Now this is really something. I’m about to embark on a trip and if there was a place and time to go to this would be it. #6000 to boot and a B&O Presidential Pacific and someone else in the background. Wow.
This must have been very very close to the end for these gals yet they look pristine. Can you imagine being there that night! Thanks Classic Trains.
Nocturnal steam at Cincinnati
New York Central 4-8-4 6000 (left, the first of NYC’s famous Niagaras) and Baltimore & Ohio 4-6-2 5313 (one of B&O’s famous “President” Pacifics) simmer near Cincinnati Union Terminal one evening in September 1954.
Philip R. Hastings photo
Also…is the Classic Quiz finished, over, kaput? Was reading over older quiz threads comments last night…many are either not with us, such as Deggesty friend KCS Fan or just not participating any longer. Lots of great information, things we did not know.
No, I think I’m sitting on both threads and every time I get halfway to a question I either run out of time or see something about it posted elsewhere.
If I’m “up” and it’s been more than a day – someone jump in and ask their own to keep it going. I’d much rather answer ‘stumpers’ from the real experts here than come up with my own (usually excessively technical) ones.
I usually don’t bother with the “Classic Railroad Quiz” because it’s depressing to be shocked by your own ignorance.
But that photo! Wow!
Reminds me of a story that was in “Classic Trains” a while back. The writer remembered being a little boy and just loving being at the station when his “friend,” a BIG Niagara, used to pull in.
Then one day his friend stopped coming. Some thing called a diesel had taken it’s place, and a friendly and sympathetic conductor told him it wouldn’t be back. Sixty years had come and gone and the heartbreak was still there.
Yes a very touching re-cap Firelock76…something most of us experienced to one degree or another. Worse for me were the funeral trains, with familiar steam, humiliated, with recognizable #'s whitelined out spaced by decrepid rolling stock heading for the same fate. That was traumatic. CNR had many that were just rebuilt and fresh paint mostly from Stratford. The streamlined Northerns, my God, are you kidding? What? Why? 600 minus 2 Mohawks, all the Hudsons, all the Niagaras, all those Mikes…and they Pennsy? Where did they put it all?
Once seen you can’t unsee it. Glad for this photo, very powerful scene.
RME- Yes it’s getting hard to squeeze in the time and coming up with questions in a timely manner plus we seem to down to just a few dudes. Oh well it will proceed at a different pace, no big deal.
My not very rigid rule is that if the next guy doesn’t post his question in 7 days, I post another one (assuming, of course I was last one up…) I would volunteer to moderate the quiz thread (either one) as long as I get to pose something once in a while!
My problem with those is that I never seem to have the time to go through the 5000+ responses to get caught up. It’s not terribly “newbie friendly”, there are questions I might ask but not knowing the content from the beginning I don’t ask them. Anyhoo. Not a rant, just [2c].
Oh certainly, a lot of these threads end up as a free-wheeling discussion, kind of like sitting around the coal stove at the depot with the coffee flowing freely and the doughnuts being passed around.
The only downside? We’re not really at the depot with the coffee and doughnuts and can’t see each other face-to-face. But we’ll just have to make do otherwise, right?
Give it another 5 years or so and we will have virtual experience that comes along with a photograph. Holodeck, West World stuff.
In the meantime I’ll have the dark and an extra shot of espresso in it and a cruller and an apple fritter. No Timmies up here, we had an A&W but they lost their lease and are gone. Believe it or not it was, sort of, a continuation of the old NorthWest Co. vs. Hudson Bay Co. wars.
The North West Company was a fur trading business headquartered in Montreal from 1779 to 1821. It competed with increasing success against the Hudson’s Bay Company in what is present-day Western Canada. With great wealth at stake, tensions between the companies increased to the point where several minor armed skirmishes broke out, and the two companies were forced to merge.
Miningman, Lady Firestorm sympathises with you over not having a Tim Horton’s nearby, she loves the tea-biscuits! Unfortunately the nearest Timmie’s to us is in Saint John’s, Newfoundland!
The only tea-biscuits better than Timmie’s were the ones Lady F’s mother’s childhood friend Lizzie Ryan used to make, but that’s not an option now either. To use a quaint Newfoundland phrase Lizzie’s “…passed the light, rounded the point, crossed the bar, and dropped anchor in her last harbor.”
That North-West Company coat of arms is spectacular! I clicked on it for a closer look, and was amazed to see the beaver chewing a tree down with the motto “Perserverance.” Amazed because that was a common motif on some American regimental flags during the Revolution, although “Perserverance” was typically rendered “Perserverando.”
SD70, I just love mega-burgers myself. As Frederick the Great said, “Rogues! Would you live forever?”
Oh, for a coal-scented cologne, try “JT’s Mega-Steam” coal-scented O gauge smoke fluid!
Tried something similar once, but that stuff seems to work best when pared with a locomotive (gives me the itches when applied to clothing), and they look at you funny when you bring model trains into a restaurant. Oh well.
“Sir, I must ask you to leave. The other customers are complaining about the smell, and we have a no-smoking policy in our establishments.”
The tables are too small for a proper layout anyway. And if you do it on the floor people will trip over it. Too busy twiddling on their phones to look where they’re going I guess.
