All-Pennsy color-calendar for March 2018

For steam-junkies. (Photo by Bill Price.)

—The March 2018 entry in my All-Pennsy color calendar is an L1s Mikado (2-8-2) stomping through Hagerstown, PA with mixed freight.
An L1s Mikado isn’t a fantastic engine steamers later become. But it’s not a teakettle.
The L1s’s were developed in the early teens in concert with Pennsy’s famous K-4s Pacific (4-6-2) passenger locomotives. In fact, both use the same boiler/firebox; 70 square feet of firebox grate is pretty good size for a 4-6-2.
The picture is 1956. 6306 could be 40 years old. My guess is 6306 was all that was available, otherwise the train might be diesels. 6306 might be worn out and tired, but still good enough to head a train.
By 1956 many of Pennsy’s 574 Mikes were scrapped. They weren’t draggers, or boom-and-zoom. They were more “jack-of-all-trades.”
Steamers like 6306 are what I grew up with. By the ‘50s most railroads had dieselized, but Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, near where I lived, still used steam.

This is the EXACT spot where I first watched trains. (Photo by Robert Long©.)

K4 Pacifics (pictured at left), E-6s Atlantics (4-4-2) and H8 and H9 Consolidations (2-8-0) are why I’m a railfan. I don’t think I ever saw an L1s on PRSL; freights were Consols, often as peddlers — replaced by trucking.
South Jersey railroading wasn’t very freight-oriented. Even railroad passenger service to the seashore, once a gold-mine, became moribund as auto-use grew. Railroad seashore service is now Jersey-Transit, a commuter operation.
And steam-locomotion jumped well beyond Pennsy’s L1s and K4s with Lima’s SuperPower locomotives. Nickel Plate 765, which I’ve ridden behind, a SuperPower design, makes anything like the L1s seem pedestrian.
And no way could even a SuperPower steamer pass muster with today’s environmentalists. Or mother hanging her sheets to dry. Soot city!
62 long years ago 6306 is chuffing through Hagerstown. The crew, covered with soot and coal-dust, probably wishes they had a diesel. The photographer, Bill Price, was probably thrilled.
Interesting to me is that Norfolk & Western (N&W) hopper in the right-side of the picture. It’s probably 70 tons, and Norfolk & Western no longer exists. It’s part of Norfolk Southern, the 1982 merger of N&W and Southern Railway, which now owns the old Pennsy main across PA.
And coal-cars are up to 120 tons, and often are no longer hopper-cars. They’re gondolas that get rotary dumped.