Classic Hifi Care

As a kid in Baltimore we always had what was called a "Christmas Garden" a train set put up around the tree. My wife's family always did so as well. Usually Lionel or American Flyer, most were only set up at Christmas time, hence the name. We still have her set, bought in Fall of 1949 for her 1st Christmas, and occasionally set up in our basement. We bought a vintage 1950 Lionel train set for our Grandson in Denver last year, which he loves. I gave my old HO trains to our other Grandson.

Always interested in trains, I've been so discouraged to see the decline of passenger rail over the last 60 years. We rode the famous B&O "Capitol Limited" to DC, and steam engines were still around when I was little. We saw the small "Ma & Pa" (MD & PA) steam (later diesel) local freight trains in our little town in the '50s & '60s. The B&O was the oldest RR in the country, and my wife's Mother, Uncle and Grandfather all worked for the B&O. They traveled all over the US for free, courtesy of the B&O. The B&O's"Mount Clare" museum in Baltimore is really something to see, many historic trains, and the "Tom Thumb", the most famous engine ever and built for the B&O, is there. It's first run was Baltimore to Ellicott City.

So I've been rooting for years for a resurgence in passenger rail for decades. We are sooo far behind, yet if any country has the vast spaces and spread-out large metro areas to use it, we do. Nowhere would it make more sense to have true high-speed rail service than here. We have the best freight rail system in the world, but our passenger rail, what little we have, sucks.

Many countries now have high-speed trains, even Morocco has one that can do 200 mph for heavens sake! Our pathetic Acela does at best 135 for a short stretch, and is limited to the NE corridor. France, Japan, Germany, China, Spain... all have trains in the 250-300mph range! China has a new MagLev train that does 360mph! (see pic, it's fabulous!). I remember reading about MagLev in Pop Sci in the 1970s, but 50 yrs later we don't have it, China does! I'd love to take a train to Denver, leave NY in the AM and get there that afternoon. And why don't we have the best trains in the world? (hint-hint: the trucking and auto lobbies!). Pathetic. As part of the embrace of cleaner technology, we need to start with decent passenger rail!

Pics at Mt Clare in Baltimore, the best 19th Century locomotive collection in the US, maybe the world.
This is but a small sampling. You can see a bit of the "Tom Thumb" at the L of one pic (with white wooden coaches):

https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x ... AB6BAgbEAI

Trying to gin up some posting interest here! I thought everyone (guys anyway) loved trains... ?

I never had a train set. The closest I ever got to a train was when I had the PennCentral account when I worked for a Standard Oil jobber. I would deliver 2000 gallons of diesel fuel to the PennCentral southbound locomotive back in the 1970's. My cousing had, still has, a Lionel train set with all the fancy doodads. I had a race car track with a couple of cars, but that didn't last long. I really never got into trains. Trucks were my thing when I was a kid.

I reckon interest in trains varied depending on the area of the country you are from. People on the east coast may have ridden a train regularly, whereas in the Midwest all a train did was move freight and rich people across country. We had the old Monon railroad that ran along the back part of the old home place, but they still ran steam locomotives up into the early 1970's. They mostly hauled coal from the Minehaha Mine over in Vigo County to towns in the NE corner of the state. If you wanted to get onto a passenger train, you had to visit the New York Central station in Indy. There was a narrow-gauge railroad connecting a couple of the local towns, but it was mostly a tourist trap. It was defunct when they widened the highway and took the narrow gauge right of way.

When I was ten I could tell you all the freight companies, what kind of rigs they had, what engines they ran, whether they ran gas burners or diesel, the whole schmeer. I was determined to be a truck driver. Grandpa would have none of it. He thought truckers spent their time in bars, whorehouses and cheated on their wives. He didn't realize that everything he touched, even in the 1950's had been hauled in a truck at one point. When I started driving Bill Bays' new Mack B-75, grandpa was heartbroken. My driving that old Mack taught grandpa how hard a trucker actually worked, the long hours, the crappy pay, not eating right, smoking too much. I loved it. Some of my fondest memories are driving a truck. I was a Mack driver. I drove other trucks and they were okay, but I was a Mack man, still am.

My first extended train trip was from Michigan to Colorado for the 1960 Boy Scout Jamboree. My troop went out. Only later as an adult did I reflect on the hard work of the adults who managed that. Later, in high school, my cousin came to visit in MI from Virginia and we rode back to his home on the train. My Mom organized a birthday party for one of the kids on the Beeliner, a two-car passenger train that ran between Bay City and Flint. About 1980 I flew with my bicycle to Alberta, where my brother was living. We hopped a train from Edmonton toward Jasper Nat'l Park and bike camped from there to Banff Nat'l Park. We were in the cheap seats. We walked to the dining car through one of the big transcontinental cars, and whoa! Suddenly everything got smooth and quiet!

In Michigan you can ride a steam train at Crossroads Village near Flint.

