Different

Intermodal from Macon to Port of Savannah in GA. (Photo by Ruth Brown.)

—The February 2019 entry in my Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar is a Norfolk Southern stacker on snow-dusted railroad in GA.
The railroad is between Macon and Savannah. The train is headed for the Port of Savannah.
The picture is not extraordinary, but different. How do I repeat it?
I can’t. It’s from on-track railroad equipment.
Most train-photos are from about five feet above the ground: eye-level. They’re also trackside.
So the classic three-quarter view of an oncoming train is nearly always trackside at the height of the standing photographer. If the photographer sits, or takes the camera down to ground-level, the locomotive looms even higher than if the camera were about five feet.
But photographer Brown was on a rail-grinder on the rightmost track. This takes her camera up to cab level. Five feet is the locomotive frame.
Sometimes photos are taken from the track next to the track the train is on. I can’t do that. It’s too unsafe. NO WAY do I get up on the track. You don’t get much warning with an oncoming train. Suddenly getting off the track invites falling or entangling the rail.
But photographer Brown, on a rail-grinder, has her camera -a) on the track next to the train, and -b) at a height not normally photographed.

• I know it’s March. I wanted to blog this last month, but didn’t get to it.

Run Eight

Assaulting the heavens! (Photo courtesy of Joe Suo Collection©.)

—“Run Eight” is “pedal-to-the-metal” in diesel locomotive parlance. Diesel locomotives have eight fuel-delivery positions. “Run Eight” is maximum.
Six diesel locomotives are climbing Allegheny Mountain. Their train, visible in the distance, in wrapped around world-famous Horseshoe Curve.
I have been to Horseshoe Curve hundreds of times. I consider it the premier railfan pilgrimage spot. Trains galore! It’s how Pennsylvania Railroad breached the Allegheny barrier in the late 1840s.
“How come the railroad didn’t just trestle this valley?” a tourist asked.
“Because that woulda been too steep,” I exclaimed. “Looping the railroad around this valley made the grade manageable. You didn’t hafta section the train. With helpers you could run a complete train over this mountain.”
“Vacation, huh? Where to this time?”
“Mighty Curve, of course.”
“What is it about that place? Yer always goin’ there.”
“Trains, man. Yer smack in the apex, and they’re always assaulting the heavens.”
The May 2018 entry of my Audio-Visual Designs black-and-white All-Pennsy Calendar is six diesels climbing Allegheny Mountain. Five are EMD, and one appears to be a GE U-boat.
Years ago the engines were steamers. Diesel locomotives have got powerful enough to climb the mountain unassisted if their train is light. 15,000 tons of coal — 125 120-ton coal gondolas — need helper locomotives. One or two helper-sets up front = two or four additional 3,000 horsepower locomotives. Plus two more sets pushing, four more locomotives. The train will already have two or more 4,000 horsepower road-locomotives.
That’s 10-11 locomotives in total for a single train. Railfan Valhalla!
I’ve seen trains stall on the Mighty Curve. Track-curvature adds resistance. “Too many cars,” the engineer said.
A train could also break apart crossing that mountain. The part over the top is already pulling the train downgrade. The part still coming up The Hill has to be carefully pushed to avoid breaking the train apart. Divergent forces break couplers.
The cars also have brakes, so crews operate per “seat-of-the-pants.”
The lead locomotives in this lashup are EMD’s GP-30s, the only EMD locomotive where GM styling was involved. (ElectroMotive Division [EMD] was a GM subsidiary at that time.)
The cab-roof is rounded to the cab-sides instead of chamfered. Metalwork was added atop the hood to fair back into the fresh air intake and dynamic-brake blister.

7048 is at left. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

Railfans love the GP-30s. Only a few are left. Some were converted, but most were scrapped.
7048 in the Curve viewing-area is only a GP-9. But it should probably be a GP-30. 7048 replaced a K-4s Pacific (4-6-2) steamer.
The picture is 1966. The Curve is now three tracks instead of four. And the railroad is now Norfolk Southern.
But Allegheny Mountain still challenges; and the Mighty Curve is still in use. To get trains over that mountain without serious delay, like switchbacks or sectioning trains, is one of America’s greatest engineering triumphs.

• The first General Electric road locomotives in the ‘60s were the U series. Railfans called ‘em “U-boats.”

