EL Monday: With a Little Help From the D&H

It’s sometime in the late 1960s or maybe early 1970s in Akron.

Four Delaware & Hudson locomotives have teamed up to lead an eastbound manifest freight on the Erie Lackawanna and the train is approaching McCoy Street Yard at Voris Street.

In sequence the D&H units are an Alco C-628, GE U33C, Alco C-628, and and Alco C-628.

D&H motive power on the EL was not uncommon in this era as both were part of the holding company known as Dereco, a term that was short hand for the various railroads in the ownership group: D&H, EL, Reading and Jersey Central.

Photograph by Robert Farkas

EL Monday: Eastbound in Akron

There is some variety in this intermodal train on the Erie Lackawanna that is running eastbound through Akron on Sept. 4, 1972. The motive power consist includes EL 3640, 3668, 2562 along with Delaware & Hudson No. 602.

Photograph by Robert Farkas

AAPRCO Move Through NE Ohio Set in September

Private car trains are making somewhat of a comeback on Amtrak.

The passenger carrier has given the Association of American Private Car Owners preliminary approval to operate a private car special from Chicago to Vermont in September.

The train will pass through Northeast Ohio on Sept 22 but probably in darkness as it will depart from Chicago at 8:30 p.m. the previous day.

The special will also operate on the Mohawk Adirondack Northern Railroad and the Vermont Rail System.

In announcing the special to its members, AAPRCO said Itinerary is subject to railroad approvals, but the group said it has contingency routings.

The announcement did not say what route the train would take between Chicago and Cleveland, but it likely would be the Norfolk Southern line used by Amtrak.

Nor did it say which route would be taken between Cleveland and Buffalo, New York.

In September 2014, an AAPRO special traveled on NS east of Cleveland.

The train has been named the American Autumn Explorer.

The announcement said the train would operate overnight through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania and expects to pass the former Buffalo Central Terminal during breakfast hours.

The train will continue to Niagara Falls, New York, where passengers will be able to disembark and spend time there.

The train will depart Niagara Falls on Sept. 23 and use the former New York Central Water Level Route to Utica, New York, where it will drop its Amtrak locomotives and operate as a special train on the Mohawk Adirondack Northern Railroad.

The destination will be Thendara, New York, where the train will park overnight.

Departing Thendara on Sept. 24, the special will go back to Utica, pick up the Amtrak locomotives and use former Delaware and Hudson Railroad tracks (now owned by Canadian Pacific) to travel to Saratoga Springs, New York.

The special will leave Saratoga Springs on Sept. 26 and en route to near Plattsburgh, New York, where it will reverse direction and run to Albany-Rensselaer, New York, to pick up additional private cars.

Departure from Albany-Rensselaer will be on Sept. 27 for Whitehall, New York, and then east to Rutland, Vermont.

At Rutland the Amtrak locomotives will be dropped off and the train will continue on the Vermont Rail System to Burlington where it will be parked downtown for three days.

The annual AAPRCO convention will be held in Burlington.

The special will depart Burlington on Oct. 1 and return to Albany-Rensselaer where the special will terminate and its cars forwarded back home on regularly scheduled Amtrak trains starting on Oct. 2.

Swimming With Some ‘Sharks’

That was great news that the owner of Baldwin’s last two sharks says he will have them donated to a museum at his death. Here are a couple of shark photos.

In the top image it is late 1968 in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, where five ex-New York Central sharks plus several Baldwin switchers can be seen in the Monongahela engine facility.

The two units on the left, Nos. 1216 and 1205, are the survivors now being stored in Michigan.

In the bottom photograph it is June 13, 1977, and Delaware & Hudson Nos. 1205 and 1216 (the two survivors) are rounding a curve in Whitehall, New York.

Article and Photographs by Robert Farkas

Rare Sighting

Delaware & Hudson RS-36 No. 5020 leads a quartet of four axle Alco locomotives eastbound past the Erie Lackawanna passenger station in Akron in the late 1960s. I have been told this is a rare photo because the D&H usually only used six axle ALCO’s on the EL.

