In 1995 Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul 4-8-4 No. 261 left its home in Minnesota and ventured east to help Steamtown National Historic Site celebrate its grand opening.
The Northern-type locomotive built by Alco in July 1944 had been restored to operating condition in 1993 by a group known as the Friends of the 261.
I was on hand when the 261 participated in the parade of steam locomotives held during the grand opening festivities on July 1.
Later that day, the 261 pulled an excursion train from Scranton to Pocono Summit filled with attendees of that year’s convention of the National Railway Historical Society.
The convention actually was held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and we had ridden chartered buses north that morning to board a diesel-powered excursion to Steamtown.
The 261 remained behind in Steamtown for the next year, participating in excursions and other events.
But by June 1996 it was time for the steamer to head home to Minnesota.
I got a telephone call from my friend Bill Stephens, who at the time was living in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, asking if I’d be interested in riding the 261 ferry move from Orchard Park, another Buffalo suburb, to New Castle, Pennsylvania.
Bill was a correspondent for Trains and may have been covering the locomotive’s ferry move for the magazine.
He also invited some other friends to ride along. All we had to do was make a donation to the Friends of the 261 group.
Arranging this outing was complicated because the ferry move was one-way. This meant having to position our vehicles so that we had transportation to and from the train.
On the Friday before the ferry move, I met up with Bill in New Castle at the CSX yard office.
He parked his vehicle there and I then drove him to a motel in Buffalo where the four of us were staying.
The next morning we drove to the former Baltimore & Ohio station in Orchard Park to board the train.
There was a crowd of people on hand train because, well, steam locomotives attract crowds.
Some local officials were having an event to publicize their efforts to acquire the ex-B&O track through Orchard Park for use as a commuter rail service to be known as the Niagara Line. That concept, though, never panned out.
The train arrived and we swung aboard the tool car to get settled. We would spend much of our time in that car because the doors of the former baggage car were open during the trip and that was the place to be to make photographs and listen to the locomotive work.
We were on Buffalo & Pittsburgh tracks to West Eidenau, Pennsylvania, where the train got onto CSX.
It is hard to believe it today, but the 261 ferry move spent a lot of time on CSX going to and from Scranton, including traveling across Ohio and Indiana.
On the rear of the train was an open platform office car carrying a Missouri-Kansas-Texas drumhead.
My memory is that Trains had written about car 403 not long before the ferry move and featured it on the cover.
I spent part of the trip sitting or standing on the 403’s platform. In theory I wasn’t supposed to be in the 403 because I wasn’t a guest of the owner.
But he tolerated me being there, at least for awhile. After the train made a service stop, he approached me and when he began by saying, “well, friend . . .” I knew I had worn out my welcome.
We had brought with us some food items purchased from a Tops grocery store on Friday night. Yet somewhere in Pennsylvania someone ordered pizza to be delivered to the train. That turned out to be dinner for everyone.
There were not many passengers and I don’t remember talking with many of them although I might have.
Someone in our group said one of the passengers was Tom Nemeth, the editor of Railpace.
It was apparent throughout the day that railfan photographers were out in force following us.
It was sunny and the train didn’t move all that fast so I presume it was easy to chase.
In looking at my photographs, I found an image of some small town where our passage interrupted a parade on a downtown street.
We also made a stop at a town in New York at which there was a large crowd at a former B&O depot.
We knew the ferry move would make for a long day, but it turned out to be much longer than I had expected. Even someone who enjoys riding trains is ready to get off at some point.
Darkness came, the chasing photographers went home and I was sitting in a coach seat trying to catch some sleep.
We spent quite a bit of time in Butler, Pennsylvania, during the night. I believe we were waiting for a CSX pilot crew.
I remember seeing a train pass by overhead in the dark on a bridge as we sat in Butler.
One of Bill’s friends got down from the train, walked up to the locomotive and climbed up into the cab. He sat in the engineer’s seat for a while and, he said, began dozing off.
In retrospect I wished I had taken the time to visit the cab, too.
By the time we reached New Castle it was around 4 a.m. We had reserved motel rooms there and needless to say I was dead tired.
I shared a room with Bill’s friend Edmund who had traveled from Washington, D.C., to ride the ferry move.
Not only were we tired, we were covered in cinders and soot. Edmund stood in the bathtub and shook all of the cinders off. He then washed them down the drain.
It never felt so good to take a shower than it did after this trip.
The ferry move left Sunday morning to travel through Northeast Ohio on the CSX New Castle Subdivision.
But I was heading back to Buffalo to retrieve my car and return to Cleveland.
* * * * *
Over the years I’ve experienced a number of tie backs to that June 1996 day.
About eight years after it occurred I was sitting in Dave McKay’s living room on a Saturday night looking at slides of images that I might use in a book I was working on.
Dave had grabbed various boxes of images he thought I might find interesting.
Onto the screen popped photographs Dave had made of that 261 ferry move.
“I was on that train,” I said out loud. Dave had not known that.
He rattled off the names of other Northeast Ohio railfans who had been chasing the ferry move as well.
It was interesting to see that day’s trip from “the ground.”
Fast forward another 11 years and more photographs of the 261 ferry move surfaced when I was working on my second Akron Railroads book.
These images, though, had not been made in New York or Pennsylvania, but in Akron.
I number of people I had met through the Akron Railroad Club were standing near the tracks by the former Akron Union Depot when the 261 made a service stop.
In early July 2017 I traveled with Marty Surdyk and Ed Ribinskas to Arcade, New York, to photograph the Arcade & Attica steam train.
We stopped in Springville, New York, to photograph a passenger station and the right of way of an abandoned rail line turned into a trail.
This placed looked familiar. Marty said it had once been the B&O line out of Buffalo.
Then it clicked. This was the station at which we had stopped during the June 1996 261 ferry move.
I looked at my slides later and found an image I made of that station from the tool car. I had been there before.
About two weeks ago Ed emailed me some photographs of the 1996 ferry move. He thought he remembered my showing photographs of it during an ARRC program years ago and my having ridden it.
I didn’t remember doing that and a check of my past ARRC programs didn’t turn up any indication that I had.
Maybe Ed remembered a story I had written about that stop in Springview I had made on that trip to the Arcade & Attica.
Whatever the case, it prompted me to write this memory of my time riding the 261 ferry move. It is the last time I’ve ridden behind the 261.
I’ve seen it once since then, a fleeting glimpe through the windows of a Metra commuter train in Chicago.And that visit to Steamtown in 1995 remains the only time I’ve been there, too.
Article by Craig Sanders, Photographs by Ed Ribinskas
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