New York Central Nos. 7364 and 7311 are in Painesville on Oct. 2, 1969. This is a year and a half after the Penn Central merger took place. If you look carefully at the caboose, though, you’ll see it has a PC logo and lettering.
It is the first month of Penn Central, but it looks like a New York Central world as westbound NYC 4032 passes through Painesville, Ohio, on the weekend of Feb. 24-25, 1968. Both views are from the same negative.
The photographs were made with a Mamiya C3 twin lens reflex camera that took a 2 and 1/4 inch square negative that made cropping like this easier. The camera was owned by his father.
Although Bob didn’t record the train number, it is probably No. 63, which was the only daylight westbound passenger train on the ex-NYC through Painesville and Cleveland.
It was scheduled into Painesville at 10:55 a.m. and Cleveland at 11:59 a.m.
No. 63 originated in New York, leaving Grand Central Terminal at 10:30 p.m. It carried a sleeper and slumbercoach between New York and Cleveland and added a diner-lounge at Buffalo, New York, that ran to Chicago. Of course No. 63 also had coaches.
After leaving New York, No. 63 split into two sections at Albany, with one section conveying cars to Montreal via the Delaware & Hudson where it operated as No. 9.
No. 63 would last until the coming of Amtrak on May 1, 1971.
Was it really 49 years ago that I took this photo of my first Montreal Locomotive Works FPA-4? Here is a photo that still brings a smile. Canadian National 6786 is at the station in London, Ontario, on November 30, 1968. Mike Ondecker, John Woodworth and I had originally intended to go to Toledo on Nov. 29 for an overnight stay but finished there and spent the night in London were this was taken.
Norfolk & Western Nos. 3697, 3717, and 3712 are at Brewster outside the N&W diesel shop in the late 1960s. Although the N&W had no F units of its own, these Fs are ex-Wabash.
Early in its history, the modern Wheeling & Lake Erie held a competition among its employees to design a locomotive livery.
The winner was a bright combination of red and gold that was applied to two GP35s, Nos. 2662 and 2679. W&LE CEO Larry Parsons often referred to them as the “painted ladies.”
Parsons believes that the best color for a locomotive is black so the red and gold look was not widely applied.
No. 2679 has since been rebuilt and repainted in the W&LE’s standard livery, but No. 2662 remains on the active roster in its red and gold appearance.
The two units are shown together in the above images in Akron on May 8, 1994.
They had led an excursion train from Bellevue into town and parked it near Summit Street.
Passengers were taken by bus to Quaker Square for dinner. I remember that it was Mother’s Day.
The two “painted ladies” are shown ready to return to Bellevue. The train was sponsored by the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum and operated under the name Bradley Memorial Limited in honor of a boy who had died far too early.
The fact that No. 2662 is still in service means the image is not yet lost history, even if it is historic.
The images also qualify as nostalgic because the W&LE no longer will agree to host excursion trains such as these.
This would be the only time that I saw the two “painted ladies” paired together on the same train.
Thankfully, I have some Erie Lackawanna photographs that I made in color although many of them are roster photos. Here is one of my favorite EL slides. F7A EL 7124 leads three E8A locomotives eastbound through the EL yard in Kent in April 1973.
Here is another memory for the blog. A Baltimore & Ohio trailer train heads east through Kent in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The Erie Lackawanna passenger station can be seen on the hill in the middle left. Notice all the jointed rail that was normal back then.
An Erie Lackawanna Alco FA and Alco RS-3 are eastbound leaving the EL Kent yard in the late 1960s. This photo is from the north side of the tracks and not the more commonly photographed south side. Notice, also, the light tower, bridges and semaphore signal.
I was going through some glassine envelopes of negatives and found this. Illinois Central No. 4035 is in Centralia, Illinois, in August 1970. The Train name/number are unknown to me.
John Woodworth, Mike Ondecker, and I were in Centralia to photograph IC passenger trains. I never guessed that in less than a year there would no longer be IC passenger trains.
Photograph by Robert Farkas
There’s an expression that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it is a duck. Except when it isn’t.
The locomotive shown above looks for all the world like a Conrail unit except for the letters OHIC toward the top. Those show that it is actually owned by Minerva-based Ohi-Rail.
Class 1 Railroads hold garage sales every so often to get rid of “surplus” motive power that has either been replaced by newer units or been deemed to be no longer needed.
Short-line railroads shop these sales looking for bargains on good merchandise just as many people make it a way of life to shop yard sales on Saturday mornings in the summer.
More often than not these used locomotives continue to work with their former identities for a while before seeing a paint booth to get the livery of a new owner.
This image of a former Conrail B23-7R was made in Minerva in June 2004. The unit was built by GE as a U23B for Western Pacific, but later transformed into a Monongahela Railway Super 7. No. 4097 was on the Norfolk Southern roster for a while before Ohi-Rail got it.
I’m not sure what this locomotive was doing at the time I saw it, but it might have been coming back from interchanging cars with NS at Bayard and is headed for the yard.
