I wrote a little about the Naval Weapons Center at Earle Nj. and It got me curious so I went on google earth and its awesome. You can follow the railroad from the piers all through the base. There is an extensive network of tracks. You can see many areas were train cars are parked in bunkers and all kinds of warehouses etc. It would be a great modeling pike. Go to google earth and search Atlantic Highlands New Jersey. You will see the piers out in the water and you can zoom in and take a ride from there.
To clear up some possible misunderstandings from earlier posts:
Member of the Transportation Corps rarely operate trains. Rail MOSs left the active Army in May 1976 and the last active Army rail unit, the 1st Railway Detachment at Fort Eustis, was inactivated on Sep 30, 1978. Since then only the Army Reserve has had rail MOSs, and you'll only see reservists operating rail equipment during weekend drills, annual training, school attendance at Fort Eustis, or the occasional TDY here and there. Rail operators on military installations are wage grade employees or contractors.
Then-Camp Polk and Camp Claiborne (early 1940s) had a rail training line between them during WW II but that ended with the war, and Claiborne closed in December 1945. Fort Eustis has been the home of rail training for many decades, and I can assure you that steam locmotive training did not continue into the 1980s. I went through there in 1975 and we only dealt with Army diesels. There was one steam locomotive on post and it was inoperative. It was repaired enough to do three loops around the post railway during the open house that year and then it had to be taken out of service again. I don't know of any occasion when it operated again, and it now resides in the museum.
General supplies are not delivered to bases or posts by rail anymore. Such traffic moved to the trucks a long time ago.
The two GE centercab locomotiives at NSY Norfolk are GE 80-tons, not 44-tons or 60-tons.
The Army didn't have "Trainmaster" locomotives. What you saw were probably Fairbanks-Morse H12-44s in transit. The last of these left the inventory in the very early 1990s.
Fort Campbell doesn't receive general supplies via rail, but instead uses the line to deploy forces to the port at Jacksonville, FL. The post is the home to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), a former parachute division that converted to air-landed (via helicopter) while in Vietnam in mid-1968. The 82nd at Fort Bragg is the Army's only parachute division. Its geeps were not "inherited" from a shortline but were instead purchased by the Department of the Army as part of an Army-wide acquisition of motive power (mostly rebuilt ex-IC and ICG geeps from VMV in Paducah, KY) to replace its existing Korean War-vintage equipment in 1990.
The two geeps at Fort Lewis are both GP10s.
Wright Patterson AFB Ohio had four GE 80-ton locomotives, not 44-ton locomotives. The rail operation is long gone at WPAFB and 44-tonners have been gone from all of the services for many years.
I've seen the track into Osan AB, ROK, but a Korean National Railroad employee stated during my last visit a few years ago that it is no longer used.
The last SW8 left Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, in mid-2005 for the California State Railroad Museum. Rail car movements for impact testing on loads is done with a carmover. This takes place within the restricted area at the east end of the post, so few among us are likely to ever view such activities. The APG tracks are now in awful shape.
Do not consider enlisting or reenlisting in the Army Reserve in one of the few remaining rail units. Actual rail training on weekends, as small as it was, has declined significantly, and the Army Reserve's intent is now to recruit personnel from industry who already possess the desired skills (i.e., construction workers for engineer battalions, truck drivers for truck units, etc.), allowing units to concentrate on Army combat training on weekends. Rail training takes a distant back seat to such training, if it occurs at all. The amount of time devoted to rail training can vary depending upon a unit commander's interest in rail, which may vary from "very little" to "none at all." Remember that rail unit commanders are TC officers who will probably not be there too terribly long and rail is just an oddity in today's Army. If you're interested in working around rail equipment, apply for a position on a railroad or volunteer at an operating rail museum. You will be much more satisfied.
There is a USAR rail unit company based at Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point near Southport, NC, but anyone considering enlisting in it should be fully aware that it was reorganized from an installation support role to being an overseas deployable unit, a completely different kind of company. Even if you occupy a rail slot in such a unit, you could find yourself being involuntarily retrained as a truck driver and deployed as such. The Army's personnel manning is tight, so don't think you can join a rail unit and avoid the current unpleasantries overseas. "Oh, they'll never take me" are famous last words.