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.

Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar

Again, looks like something my brother and I might do. (Photo by Lance Myers.)

—The March 2018 entry in my Norfolk Southern Employees’ Photography-Contest calendar looks like something my brother and I might take.
Except it’s well east of Altoona along Pennsy’s old Middle Division. It’s an eastbound Norfolk Southern stacker crossing Juniata River on another of Pennsy’s gigantic monuments, a large stone viaduct only Pennsy could afford. The viaduct is between Mt. Union and Kistler, PA, half-way to Altoona from Harrisburg.
My brother and I have never been that far east.
Norfolk Southern’s Penn-Central heritage unit, #1073, an EMD SD70ACe, leads the train. Norfolk Southern has 20 heritage units, modern locomotives painted the schemes of predecessor railroads.

Last year’s April Entry. (Photo by Lance Myers.)

This is the same viaduct Myers ran last year as the April picture in the contest calendar. Except that was a Herzog ballast train. The viaduct was built in 1906 when Pennsy was a cash-cow.
Penn-Central was a 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad with New York Central. New York, New Haven & Hartford (NY,NH&H = “New Haven”) was included by gumint fiat. It was not a marriage made-in-Heaven. Pennsy and Central were rivals. Penn-Central went bankrupt in two years, but lasted six more. The company tanked in 1976; but the actual railroad remains.
All three lines were restrained by heavy regulation and taxation, plus all had costly commuter operations. They also were hampered by what they did. Break-bulk freight operations, endemic to northeast railroading, were lost to highway competition. Western railroads shipped longer distances, plus they weren’t burdened by commuter operations.
Railroad shipping was so necessary to the northeast the gumint stepped in. Conrail was founded in 1976 with gumint funding. Amtrak took over nationwide passenger-train operation in 1971. Commuter operations were farmed out to local gumint agencies. Many branch-lines were abandoned or sold to become shortlines.
Conrail was freight railroading. Pennsy’s Middle Division became part of a main shipping corridor across PA. Its Washington DC-to-New York City electrified line became Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. The “Corridor” even became Amtrak. Conrail used an old Reading main, etc, to access the New York City area. Not New York City in actuality, but more north Jersey across the Hudson.
Conrail became successful enough to privatize. Too bad Penn-Central couldn’t be what Conrail became later. That PC heritage unit might be just another Penn-Central locomotive.
Conrail became so successful it attracted CSX Transportation. CSX was Chesapeake & Ohio, Baltimore & Ohio, plus Seaboard and Atlantic Coast Line to the south. If CSX were to merge the old New York Central main across NY, it would promulgate the C&O/NYC merger Chesapeake & Ohio sought years ago.
Norfolk Southern, a 1982 merger of Norfolk & Western and Southern Railway, became interested in the old Pennsy main. Also the large locomotive shops in Juniata, PA.
CSX was gonna get that too, but Norfolk Southern bid the old Pennsy. It also bid the old Erie to Buffalo across lower NY. From Hornell west toward Chicago the original Erie main was sold to a shortline or partly abandoned.
Allowing Norfolk Southern to merge the old Pennsy main brought about the merger proposed earlier by Pennsy: Norfolk & Western and Pennsy.
The breakup and sale of Conrail restored rail competition in the northeast, which previously was New York Central and Pennsy.
So now Pennsy’s old Middle Division is part of Norfolk Southern’s “premier corridor” from Chicago to New York City. CSX does the same, but across NY instead of PA.
That “premier corridor” is extremely busy, both ways too. This viaduct would be just like what my brother-and-I see near Altoona: wait 15-20 minutes, and a train blasts past.
I was crossing the old Central up near Rochester the other day, and coming west was an empty CSX crude-oil unit-train of all tankcars. Just like what my brother-and-I see in Altoony.
A lot of what we see are doublestacks like pictured, 200+ individual intermodal containers loaded with consumer-goods double-stacked in well-cars. Stuff from the Pacific Rim, but also unloaded on the east coast now that the Panama-Canal was widened.
Many containers are “domestic,” 53 feet instead transoceanic at 40 feet. If the containers are “J.B. Hunt,” it’s probably product for WalMart.
I wonder what train this is? 20T or 26T perhaps. My brother-and-I usually see both.