Article and Photograph by Robert Farkas

CSX Donates Ex-Reading Unit to Reading Museum

CSX has donated a former Reading GP-39-2 to the Reading Railroad Heritage Museum in Hamburg, Pennsylvania.

No. 4317 was the last new locomotive delivered to the Reading before it was taken over by Conrail. It was built in December 1974 as No. 3412.

However, the locomotive was actually owned by the Chessie System and was leased to the Reading.

The unit will be repainted in Reading green and yellow from its current CSX livery as soon as time and funding permit.

When Conrail was formed in 1976, 20 Reading locomotives were set aside for the Delaware & Hudson, which eventually purchased them from the Reading estate.

Canadian Pacific returned the ex-Reading units to CSX after it acquired the D&H.

The Reading museum is part of the Reading Co. Technical & Historical Society and features a comprehensive collection of Reading rolling stock and locomotives as well as an extensive archive of Reading photographs, corporate records, and technical drawings.

The Stories Behind Freight Cars

Some railfan photographers enjoy photographing freight cars although few of them make that their primary focus.

For the vast majority of railroad photographers, the motive power is the be all and end all of their hobby.

Yet I’ve sat through more than one railfan club program in which one or more audience members lamented not photographing a particular freight car at a given time and place.

Usually, what they failed to capture is a car from a fallen flag railroad.

That is the story behind the top image of a Delaware & Hudson boxcar photographed on June 10, 1978, in Massillon. The D&H is now a fallen flag.

The story behind the bottom photograph is different. This covered hopper was photographed in Akron on Jan. 26, 1980.

It got me to wondering he is or was Sid Richardson. He was Sid Williams Richardson, a Fort Worth, Texas, businessman, who lived between 1891 and 1959.

He made his fortune in the oil and carbon businesses. He was a philanthropist who founded what would become the Sid Richardson Museum, a collection of western art, particularly that of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell.

He also founded the Sid W. Richardson Foundation in 1947 and it continues to provide grants to organizations in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

As for the company that bears Richardson’s name, it was acquired last year byTokai Carbon Company. A news release about the acquisition noted that Sid Richardson Carbon is the larges carbon black producer in the United States.

Railroading as it Once Was: Delaware & Hudson Also Was a Colorful Railroad in the 1970s

While most know of the colorful early years of Conrail, the Delaware & Hudson wasn’t to be ignored either in the years after April 1, 1976.

The government allowed the D&H to expand as “competition” to the new Conrail and some of the newest power the Reading and the Lehigh Valley had was transferred to the D&H to help with their newly expanded territory.

In September 1976 a meet occurred on the Penn Division under the former Erie Starrucca viaduct in Lanesboro, Pennsylvania.

While this beautiful stone viaduct still stands and sees the occasional New York, Susquehanna & Western train, the D&H tracks below are all gone.

Article and Photograph by Roger Durfee

Railroading as it Once Was: When Erie Lackawanna and Delaware & Hudson Swapped Power

In advance of being absorbed by Conrail, the Erie Lackawanna did some “tidy up” work.

The Delaware & Hudson had acquired three EMD SD45s once their demonstration chores were done.

They were basically big orphans in a sea of Alco and GE motive power, so the D&H and EL worked out a one-for-one swap of the three SDs to the EL for three GE U33Cs to the D&H.

This was all fine and good until Conrail was acquiring the EL, but not the D&H; so the whole deal was undone a couple months before C-Day.

The U-boats returned to the EL and the D&H got its SDs back and quickly put them to work with a quickie re-lettering job.

I consider it a stroke of good luck to have ran across all three of them together at Binghamton, New York, in September 1976 in the sun no less, their travels having come full circle.

After a few years on the D&H these locomotives were shipped off to Mexico.

Article and Photograph by Roger Durfee