Trains of the 1960s.....

......is a magazine-format special put out by Classic Trains Magazine.
I almost didn’t buy it, but I’m awfully glad I did. Many of the articles in it are by David P. Morgan, Editor of Trains Magazine in the ‘60s.
David P. Morgan is why I subscribed to Trains Magazine.
I’m a railfan, but DPM seemed like me. His reflections on trains were just like mine.
He was smitten by the drama of railroading, as am I.
He also wrote like I do, wallowing in rumination.
In fact, you could say David P. Morgan is a mentor. Like me, he’d view an ordinary subject, yet notice and depict the drama.
I’m at trackside long ago near Angola, NY, west of Buffalo.
I’m waiting for Norfolk & Western 611 on excursion out of Buffalo.
But a Conrail westbound was approaching, throttles-to-the-roof.
“Throttles-to-the-roof” is an old steam-locomotive expression.
Locomotive steam-input was controlled by a long throttle-lever hinged to the cab-roof. Cranking the throttle “wide-open” took the throttle-lever to the cab-roof.
It’s a slight upgrade, and the engineer had his locomotives in Run-Eight.
Diesel-engines aren’t throttled, so “throttles-to-the-roof” is imprecise. Run-Eight is full fuel, the equivalent of “wide-open.”
WOW! Hammering up the grade in Run-Eight: assaulting the heavens!
I bet DPM would have noticed too.
Like me, DPM apparently didn’t like to be photographed. I Google Image-Searched “David P. Morgan,” and got everything but DPM — wedding-pictures, people named “David Morgan,” books DPM published.
UHM, Google......... If I Google Image-Search “David P. Morgan,” I shouldn’t be getting anyone with “Morgan” as their last-name, or first-name. Or hits for Morgan’s books at eBay or Amazon.
Well, the fact DPM didn’t like to be photographed isn’t Google’s fault.
What few photos I’ve seen of him are not portraits.
The booklet also covers Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s storied “West End,” the first railroad over the Allegheny mountains.
The “West End” was B&O’s first mainline to the Ohio River.
Compared to railroads built later, it was horrible; two difficult grades per direction.
The first grade westbound was “Seventeen-Mile Grade” up to Altamont atop the Alleghenies.
Then the railroad descended down to Cheat River, but then it has to climb again up “Cheat River Grade” to Tunnelton, location of a short tunnel.
Eastbound was Newburg Grade up to Tunnelton, and then notorious “Cranberry Grade” up to Terra Alta in the Alleghenies.
All the grades were 2 % or more — that’s two feet up for every 100 feet forward. Cranberry averages 2.4 %, and was facing loaded coal-trains.
Pennsy’s crossing of Allegheny Mountain was easier; it averages 1.8 % westbound, less eastbound. Both Pennsy and B&O needed helper locomotives to conquer the grades, but 2 % severely limits the number of cars.
B&O managed to eventually access Pittsburgh — Pennsy had blocked it at first — and that new line was better railroad. But not as good as Western Maryland’s line around the end of the nineteenth century. (That line was abandoned.)
Pennsy is mountain railroad, but not as difficult as the West End.
(And of course Pennsy no longer exists; it’s operated by Norfolk Southern.)
Part of the reason B&O was always a third-rate railroad was because of its West End.
I’ve seen it myself, and compared to Pennsy it’s narrow. It’s two-track, often three.
But “Seventeen-Mile Grade” is carved right into the mountainside.
And weather is terrible. The wind blows and it snows.
Washouts are common; the railroad is not on stable soil.
And “Trains of the 1960s” covers the West End as it was in the ‘60s.
The West End still exists, although down to single-track in some locations.
And CSX, which now operates what was the B&O, has engineered locomotives to meet the demands of the West End.
This involves increasing locomotive weight, which increases tractive-effort.
A lot of what moves on the West End is heavy coal-trains.
The West End always interests me. Two difficult grades per direction are dramatic.
The top of Cranberry looks like a roller-coaster.
And there’s coal-empties on the Tray Run Viaduct climbing Cheat River Grade north of Rowlesburg.
And to think I almost didn’t buy the booklet.

I should run some of the FABULOUS writings of David P. Morgan:

We’ll adjust, but it won’t be easy.

It won’t be easy. (Photo by Philip R. Hastings.)