Barksdale AFB, LA, tore out its rail line in the early 1990s. The old SAC cars on base were reportedly former B-52 simulator cars, but they were sold off via DRMO many years ago.
The GE 80-ton at the Galveston Rail Museum is indeed the same one that was at Barksdale AFB. Earlier it had been assigned to Charleston AFB, SC, which abandoned rail operations long ago and finally tore up its tracks in 1991.
zapp wrote: csmith9474 wrote: shawnee wrote: csmith9474 wrote: shawnee wrote:Remember, the Army doesn't have "bases"...they have Posts. The Navy and AF have bases. Somebody better tell the Army that. Well, anyone in the Army knows. It's a Post, not a base. HOOAH! The only reason I said that (I didn't know if anyone would pick up on it) is that more and more often I am hearing Army posts referred to as "bases", even within the Army. I don't understand it, especially having been attached to an Army unit. I still refer to Army installations as posts (i.e. post exchange). Edit: I just wanted to clarify that my original response to your post wasn't a knock at you. I was a little to vague. Sorry 'bout that, hooah.Being on active duty, the only people that I hear call an Army post a base is usually someone who knows nothing about the Army or the Marine Corps, and I guess for that matter, the military! Most Army personnel will call a post by it's name; ie; Fort Hood, Bliss, or Jackson....
csmith9474 wrote: shawnee wrote: csmith9474 wrote: shawnee wrote:Remember, the Army doesn't have "bases"...they have Posts. The Navy and AF have bases. Somebody better tell the Army that. Well, anyone in the Army knows. It's a Post, not a base. HOOAH! The only reason I said that (I didn't know if anyone would pick up on it) is that more and more often I am hearing Army posts referred to as "bases", even within the Army. I don't understand it, especially having been attached to an Army unit. I still refer to Army installations as posts (i.e. post exchange). Edit: I just wanted to clarify that my original response to your post wasn't a knock at you. I was a little to vague. Sorry 'bout that, hooah.
shawnee wrote: csmith9474 wrote: shawnee wrote:Remember, the Army doesn't have "bases"...they have Posts. The Navy and AF have bases. Somebody better tell the Army that. Well, anyone in the Army knows. It's a Post, not a base. HOOAH!
csmith9474 wrote: shawnee wrote:Remember, the Army doesn't have "bases"...they have Posts. The Navy and AF have bases. Somebody better tell the Army that.
shawnee wrote:Remember, the Army doesn't have "bases"...they have Posts. The Navy and AF have bases.
Somebody better tell the Army that.
Well, anyone in the Army knows. It's a Post, not a base. HOOAH!
The only reason I said that (I didn't know if anyone would pick up on it) is that more and more often I am hearing Army posts referred to as "bases", even within the Army. I don't understand it, especially having been attached to an Army unit. I still refer to Army installations as posts (i.e. post exchange).
Edit: I just wanted to clarify that my original response to your post wasn't a knock at you. I was a little to vague. Sorry 'bout that, hooah.
Being on active duty, the only people that I hear call an Army post a base is usually someone who knows nothing about the Army or the Marine Corps, and I guess for that matter, the military!
Most Army personnel will call a post by it's name; ie; Fort Hood, Bliss, or Jackson....
That has always been my call. I was just looking at the Ft Campbell website (their .mil site), and even there they referred to themselves as the only base with some sort of unit. I did get strange looks from my wife and other AF folks when I started picking up Army "lingo" after being attached to an Army unit (the former 49th AD). I would catch myself using terms like "on garrison" more often. I would especially get a lot of looks for having an Army patch on an Air Force uniform. When I was cross training into weather (WRTC portion at Camp Blanding), we had a guy that had just seperated from the Army and went into the ANG. He constantly used the term "hooah" after just about everything he said. He was one of the jumpers and was pretty hard core about anything he ran across.
There are a lot of Air Force personnel that refer to Army installations as bases. It is not that they know nothing about the military, but the fact that they have not had much if any exposure to any of the sister services. I am sure that would serve true in any of the branches of the military.
