The Rise and Fall of America’s Forgotten Railroad Empire: Altoona, Pennsylvania
Paul McAllister
I recognize the name Altoona, but I don't know why. It feels like it was the name of a town in a story I read a long time ago, and then I watched the video about Baldwin Locomotives and I got a clue. Now this video pops up and it becomes clear that Altoona was big deal for a long time and maybe the name just kind of seeped into our culture without anyone noticing.
Video paints a pretty good picture of the rise and fall of Altoona. Gets kind of long winded and repetitive towards the end, but pretty good overall.
Not all of the images shown are accurate. For example, towards the end, just after the 34 minute mark, there is shot of a big steel mill. There was never a big steel mill like this in Altoona. The image is of Bethlehem Steel located along the Lehigh River in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Why The Baldwin Centipede Broke Every Railroad That Bought It — 91 Feet Of Failure
Cab Forward
I'm watching this video about the Baldwin Centipede locomotive, and he mentions the La Vergne 608SC diesel engine and I get distracted. He don't show a picture, or at least not a good one, so I go looking and found some passable images on The Baldwin Diesel Zone.
The 608SC shows up in 1945, but the company was around for another 20 years. So what were they building? In 1964:
The last 600 series engine was built at Eddystone. Stationary 608A #7113
Eddystone, where's that? Ask Google and the first interesting thing that pops up is the Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy. Okay, a power plant is not a locomotive, but they are like brothers from different mothers, brothers under the skin, so to speak. They are both industrial power machines, which is close enough. Besides, I have a soft spot for power generating stations, so I go take a look. On Google Maps, Eddystone is a suburb of Philadelphia and the power plant looks like this:
The power plant is surrounded by a double set of railroad tracks and most of the land inside the tracks appears to be flat, bare ground, or maybe concrete. If this power plant was burning coal, both of those features would be useful, but there doesn't appear to be any coal. However, there are two big oil tanks.
Eddystone Generating Station plays a critical role in delivering reliable power through fuel diversity. Owned and operated by Constellation, this six-unit, 820-megawatt (MW) power plant is located on the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia.
Eddystone Units 3 and 4, each with a capacity of 380 MW, were installed between 1967 and 1970. These subcritical steam boiler-turbine generator units can operate on either natural gas or oil, providing flexibility based on market conditions.
Units 10, 20, 30 and 40 are oil-fueled peaking units with a combined capacity of 60 MW. They are designed to run during periods of high demand and were installed in 1967 and 1970.
Construction of Eddystone began in the mid-1950s, with the now-retired Units 1 and 2 coming online in 1960. Both were supercritical steam boiler-turbine generator units that operated on coal. Unit 1 was retired in 2011, and Unit 2 followed in 2012.
Eddystone has been in business for 70 years, and for most of that time they were burning coal. It's only been in the last 15 years that they've fully changed over to gas and oil. I wonder how much it would cost to replicate that railroad track today. Google says one to five million a mile, for straight lines on level ground. I'm gonna say 10 to 20 million for this industrial location. Is there any other commodity that could use such a setup? A grain terminal maybe? Probably not while the power plant is operating.
There seems to be some disagreement over whether Eddystone should be operating or not. There's too many competing interests and it's too far away, I'm not gonna stick my nose in there, though maybe I should. Data Centers are one of the competing interests, and there are a bunch of them being built around here. I suspect they are piggy-backing on the electrical power distribution system that was installed to support Intel's Giant Ronler Acres Microchip Foundry. They might be piggy-backing as well on the tax deal Intel got when they set up shop in Hillsboro.
An aside: While I was writing this post I tried to copy the phrase
Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy
from Google's search page, but when I pasted it I got:
Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy
Curious as how this was being done, I used Blogger's html mode and found that pasting that line came with 3KB of html fluff. A little poking around reveals that including this little bit of text:
The narrator in this video repeats some of his stuff a little excessively. I don't know whether he is just filling time, hoping to pound these phrases into the listener's brain, or whether he just likes the sound of his own voice. Is that even a real thing? Liking the sound of your own voice? I don't even know what I sound like, I guess my voice is acceptable. Anyway, I suspect the phrase 'liking the sound of your own voice' is just something some wag made up to describe someone who talked a lot.
The point I was trying to make is that I have seen several videos like this, and I guess I got to give these guys credit for putting together a polished video. Not everybody can do that, but I suspect some of these, especially the ones where the narrator never appears, are just having an AI read a script.
Long trains moving extremely slowly equal maddening waits for drivers on the Central Eastside.
Problem is the railroad cuts the eastside in two and there are only a few place to cross it that are not grade level crossings, which means at rush hour those few crossings are going to be jammed as well.
The portion of eastside of Portland near the Willamette River is full of railroad tracks. It's hard to get a clear view of the situation. If you zoom out you see orange lines running from top to bottom.
