Ending of a Era

Classic Trains General Discussion
21

[quote user=“Miningman”]
You can’t fool an old horsefly! It’s humbug I tell ya, humbug[/I quote]

See the correspondence preserved at the Hagley about putting the still-beloved Big Engine in the Northumberland collection. That was about the closest we got. The Ts and Qs had a long and expensive paying-for before one could be preserved. I assume you know that Westinghouse took its turbine back and the rest of the S2 at that point was perhaps best forgotten by PRR.

I won’t go into Perlman and Young over on NYC except to note that yes, it was a preservation shame. And the list of ‘we came so close’ including the EM-1, the Reading Pacific, and all those 4-6-4s for the Louisiana and Eastern is so long.

But it’s also true that much of the cash-strapped Northeastern railroads with the most interesting power needed or wanted the scrap value more than the goodwill from obsolete history … we have different priorities now, but it’s only fair to consider what railroad eyes saw then.

22

Have to put on my snarky hat, or conspiracy theory eyewear.

So you say it is only fair to consider what railroad eyes saw then…Ok…how about partnerships between big oil companies, tire manufacturers and automobile manufacturers …do you not think they had a purposeful agenda not actually based on what was best for society but on destroying a way of life and infrastructure and replacing it with their own product in both a public and private applications.

In North America only…in the USA and Canada, ( because we here are always situated at your side, economically the samller one, tugging on your pant leg ) , this way of life and it’s infrastructure had to be made to look obsolete, mercilessly and with 100% destruction. The best of the best was top priority and buried fast. It needed to be forgotten and made abscent. That future glimpse cannot be tolerated or made to continue or allow to exist. The smaller and quaint could then be handled easily with ridicule and forgotten about.

375 Hudsons, 598 Mohawks, all the Niagaras, and thats just the Central…all the T1’s and Q’s, and what…where is our K4’s dotting parks and museums. J’s, M’s? Even Pennsylvannia Station!

2 Mohawks survive, one by sheer luck and audacity, one out of pleas and sympathy. No way they turn a wheel again though.

Yes things were bad but what happened to all the wartime profits and massive cost saving measures.

Today we have fake news, deep state, collusion, biased reporting, spin coming out the ying yang, the .1% … I see parallels from back then, just the folk were easier to believe and bait. Perhaps not, but they were willing.

You can’t tell me Paul J. Keiffer was a happy fella in 1955…a lifetime of achievemnt without an Oscar. Can you imagine witnessing all your Hudsons cut up, your magnificient Mohawks and Niagara’s dismissed and disrespected like old fish heads. Same with those guys in the roundhouse and

23

Oh so cool, but the blurb in the posted link made me nervous when it stated “Ask a price.”

You know the old saying, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it!”

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Here is another era gone bye bye

Caboose 434711 brings up the rear of 515 leaving Smiths Falls for Toronto, January 13, 1990, the last train with a van. The next day Montreal-Toronto through freight trains ran cabooseless. Bill Sanderson