly destroyed if it crashed. —Reduced to splinters.
I wanted one. They were exciting to watch.
So as a Christmas-present my father got me one.
It was plastic and fairly heavy.
It used a tiny .049 engine (I think that’s .049 of a cubic-inch).
It was modeled after the P-51 Mustang, although its proportions were wrong.
Its wings were quite large, at least a foot-and-a-half wide, and its fuselage was quite long; about a foot.
Everything was much larger than a scale P-51.
But it was heavy plastic.
A properly scaled P-51 model would have to be balsa to be light enough to fly.
With doped-paper wing-covering.
To fly with everything made out of heavy plastic it had to be scaled up.
I never flew it. I didn’t have the nerve.
I started it a few times (you had to flip its propeller with your finger), and gazed at it plenty.
I even painted it — a mistake. It was originally red plastic.
It did fly once. A teenaged enthusiast flew it for me. He started it, took it off, then landed it. With many circles between takeoff and landing.
These models usually landed on a “dead-stick;” that is, the engine had died out-of-fuel (that is the propeller was “dead,” not rotating).
It was gorgeous to look at, and rightly so.
It was modeled after the P-51 Mustang.
I notice the calendar-Mustang has markings of New Zealand’s Royal Air-Force.
It’s not as good-looking as the Wyndham picture, which has American markings, and looks great.
Alco RS-3 at Renovo, PA. (Photo by Fred Scott.)
—The December 2012 entry of my All-Pennsy color calendar is a Pennsy RS-3 switching hopper-cars at Renovo (“re-NO-voh;” as in “no”), PA.
This photograph was taken October 20th, 1966 — the year I graduated college.
The trees up on the mountainside are past peak in Fall foliage, and a little snow is between the ties.
I’ve been though Renovo, back during the ‘70s and early ‘80s when I was using a very rural route to get down to Altoona and Horseshoe Curve.
My thought was that route was quicker, since it was more direct. It probably wasn’t, since it used narrow curvy byways through steep ravines.
I probably averaged about 35 mph.
The route I use now is not as direct, but most of it is four-lane expressway — I average about 55 mph.
A trip to Altoona takes five hours. Back then it was about six/seven hours. There wasn’t the option of four-lane expressway. It was six/seven hours no matter which way you took.
Renovo is in the Allegheny mountains. It’s in a wide spot between two creeks that feed into the west branch of the Susquehanna (“suss-kwee-HAN-uh;” as in “and”) River.
Pennsy’s line to Buffalo went through Renovo, although it branched north toward Buffalo at Emporium west of Renovo.
Renovo was fairly important. Pennsy’s lines to northwestern PA fed into Renovo. From there a fairly heavy main went down the Susquehanna toward Harrisburg.
The Alco RS-3 was the most successful of the early Alco road-switchers.
“Alco” is American Locomotive Company of Schenectady, NY.
For years, American Locomotive Company was a primary manufacturer of railroad steam locomotives. (It was originally a merger of many steam locomotive manufacturers.)
With the changeover by railroads to diesel-locomotives, American Locomotive Company brought out a line of diesel-electric railroad locomotives much like the railroads were changing to, and changed its name to “Alco.”
Alco tanked a while ago; they never competed as well as EMD.
The RS-3 was third in a series of road-switchers introduced in 1941 as the RS-1.
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| Photo by BobbaLew. |
| Tioga Central’s RS-1 (ex Washington Terminal). |
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| An EMD cab-unit (a restored Great Northern F7). |
The road-switcher concept was very attractive to railroads, a diesel-locomotive that could be very easily operated in either direction.
EMD’s early diesels were cab-units (as at left), hard to back up due to poor visibility from the cab.
The road-switcher narrowed the motor-enclosure with walkways outside the engine-hood, like a switcher, allowing ease of vision.
Yet a small hood was ahead of the engine-cab to protect the crew.
Although at first many railroads operated their road-switchers long-hood forward.
Short-hood forward after the manufacturers started cutting down the short hood to permit vision over that hood.
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| An EMD GP30 (note shortened front hood in front of cab). |
Even EMD got into the road-switcher concept with its GP7, essentially an F7 cab-unit as a road-switcher.
EMD sold a lotta GP series (“Geeps”). Cab-units went out of manufacture. The road-switcher became preeminent.
Alco did fairly well for a while. Their locomotives were fairly reliable.