The MV Bali Sea was a rare rail ferry that operated between Coatzacoalcos, Mexico and Mobile, Alabama, carrying up to 115 fully loaded railcars across the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of crossing land borders, trains from Mexico’s Ferrosur line were rolled directly onto the ship using a linkspan ramp system supported by two vertical towers. These towers allowed for precise height adjustments to match the ferry deck with the shore tracks, ensuring smooth loading regardless of sea level changes.
Originally launched in 1981 as a heavy-lift ship, she was converted into a rail ferry in 2000 to serve the CG Railway route. The Bali Sea offered a 900-mile maritime shortcut for rail cargo, cutting transit time and avoiding congestion at U.S.–Mexico border crossings. After two decades of service, she was retired in 2021 and replaced by larger, faster ferries, but her role in connecting two nations with seamless train-to-sea transport remains a landmark in intermodal logistics.
One fine spring day, about a zillion years ago, when he was a student at Oregon State University in Corvallis, he and about a hundred other kids hopped the train to Toledo. It rolled through town going only a couple of miles per hour, so it was easy to grab hold and climb aboard.
The train consisted of open top hopper cars filled with wood chips. Jack had brought a quart of beer. Sitting on top of the world, riding on a cloud of wood chips through the forest primeval, he drank it. Now nature calls, so he climbs down the ladder at the end of the car and hanging on with one arm, relieves himself. Unfortunately, at just this moment the train went by somebody's home where there was a big family picnic going on. Oops.
Eventually the train got to Toledo and the kids got off and roamed around town for a while. Later on it's time to catch the train back to Corvallis. Now it's dark and the hoppers are empty so they are sitting on cold steel, freezing their asses off. Far as we know, nobody died.
Railroad Line from Toledo, Oregon, to Corvallis This line runs over the coast range. Toledo is at the left end of the yellow-green line, just east of Newport. The word Corvallis is partially covered by that same line. You can read the last part of the name: -allis. I-5 is near the right hand side of the image.
I don't think I've ever encountered slugs before, at least not the railroad kind. Seems they have been around for awhile. Trains tells us that they got their start in the early 20th century at a copper mine in Montana.
They Tried to Kill Swift’s Fridge Car — and Created a Monster Instead
Ewan Hargreaves
Swift and Armour, boy, those names are a blast from the past. I haven't come across them in a coon's age, but evidently they are still in business. Swift was purchased by Brazilian company JBS in 2007 and continues to operate. Armour has become Smithfield Foods.
Reefer Rail Car
I vaguely remember having a book about trains when I was a kid. It had pictures of various kinds of railroad cars, like boxcars and reefers, and they were loading ice into the reefer. I'm old, but I don't think I'm that old. Turns out the last ice cooled reefers were built in 1957, and the first mechanical refrigerated railcars were built in 1958.
Remember these old milk trucks? I got a look at one once. They had a weird refrigeration system. They had big blocks (tanks?) lining the freight compartment. These blocks were hooked up at night, chilled all night long, and then kept the truck cool all the following day. DIVCO stands for Detroit Industrial Vehicle COmpany.
Let's Build a Locomotive! Pennsylvania A3 Switcher, Part 1
Blondihacks
Jack recommended Blondihacks to my attention a couple of months ago and I finally got around to looking her up. I picked this video because I posted about a live steam model train not too long ago. In this one she spends a lot of time laying out the ground work, including sourcing materials, which turns out to be a bigger problem than I imagined. Very entertaining, if you like obscure technical info.
House of Guinness | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
It's 1868 in Dublin Ireland and Guinness is a thriving operation brewing zillions of gallons of beer, putting it in barrels and shipping it all over Ireland and England. The old man dies and his kids have to pick up the slack. Only one of them has the will and ability to do so, the others are variations of flaky rich kids. Most of the show is about the contortions they go through to maintain their façade of 'respectability' in Victorian high society. Thinking about this for a bit, I realized they were just playing the Victorian version of political correctness. Now, thanks to the internet, everyone can play. Live by celebrity, die by celebrity.
The show has all the regular drama you might expect from a Netflix show about rich Victorians along with some fabulous sets. Talk about the divide between the rich and the poor, the Victorians had it in spades. It also has some bits of history and if you look a little deeper, trains.
Ireland has just endured a famine, and there are hard feelings about that.
The Trinity College harp, also known as "Brian Boru's harp", is a medieval musical instrument on display in the long room at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. It is an early Irish harp or wire-strung cláirseach. It is dated to the 14th or 15th century and, along with the Queen Mary Harp and the Lamont Harp, is the oldest of three surviving medieval harps from the region. The harp was used as a model for the coat of arms of Ireland and for the trade-mark of Guinness stout. - Wikipedia
Brian Boru (c. 941 – 1014) was the High King of Ireland from 1002 to 1014. - Wikipedia
The Train within a Train & the Railway Built for Beer - Guinness Brewery Railways
Train of Thought
Somewhere around the late 19th century the brewery was expanded to 50 acres and a narrow gauge railway was laid down to serve the plant.