When my brothers and I were kids my parents Frank Phillips, a kind older neighbor, build a big table for a train set (Lionel, O gauge). Later Dad engaged Barney Crampton, a local firefighter who was later chief, to improve the basement. Mr. Crampton noted that the trains tended to flip off the table at one of the corners so he went home and made a tiny wood picket fence for the train table. Around 2000 I was in Bay City as a crew member on a big replica sailing schooner at a Tall Ships gathering. Mr. Crampton was dying of cancer but he and his wife came down to the boat to see me.

The Lionel table has sat next to the Chevy's spot in the garage since 1973. The cars and such are in boxes in the house. I need a pole barn....

Mr. Phillips and Mr. Crampton, two of the adults who taught me lessons in kindness and generosity. I like to repeat their names. Or, back to the Scout Jamboree, Mr. Brown, my scoutmaster. They are ll people who shared their time and energy with kids. It is substantial people like them that make me uninterested in celebrities and narcissists.

Chris Campbell

The East coast corridor now served by Amtrak has always been the epicenter of passenger train travel because of the close proximity of size-able cities from VA to Mass, to this day. It moves a lot of people, and even Joe Biden would ride a train almost daily from Wilmington to DC, a trip of about an hour+, in order to be home every evening with his family, and is a supporter of train travel and Amtrak (the core of which was Penn Central when it was created) to this day. My Grandfather rode a train to work and back in Boston every day from the 1920s to 1950s until they stopped the service, and walk to and from the station about a mile away.

The Mid-west and West has been oriented more to freight due to the vast distance for bulk goods like coal to be moved. The most biggest and most powerful engine ever built, Union Pacific's Big Boy: 1.2 million ponds heavy! was conceived to haul coal over the Rockies. It was the Saturn V of it's day, a miracle of human ingenuity. 25 were built and 8 survive: 4023 is on a hill overlooking I-80 in Omaha and is see by a million every year travelling on that highway, 4005 is in the Forney Museum in Denver, 4012 is in Scranton PA (coal country), and 4014 has recently been restored to running condition in California! They are amazing artifacts of the Steam Age!

We're lucky to have had lots of good people like those you had, Chris,who have been positive influences, when I think back to all the Den Mothers, Scout Leaders, Coaches, that have been in my and our kids lives.

The big problem for modern US passenger service is, as always: money. We lag way behind because of lack of funding. In virtually every other modern country passenger rail is heavily subsidized because it is actually treated as what it is: a public SERVICE!, The US passenger rail system is absurdly expected to make a profit and be self-funded, which is impossible. We don't do that with highways, bridges, or municipal bus service. The rail infrastructure is way too expensive to be self-supported, the track needs to be completely upgraded (some are 100 yrs old!), and the rest is best illustrated by the scant geographical areas currently served and by the obsolete equipment of Amtrak shown by these pics: here's our Acela's GE Gensis, compared with the Chinese train in the post above, and below: Japan's Shinkansen trains (newest model is on the L, the weird nose is designed to reduce turbulence in tunnels), some of them dating back to the 1960s!! US passenger service peaked around 1952 and it shows.

The new Acela trainsets coming next Fall will be a modest improvement, at 160 mph about where France, Japan etc were 20 years ago, but only usable in very limited areas for short stretches. The cars are being built by Siemens (German), the engines built by Alstrom (France). We can't even build the equipment. Even worse, the area of the US served will still be miniscule, but hey, we can hope... well, for our kids maybe!

If you visit Pennsylvania, trains are THE reason there are museums in small towns that don't get many visitors otherwise. Any remaining train stations if not demolished, are the first step to establishing a tourist stop. Every town along the tracks has a story to tell about their contributions to industrialization during the 19th century.

My office building looks out over the massive rail yard north of Harrisburg and there is always something going by. Norfolk Southern makes up most of the traffic here. Coal still going to the few remaining power plants, endless sea-can containers that go on trucks and other items (new cars?) that are in well-disguised rail cars.

Travel on Amtrak up and down the east coast could be revolutionized if USA could do it like Europe has. A trip from Harrisburg west to Pittsburgh takes a long time on a train, saving no time over a car ride on the turnpike, so high-speed rail is not practical over that terrain. Most of the country is flat and open, think of how traffic would be if there were no trains, too many truck and warehouses proliferate in the Northeast.

I was on the Thalys(?) train from Brussels to Paris 24 years ago, and speed was supposed to be 200 km/H. You did not notice unless two trains passed going in opposite directions, then a sudden change in sound and perceptible thump from the opposing draft.

I liked to see trains as a kid. The Pennsylvania RR had a line that crossed the west side of the town I grew up in. I joined the cub scouts in 1965. The lady overseeing it was the wife of the local scoutmaster. She arranged various tours of what that area of Indiana had to offer. She arranged for us to take a trip from Marion Indiana to Indianapolis and back on a New York Central passenger train. Pretty exciting stuff for a kid that would see Indy once in 2 years. Rail travel was catch as catch can even then. We started from the NYC freight platform in Marion.

I like trains, but I also like most anything that has an engine or is mechanical. Growing up, a freight train came to town twice a week and dropped off and picked up stuff. Then it would roll ahead, and the big feed/grain elevator would fill up a few cars and off it would go. Eventually it stopped coming to town and now the closest train yard is 22 miles north, or 35 miles south. If one wanted to take a train ride, there is passenger service that leaves Grand Rapids and goes to Chicago.