Alcos were also less fuel-hungry than EMD. But they were all turbocharged (exhaust-gasses used to spin a supercharger), a gizmo that could fail. Early EMDs weren’t turbocharged.
If an Alco was gushing black smoke, which occurred fairly often, that indicated a turbocharger problem, like the turbo was not spinning up as fast as the fuel input.
Or suppose the turbo never got to full revs. Yet fuel-input was as if the turbo was a full revs. Continuous black smoke; the motor was running rich. Turbos weren’t as reliable then as they are now.
Pennsy had a lotta Alcos.
But of course Pennsy had a lotta non-EMD diesels. They dieselized late, and needed so many EMD couldn’t supply.
But their Alcos weren’t side-lined as quickly as Baldwins, for example.
In fact, Pennsy continued to buy Alcos when newer models were debuted, for example, the Century-series.
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| Photo by BobbaLew. |
| This Century-630 is actually Penn-Central, used uphill as a pusher on Pennsy’s Horseshoe Curve. (Six axles, 3,000 horsepower.) |
Railroading like this has become non-existent. The money is in moving huge trainloads of product from area to area (like east coast to midwest), unit coal-trains or ethanol, or long trains of double-stacked freight-containers that can be trailered.
The unit coal-trains usually run from mine to power-plant.
I wonder if Renovo still exists?
It probably does, but I doubt it’s what’s in this calendar-picture.
Locomotives like the RS-3 were designed for railroading of the past, what’s depicted in the picture.
Even in multiple, the RS-3 couldn’t move long trains of freight like the current General Electric Dash-9s.
Homely but fast.
—The December 2012 entry of my Oxman Hotrod Calendar is an excellent photograph of a very homely car, the HenryJ.
The HenryJ was an offering of Kaiser Automotive, which never made it.
Kaiser was a postwar attempt at breaking the stranglehold of the Big Three on the automotive market: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
It was an effort by Henry J. Kaiser, who succeeded in the WWII war-effort. He was a builder of Liberty-Ships, mass-produced ocean-shipping. He also founded Kaiser Steel.
Homely but attractive to drag-racers because the HenryJ was small and light.
A drag-racer would get a small car and modify it for drag-racing; standing-start to finish over a flat quarter-mile paved drag-strip.
He’d get a Willys coupe, various Austin or Fiat models, or a HenryJ.
Then he’d wrench in a powerful hot-rodded V8 motor, and a rear-axle that could take the power output.
The front suspension was often switched to a drag-racing beam-axle.
The drag-racing was called “gas-class;” heavily modified cars with gasoline-burning engines (as opposed to “fuel;” usually some explosive nitro-methane mix).
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| An Austin Bantam roadster converted into a drag-racer. |
But as “gas-class” become more competitive, racers began using smaller, lighter cars like the HenryJ. (The HenryJ was also more aerodynamic.)
And so one of these HenryJ gassers makes the Oxman Hotrod Calendar. Homely, but a drag-racing icon.
I also have a picture of a “Bad News” Willys coupe gasser. The Willys is more attractive to look at, but the racer himself, Vic Young, preferred his HenryJ.
It could win!
Fireman’s view of the “Sunshine Special.” (Photo courtesy: Mitch Dakelman Collection©.)
—The December 2012 entry of my Audio-Visual Designs black-and-white All-Pennsy Calendar is a shot taken by the locomotive fireman of the Fairbanks-Morse H10-44 switcher at right.
The switcher is in Dunreith, Indiana, and the Pennsy K-4 Pacific (4-6-2) is blasting through with “The Sunshine Special.” It’s the winter of ’48-’49. The railroad is Pennsy’s line to St. Louis.
“The Sunshine Special” was a train to Texas.
It was inaugurated in 1915, giving premier service to Texas from St. Louis via Little Rock, Arkansas.
It used Missouri Pacific to get to Texas.
It ran over Pennsy from New York City to St. Louis, and then turned south on Missouri Pacific toward Texas.
It was the flagship of Missouri Pacific’s passenger service until relegated to a secondary role by “The Texas Eagle.”
I doubt Pennsy’s line to St. Louis any longer exists (although it may).
I think the main railroad to St. Louis from the east is the old New York Central St. Louis line.
Years ago railroads from the east had competing lines to major midwest terminals like Chicago and St. Louis.
Rationalization has taken place. Now there are no longer multiple railroads from the east, just two: CSX and Norfolk Southern.