Replace the high-backed wooden benches with pews, add an altar or a pulpit, and you could have turned the waiting room of Missouri-Kansas-Texas’ San Antonio passenger station into a church.
That’s how well its architects and builders managed to blend functionalism with mission-style construction native to the region when the facility was completed in September 1917.
It was a beautiful, serene place, a civilized transition from one’s taxi to the observation-lounge of the Texas Special, a building Katy itself once extolled as “one of the most distinctive stations in the Southwest.”
When photographer Hastings came upon the depot in 1948 he found therein Mrs. S. A. Agnew, “a lovable, kindly Southern lady” who had been station matron in San Antonio since the waiting-room doors were first unlocked.
So here is Mrs. Agnew, presiding beneath the arches and chandeliers of a classic, a gem, a monument.
Those are Katy President John W. Barriger’s words of definition. It fell to him to demolish the building in 1967 when a fallen-from-grace, freight-only Katy required the real estate for other occupancy.
But gentleman John could not bring himself to dismiss the place without a suitable epitaph in the company’s annual report.
He wrote, “The [passenger station] at San Antonio, built in 1917, was renowned throughout the United States as a gem in the finest tradition of classical mission-type architecture. Much of the material and nearly all of the fixtures used in the construction of this beautiful building had been imported from Spain and Italy. As in the case of other railroad monuments, most notably Pennsylvania Station in New York, the San Antonio depot had to give way to the necessities of contemporary progress with its demands to transfer increasingly precious space within the heart of growing cities from lesser to more important assignments.”
So we'll take Mr. B's word for it; we’ll remember his kind farewell; we’ll adjust, but it won’t be easy. It never is when friends part for good. — David P. Morgan

Uninvited guest.

The GE U-boat demonstrators. (Classic Trains Collection.)

Do you remember anyone inviting General Electric to the locomotive party?
We don't.
The domestic diesel market had peaked and was in a predictable, relentless decline in 1953 when GE dissolved its relationship with Alco and went searching for an engine it could call its own.
And by 1959 when GE lowered Cooper-Bessemer V-16s onto the frames of a couple of prototype hood units numbered 751 and 752 the whole railroad business was in bad shape.
There wasn't room in the locomotive trade for one builder, much less Alco, EMD, and GE. Besides, the future of the business obviously lay in replacement units, and there were no old GEs to trade in on new ones.
And more to the point, what could novice GE teach veterans Alco and EMD?
Too many roads already possessed too many diesel “orphans” on their rosters to risk investing in yet another newcomer for second-generation units.
But the uninvited guest had guts. GE pulled an end run on conventional design with an uncomplicated but high-horsepower four-motor locomotive, sweated the bugs out of its power plant, and kept on barnstorming, advertising, demonstrating, and talking until the orders came. Today more than 300 GEs are rolling off more than 2&1/2 million miles a month on 17 U.S. railroads. —David P. Morgan

• And that’s back then. Now GE pretty-much dominates the locomotive market.

Out where a train is a train.
In his own caption for his masterful photograph, Richard Steinheimer says, “The silent desolation of the Smoke Creek Desert of Nevada yields momentarily to a 75-car westbound freight of the Western Pacific drawn by four GP35s.”
We think the scene is a rare pictorial definition of the train per se — an assembly of coupled cars, each with the built-in guidance system of flanged wheels tracking to steel rails, propelled by independent motive power units.
Which is why the railroader and the gallon of locomotive fuel both produce up to five times more transportation than their counterparts in trucking.
Trouble is, we so seldom see the pilot-to-caboose miracle of the freight train east of the Mississippi. Curves, cuts, buildings, and bridges preclude our witnessing simultaneously the entire train.
But beyond the Rockies and the Wasatch there is room on the desert floor to absorb the train, all 10,000 horsepower, and 3,500 or 4,000 tons of it.
It is ironic that buzzards, rabbits, and snakes are thus afforded daily demonstrations of a principle that eludes the eye of so many human beings.
Perhaps it would be in order to park campstools here in the sands of Smoke Creek Desert, and to seat thereon all of the members of the Congressional committees on interstate commerce.
Perhaps then they would comprehend that, unlike Americans, all modes of transportation are not created equal and that one mechanism of carriage in particular is intrinsically more efficient than its fellows.
Professor Steinheimer, please brief the Congressmen. —David P. Morgan


I gotta do my own picture, ‘cause Stein’s picture, which is better, is across the fold. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

• Morgan retired and died years ago and “Trains” had various editors, some rather moribund. —It’s in pretty good hands now, enough to continue my long-time subscription. But it’s not David P.