I have also visited a few train museums over the years, and the Henry Ford museum in Detroit has several trains including a really huge locomotive, possible another Big Boy? Roger, am I correct on that??? If not, it has to be close.

In my lifetime I think I have ridden a passenger train 6 times, which were all above ground. I have also ridden subway trains.

My favorite engine style is the Art-Deco look.

Bill

When I was a kid, the Detroit & Mackinaw ran behind the house. Twice a day, then later once a day, then a few times a week. Eventually they abandoned the track after high water washed it out, buying a track a mile farther inland. The D&M ran from Bay City to Alpena, despite the name. We kids would run out and wave to the engineer, and sometimes put pennies on the track.

When the RR abandoned the track, they sold off the right of way in lots to adjacent landowners. I own about 45 feet of the old ROW. I have left the gravel ballast in place go remember the RR. Most of the neighbors had theirs bulldozed flat for pole barns or lawns.

My Mom collected RR keys--the switch keys, usually bearing the company's initial.

Chris Campbell

The railroad bed that was once the route into Hart is now the Hart, Montague/Whitehall bike trail. It's one of my favorite things to do during good weather, to ride that trail and see where the train traveled.

Bill

Firedome wrote: ↑Sat Apr 08, 2023 1:16 pm Many countries now have high-speed trains, even Morocco has one that can do 200 mph for heavens sake! Our pathetic Acela does at best 135 for a short stretch, and is limited to the NE corridor. France, Japan, Germany, China, Spain... all have trains in the 250-300mph range! China has a new MagLev train that does 360mph! (see pic, it's fabulous!). I remember reading about MagLev in Pop Sci in the 1970s, but 50 yrs later we don't have it, China does! I'd love to take a train to Denver, leave NY in the AM and get there that afternoon. And why don't we have the best trains in the world? (hint-hint: the trucking and auto lobbies!). Pathetic. As part of the embrace of cleaner technology, we need to start with decent passenger rail!

I agree , the US is way behind the world on high speed trains , detractors claim a high speed is not needed as we have all these regional airlines... some people are scared to fly. my cousin worked in china for a few months and took several trains , I guess some of the trains are so fast, it made their regional plane service obsolete... here we are lucky if Amtrak can stay on the tracks...

Bill the loco at the Henry Ford is a 2-6-6-6 "Allegheny" H-8 class built by the Lima Works (Ohio) for the C&O for the exact same purpose as the Big Boy, hauling coal, in this case over the Allegheny Mts form the coal fields of PA, WV etc.

One of the biggest ever built, over a million pounds, but believe it or not, huge as it is, smaller than the 4-8-8-4 Big Boy!
Only 2 are left, one at the Henry Ford, and one at the Mt. Clare B&O museum in Baltimore I referenced above!
They were both so long their drive wheel sets, 2 x 6 and 2 x 8, were 2 separate articulated wheel sets.

We still have freight trains rumble by about 1/2 mile away, on the old Delaware and Hudson line, now owned by Canadian Pacific. Coal, fracked oil from Canada, cars from the mid-West to the big Eastern cities, and lots & lots of Intermodal (truck trailers on top of flatcars) hauling freight inland from all the big East coast US ports in Jersey, NY, Baltimore, Newport News, &c. We hear their loud horns at the crossings, love that sound, you wonder where it's going, what it's hauling.

The CP now uses the old Delaware & Hudson and New York Central lines, all over NY into PA, OH, and up to Montreal. The D&H was known as the last line that used the iconic, famous and powerful Baldwin "Sharknose" diesels, into the late '70s. They were built in Penn. and quite rare even when new and now only 2 are left in the world, both in Escanaba Michigan, after being bought by a small local line in the early '80s then squirreled away.

One of the last pictures ever of a pair in actual use was taken right here in Binghamton at a big D&H rail yard in 1975. They were bought and stored out of sight in a locked building in Michigan to the consternation of rail-fans the world over, and just recently re-appeared: spotted for the first time in 40 years! An item on my "bucket list": is to see them in person! I love the D&H "livery" of blue, silver and yellow, and their super-aggressive look.

https://railfan.com/elusive-baldwin-sha ... n-storage/

Baldwin "Sharknose" in NY Central's cool "Lightning" livery:

Last pair of the mighty "Sharks" in use, spotted in the D&H Binghamton yards in 1975.
1216 is positioned behind 1205. Now in Escanaba Michigan, ultimate fate unknown!
Such awesome locomotives!

D&H 1216 in Michigan just last year, 1205 is there as well. Both were last used here in Binghamaton
I may need to make a trip to Escobana... save the Sharks!!

Any of you Michiganer's live near Escobana?

The Baldwin Sharknose was designed by Raymond Lowey btw, he also designed the Baldwin T-1 '30s steam engine for the PRR, one of the coolest looking ever, and also called "Sharknose". Sadly none survive, though an effort is being made to build a new one!