The business about having a carriage that allowed the narrow-gauge engine to run on standard width tracks might be unique. Someone thought it was worth building a live steam model.
Seems like videos like this pop up on a regular basis and I got to wondering just how often this happens, so I asked Mr. Google and he says nine per week! That's near 500 per year! You've got figure that every time there is one of these collisions it's gotta cost a million dollars, and that's if nobody gets hurt. Besides the immediate damage, there are the delays, the disrupted schedules, the investigation, the penalties, and there is a good chance there will be litigation, even if it's just the insurance companies arguing about who will pay.
Still, you'd think that even a measly $500 million bucks would bestir someone in trucking or insurance to try and put a stop to these collisions, or least reduce the frequency. Actually, industry ought to get their act together cause if they don't, the federal government is liable to step in, and then nobody will be happy.
For over a century, two dead advisors have shaped the way great powers view the world.
On one side, we have Alfred Thayer Mahan—the American naval officer who believed sea power determined global supremacy. According to Mahan, controlling the oceans means controlling trade. If you control trade, you control wealth. If you control wealth… well, you get the picture.
On the other side is Halford Mackinder, the British geographer who argued the exact opposite. Forget the seas, he said. Whoever controls the “World Island”—Eurasia—controls the world. Railways, rivers, pipelines, and land empires are what count. Not frigates and aircraft carriers.
Mahan and Mackinder are no longer with us, but their ideas continue to influence the world today.
Just looking around the industrial parts of town, I was overwhelmed by the amount of steel that goes into these machines, structures, raillines, tanks and towers, and that's just one town. Every town in the industrialized world is built on a zillion tons of the stuff.
U. S. Steel Production peaked in the 1970s. Since then it has fallen by half.
So why did this happen? Why did the U.S. go from a steelmaking powerhouse to an also-ran? As usual, there are a bunch of competing explanations — import competition, bad management choices by steel companies, and unions raising wages to uncompetitive levels. But while these were factors, the biggest reason the U.S. steel industry went into terminal decline was that we stopped building things that used lots of steel. - Noahpinion
The ALn 668 (Automotrice Leggera a nafta, Light Diesel motor car) series is a family of diesel railcars built by Fiat Ferroviaria between the 1950s and the 1980s. The trains were built for the Italian public railway company Ferrovie dello Stato (FS), now Trenitalia as well as many Italian private railway operators. - Wikipedia
In my mind, steam locomotives have two cylinders, one on either side of the front of the engine. The piston in each cylinder drives the wheels on that side through a connecting rod. Turns out that some locos have three and even four cylinders. The Royal Scot has three as shown in the drawing above. This means that the straight axle between the second pair of driver wheels has been replaced with a crankshaft. The center cylinder is slightly elevated so that the connecting rod clears the axle of the first pair of driver wheels.
The three cylinders are high on my list of unique designs that never took off over here in the US.
3-cylinder locos had a speacial exaust chuff as well, from the four chuffs per driver revolution on normal engines, 3 cylinders had six chuffs, making for some very interesting “stack talk”
While here in the US they never really took off, they became fairly common across Europe. Among some notable European 3 cylinders is the A4, thats right, the “Mallard” was 3 cylindered, along with her sisters who still operate today!
[3 tiny pictures that purport to show the center cylinder of 3 cylinder locomotive. They made no sense to me. Perhaps they would if you were familiar with these locomotives.]
The center cylinder yielded more power in a smaller locomotive, the #12 (pictures above) is an 0-8-0, but still produced more than 60,000 lbs tractive effort! Thats more than some 4-8-2’s and 4-6-4’s of the time period!
Unfortuantely, the 3rd cylinder was difficult to service, and the costs related to maintenance outweight those saved by fuel economy. These engines became known as “Roundhouse Queens” as they sometimes spent longer under repair than in operation.
This is probably more than you wanted to know,
The Great Western Archive has audio recordings of a variety of steam locomotives. Simple, i.e. not compound, engines sound different than compound engines.
For a while I was thinking that steam locomotives could have been improved by using steam engines with several smaller cylinders running at high speed, like a diesel engine, but that would have meant using gears to transmit power to the wheels, and making large gears that would take the load may not been economically feasible in early 20th century. The Shay locomotives built for logging industry did in fact do this, but they weren't carrying the enormous loads that mainline freight trains did. Diesels got around this problem by using electric generators and motors. I suspect electric motor technology in the early 20th century wasn't up to the task.
The narrator's cheerful demeanor is totally at odds with his environment. 10 hours to get a ticket and then 10 hours to make 5 hour trip?!? Google Maps says you should be able to drive it in three and a half hours. As if. This is Cuba after all.
Note that the pretty 1950's era automobiles shown early on are basically jalopies that are only still running due to the ingenuity and diligence of the Cuban equivalent of redneck engineering. That $10 bribe is likely the equivalent of a month's wages in Cuba.
Cuba runs on crime. People can't survive without it. Everyone has to give a cut of whatever they get to 'the beard' as Castro was known.