When I was deployed to Saudi, I scored and incentive flight on a KC-135. I was able to fly the boom and all that jazz. Talk about lying down on the job though.
Here are some links to the cars that I believe you are talking about (on some pages you will have to scroll down to find the pics) It looks as if there were the KC-135 sim cars as well....
http://www.dhke.com/railroad/utah/ogden4.htm
http://www.wildfire-productions.com/atd/index.html
http://forums.railfan.net/image.cgi?concourse/mobile.jpg
Out of curiosity, I googled the satellite map of the area around the base and it appears that all of the tracks on the base have been removed. The only thing left is just the switch and the track dead ends at the fence.
I saw a small switcher with USAF markings at the Galveston Rail Museum. I'm wondering now if it was the loco that used to be at Barksdale.
Well after all these years, I finally know what those rail cars were. I only saw them a couple of times before I was relocated to Guam and then to Nellis AFB.
I was maintaining B-52G's and KC-135A's at Barksdale. (they now have H models as the G's have been retired). The tankers at the base were all A models. At that time I believe there were only three variations, the tried and true A model "water wagons" (they still used water injection and J-57 engines), the Q model which carried JP5 for SR71 refueling, and the R model which used newer TF-33 engines (same as the H model B-52).
wl_keller wrote: Barksdale AFB, in Bossier City La.I also saw some old passenger cars there a couple of times, but I'm not sure what they were for. The were lettered Strategic Air Command and had a SAC shield on them.They appeared to be painted Strata Blue, the same color as our maintenance vehicles or something similar. At first I assumed they were going to be part of the museum, but now I'm not so sure.
Barksdale AFB, in Bossier City La.
I also saw some old passenger cars there a couple of times, but I'm not sure what they were for. The were lettered Strategic Air Command and had a SAC shield on them.
They appeared to be painted Strata Blue, the same color as our maintenance vehicles or something similar. At first I assumed they were going to be part of the museum, but now I'm not so sure.
As ericsp hinted at, that is exactly what you saw (the B-52 sim cars). I believe they have finally all been scrapped. It is late for me now, but I will post links to photos and info tomorrow.
I heard Barksdale is nice, but we are stationed at the Academy right now, and Colorado is hard to beat.
I knew someone who used to be an EWO on B-52Gs. He told me that SAC used to have a mobile B-52 simulator in some type of railcar.
I wonder if the tankcars were for KC-135Qs (or KC-135Ts).
"No soup for you!" - Yev Kassem (from Seinfeld)
wl_keller wrote: When I was in the Air Force back in the 80's I used to see long strings of tank cars being pushed onto the base through the fence from a civilian railroad. Then the small loco on the base would take over and move the cars to other areas of the base.I always assumed that the tank cars were full of jet fuel since it was a SAC base and we flew B-52's and KC-135A's. Neither of those planes were exactly "fuel efficient".
When I was in the Air Force back in the 80's I used to see long strings of tank cars being pushed onto the base through the fence from a civilian railroad. Then the small loco on the base would take over and move the cars to other areas of the base.
I always assumed that the tank cars were full of jet fuel since it was a SAC base and we flew B-52's and KC-135A's. Neither of those planes were exactly "fuel efficient".
Which base was it?
I was stationed at Ft. Eustis for about 8 months prior to shipping over seas back in 1965. I have found this thread very interesting as I have not been back there since I shipped out.
I was assigned to the warehouse down at the 3rd Port. We handled parts and supplies for all the watercraft (boats, ships, LCU, LCM, Ducks, Larcs and Barcs). Occassionally we had scrap left with us by the various outfits that were on the different vessels.