I don’t even know if Norfolk Southern accesses St. Louis, but I imagine it does. It’s probably doing it on the old Nickel Plate line.
The old Pennsy line, one of the competing multiple railroads, is probably gone.
This photo is not very dramatic.
But it is a Pennsy K-4 Pacific, and it looks like it’s doing track-speed, perhaps 60 mph.
Boomin’-and-zoomin.’ What the K-4 was great at, and looked good.
What started me railfaning was K-4s boomin’-and-zoomin’ on PRSL (Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines in south Jersey [“Redding;” not “reading”]).
As in previous years, I use this December calendar-report to display various pictures not displayed earlier, and not in the calendars themselves.
At Plummers. (Photo by BobbaLew with Phil Faudi.)
Although the cover-picture of my own calendar is displayed as a small picture in my Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar report above.
It was taken a few years ago.
My wife and I had driven to Altoona in February hoping to find winter conditions similar to what’s depicted in the first calendar-picture.
But it was warm. The snow had almost entirely melted.
My railfan nephew from northern Delaware had also come out. Together we all piled into my CR-V and headed north to Tyrone (“tie-ROAN;” as in “own”).
Just east of Tyrone is Plummers Crossing, where this picture was taken.
My nephew got geodesic coordinates for Plummers on his iPhone so he could find it again. With me, the location is in my head.
Tyrone is where the railroad turns east toward Harrisburg. Tyrone is in a notch in the mountains where the Juniata (“june-eee-AT-uh”) River also turns east. The railroad is following the Juniata.
Plummers Crossing is in the notch.
We set up and waited for a train.
An eastbound was coming, and this is it.
What’s remarkable here is the lead unit is not a wide-cab Dash-9.
It’s the hood-unit version thereof.
The small hood in front of the cab is narrow — pretty much the same width as the engine-hood.
I decided to use this picture as my cover-shot. I’ve used my Horseshoe Curve shot a couple years already.
A small amount of snow is still on the ground.
(Photo by Philip Makanna©.)
My Ghosts WWII warbirds calendar has a fabulous picture on its cover not in the calendar itself.
It’s a Chance-Vought Corsair F4U Navy fighter-plane right in your face!
And this is the four-bladed prop, the best of the Corsairs!
Imagine flying a Japanese Zero , and seeing this right behind you. You are dead meat, baby!
Years ago, when I was 7, as a Cub-Scout, I visited Willow-Grove Naval Air Station north of Philadelphia.
Corsairs were practicing tail-hook landings on the runway, except it was a runway, not a heaving aircraft-carrier deck.
A dashing fighter-jockey with aviator-sunglasses strode out, mounted his parked Corsair, and started cranking it.
Giant orange flames cascaded along the fuselage as the big engine lit.
“Won’t it catch fire?” I asked worriedly.
“Of course not,” our guide laughed.
Soon the Corsair was flying over us, rattling the barracks with the roar of its mighty radial engine.
Finally my Oxman Hotrod Calendar has added a tribute to the ’40-’41 Willys coupes, a car even better-looking than the ’40 Ford coupe, which is stunningly attractive.
That’s because the Willys is a three-window coupe. The Ford is five-window.
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| A 1939 Ford five-window coupe. |
The Willys has only a one-piece flat windshield. The Ford is two flat panes.
As such, The Willys looks very spare. Its body-styling is only the barest minimum.
Yet the Willys looks like the Ford coupe. It has the same gorgeous lines.
One gets the feeling the Ford could look as good, but it’s a five-window with a two-piece windshield.
Featured are four cars, primary being the fabulous Stone-Woods-Cook drag-racer.
But it’s an ersatz Willys, a Willys wannabee, modeled after the original Stone-Woods-Cook drag-racer, an actual Willys.
The Stone-Woods-Cook Willys is a fiberglass reproduction of a Willys coupe, fitted to a dragster chassis. It would never work on the street; it doesn’t have a radiator.
Sadly, I never saw the Stone-Woods-Cook Willys race, and it was supposed to be phenomenal.
But it’s not a streetable hotrod, and two of the other cars seem lowered too much.
So much they dare not attempt a driveway.
Yet given a choice between the ‘39-‘40 Ford coupe and the Willys coupe, I’d prefer the Willys.
It’s the spare appearance.
A very desirable hotrod, fitted with a souped SmallBlock Chevy and four-speed.
Labels: Monthly Calendar Report
posted by BobbaLew at 9:23 AM
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