My calendar for May 2021

Helpers push unit coal up the West Slope. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

—The May 2021 photograph in my annual train-calendar is an image I mistakenly used in at least two prior train-calendars, maybe three. —Mistakenly used again.
It’s helpers pushing a long heavy coal-drag up the west slope of Allegheny Mountain. The train is eastbound on Track-One going through Lilly PA.
The photo was taken years ago shortly after I started chasing and photographing trains with my Altoona railfan friend Phil Faudi. At that time Phil was running a business helping railfans like me chase and photograph trains.
$125 for a full day of chasing and photographing trains — sometimes 30 or more.
Phil was extremely knowledgeable. He knew the railroad, the schedule, and train-numbers. At that time train-engineers were calling out signal-aspects on railroad radio.
We’d be motoring to another photo-location in Phil’s old Buick, he’d hear something on his radio scanner, and suddenly we were doing a bootleg turn to zoom back to the nearest photo-location.
Phil gave up his business, so now it’s my brother and I chasing trains.
That I mistakenly used this image at least twice before, flies-in-the-face of my continually badgering my brother to not repeat a view I already published.
“Aww-man! Brickyard again? We done those bridges in Altoony all too many times!”
Also, the train is going away, and is identified as C-51 in an earlier calendar. That makes it a local (I think), and as I recall it was loaded coal brought out of the Portage or South Fork Secondaries.
Back then the SD80MACs were still in use.
The SD80MACs were supposed to reduce locomotive usage on the old Pennsy main across PA.
That didn’t work out.
What the SD80MACs were good for was dragging heavy trains at slow speed, e.g. coal-drags.
So they were reassigned to dragging heavy coal trains out of the South Fork secondary, or out of Sonmon coal loadout on the Portage secondary.
The Portage secondary is the original Pennsy mainline that was bypassed in 1898.
Both are onto the west slope of what used to be the Pennsy main up Allegheny Mountain.
The railroad is now Norfolk Southern.
South Fork is where the Johnstown flood of 1889 began when a retention-dam near South Fork washed out killing over 2,200.
This coal-drag is either from South Fork or Sonmon.
I keep forgetting I already used it.