https://vietnam-railway.com/train/SapaTourist/reunification-express-train
https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.280357/2015.280357.Indo-China#page/n0/mode/2up
Interesting stuff. Last I heard was the Vietnamese are restoring an old French 2-8-2 for steam train excursions. Looks like steam’s appeal is universal!
Wanswheel— Is some of this material recently de-classified items?
A small operation that was likely vital but shrunk to insignificance.
I’m sure the rails are a real vibrant part of todays economy in Vietnams roaring economy. You could say free markets and capitalism won out in the end.
Declassified in 1977 and 2004, posted to internet archive in 2016 and 2017.
It seems the line(s) connecting Hanoi and the port of Haiphong to China was incidental to Pearl Harbor.
The Chinese built a number of 2-8-2s to the French drawings during the 1970s and maybe later. Some of these should still be in good order, if not actually working. I’ve seen a Chinese brochure descibing these locomotives, described as class SY2 by the Chinese. They were numbered in the same series as the French built locomotives, possibly in the 141-500 series.
Peter
Warm and fuzzy 141-202 in 1998, shrieking at whoever every minute.
http://www.steamlocomotive.info/vlocomotive.cfm?Display=17419
I’m pretty darn sure that’s Firelock and Penny Trains driving that locomotive.
It’s a wonder they didn’t run out of steam. First time I ever laughed at something like this…it was funny…going over that bridge was a real hoot.
Well you wouldn’t find me on that thing with that annoying squeaky whistle! Much as I LOVE steam I do have certain standards. I’d make allowances for whistles like that on the “Orient Express,” it is French after all, but that’s it!
THIS is what a steam locomotive should sound like!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaX8rsq5QBY
I can’t speak for Penny Trains, but maybe she’s a bit more flexible than I am!
Wayne, I could not get to that whistle, but from what you wrote, it is just as well. To me, when I was in college in Bristol, hearing the engineer’s response when the conductor told him it was time for N&W #42 to leave (about a mile and a half from the college) was a beautiful sound from whatever J was on the point. When I was in Decatur, Georgia (again, about a mile and a half from the railroad), the sound of the Georgia’s horns was almost nerveshattering.
Well in this instance it’s not the actual tone of the whistle ( tone is in the ear of the listener!..for further clarification see David Klepper),it is the fact that whoever was in that cab could not keep their hands off the whistle …and much of it had no rhyme or reason or sequential structure to it. It’s like a couple of kids were having some fun…hence the obvious conclusion.
https://www.gettyimages.ae/license/515261626
https://archive.org/details/The-Presidents-Daily-Brief-30-January-1968
While it seems that some whistling was for the Japanese tourists that chartered the passenger train there were children or teenagers on the track in four of the scenes.
Also, was there anything to suggest that 141-202 was the loco on the passenger train? Even at full screen, I could never read the numbers on the pilot beam, but read “165” on the cab side, suggesting that the loco on the passenger train was 141-165.
There was nothing to suggest that 141-202 seen in a separate scene at the end on a freight train was also on the passenger train.
The track was dual standard and metre gauge, which suggests that the track is north of Hanoi. The coastal line to the Chinese border was converted to dual gauge during the Vietnam War. There was also a former French line to Kunming (the Yunnan Railway mentioned in Wanswheel’s military extract) which remained metre gauge. This line had 4-8-2+2-8-4 Beyer Garratts purchased second hand from the East African Railways.
Peter
The firebox scene is insufficiently fuzzy. Suspect artistic splicense.
Since we are discussing stuff that is technically outside the ‘accepted’ time window for Classic Trains, let me provide an example of whistling, and some other things, that might calm us down after all that lady-sees-a-mouse action.
This is the Canadian ‘moral equivalent’ of the Rural Retreat recording with the chimes, close to the end of steam. Pay careful attention to what happens at 2:00 and around 4:07. Otherwise just close your eyes, and you’ll be there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQNQbuXjF2M
Just as with the N&W recording … you won’t be quite the same afterwards.
Very nice Overmod—thank you for this.
Speaking of N & W and whistles, am I the only one who thinks that the whistle on N & W 2-6-6-4 1218 sounds a bit wimpy? It’s kind of like a big, heavy, 6’ 6" man and then you find out he has a countertenor voice!
No, it’s more like watching Topkapi with Shirley MacLaine up to the point she opens her mouth…
Ed King had a discussion of this, with the N&W rejoinder being that it was what was under the whistle, not the whistle, that was important. But as with the to-me-execrable banshee whistles on ‘parent’ PRR’s freight power … yeesh, what a sad excuse. At least that awful sound on Cotton Belt 819 was the result of butchery, not design!
PRR made a practice of transferring chimes to freight power as passenger steam was retired, and in my decidedly unhumble opinion should have augmented this by sending some ‘southward’. THAT was a voice fit for a Class A.
(And to forestall a likely source of discord, or perhaps in this context dischord, it’s not as if PRR designed its chimes for non-comparable service in non-comparable mountain regions…)
No discord or discord, just one man’s biased opinion. I don’t know if anyone here has seen the Marx Brother’s film “Go West”(1940). In the zany locomotive scene, there is a classic American type with a whistle virtually the same as 1218. Somehow, on that locomotive it makes sense.
Naturally, the three nutty brothers raised havoc on the train. In order to beat the bad guys to railroad headquarters, they threw every possible thing into the firebox. When they threw in popcorn and the white stuff exploded all over the cab, Groucho gave one of his one-liners “Pop goes the diesel.”