We would load up a 2 1/2 ton truck and take this accumulation of scrap to the post dump. That is quite an experience seeing what they have in the dump. I saw old 2-8-0 Consolidations stripped to the boilers just rusting away and they had a experimental hover craft made from fiberglass (painted olive drab green). It looked like a car with 2 seats and a big fan mounted in the top of the hood and another in the trunk lid.
my father and i once got kicked out of the train yard by a MP when the train yard was still GTW becuse we were takeing photos of a train with some flats covered with tarps, Still got photos though! probably a UFO on its way to hanger 18. lol
cnwfan51 wrote: Something else that you might consider would be to use hospital cars to simulate the transporting of the wounded if you are modeling during time of war One Of the saddest photos I have ever seen was taken in Central Nebraska in the summer of 1945 and the caption read it was a specialt train made of U S Army hopital cars taking a train full of war dead back East Just a thought Larry
Interesting, I would think it would be very unusual for hospital cars to be used to transport the dead, since at that time there were certainly plenty of wounded servicemen coming back from the Pacific that would need the services of the hospital cars. The dead were usually transported in coffins in baggage cars.
Dmitzel,
Not argueing the verboten aspect of the photos but it does happen. Case in point I have seen some very very good photos of the Norfolk docks taken by tourits on open ship days. The exception is I don't recall ever seeing the sub pens. There is probably a pretty good reason for that....
If you are looking for out of date photos of military bases, current or inactive, you can always use the Navy Archives, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian institution (small fee for the last one). When I was doing some research for a prof in grad school all of these institutions had no problem getting photos up to the early 80's with some being even later than that.
Another place to check, would be the US Fort Registery www.USAForts.com. The majority of the photos are from defunct forts, but there are some for active forts there as well. I have asked the properiter of the website if he has other incidental shots of base railroads and he does have some. Ask nicely, tell him why, he gets nervous about active base requests. The other place you could try is a Office of Public Affairs for the Navy. They do have a done of stuff and if catch them on a good day you can get a lot. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing NAS Lakehurst in the late 20's and early 30's until I scaled out a Airship hanger, and that brought that idea to a crashing halt.
Now if you are doing INACTIVE bases, the job gets A LOT easier. There are very very few restrictions on photos of these places unless there is a material danger to the photographer, example, try getting on the grounds of the Badger Ammo Plant outside of Sauk City, I have a ton of photos for Fort Monroe, and some of Fort Eustis at the museum, and at a loading ramp at an empty siding.
Thanks for the very detailed write-up on the DoN rail operations. I am a Navy contractor and have spent alot of time at NS Norfolk and in Kittery ME over the past few years. Too bad so much is gone now.
One base that has (at least in 2002, when I was there) an active rail operation is NSWC Crane (Indiana). Lots of ordinance stored and shuttled around there by a small fleet of EMD (and EMD-repowered) Navy switchers. The power was in bright yellow paint with black lettering - rolling stock mostly old 40' and 50' boxcars with roofwalks removed and roller bearing trucks. Our office was right next to the small enginehouse so I got to see alot of movements nearby.
Interchange at Crane was done with the CP Rail-Soo Line's former MILW CT&SE line, now Indiana Railroad. However, at this date I believe little interchange of "stuff that can go boom" occurs - most that came into the base or left was on semi-truck. I think the rails were pretty much exclusively used for "intra-plant switching."
Photos on active military installations are verboten so you need to rely on memory to model these operations in this day and age. That is, if you are even able to "get on base" with a valid purpose to be there. Still, I imagine that there is some amount of information available in the public domain to do a credible job of modeling these interesting operations.
A modeler would do well to just model a spur off their mainline leading to a small hidden staging area. The military locomotive would appear at the interchange yard, pick up and drop off cars, and return to the "secret" hidden location, behind the security fence. That's what a local modeler in my area is doing on his layout.
PNCROSE wrote:The outlook for military railroads at Navy installations is bleak. The Navy has been turning to trucks since the early 80's and shutting down base RR operations. The three that I am most familiar with, Naval Station Norfolk, NWS Yorktown, VA, and Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Portsmouth, VA have been shut down or scaled back their operations. Norfolk Naval Station had an extensive system which reached most of the piers and contained a small yard. The former Virginian Railroad had their main coal offloading facility and yard where the current Navy Exchange, Dental and Medical Clinics now stand. A line also reached out to the former Naval Air Station. Ships received most of their supplies and equipment via rail. However, this was being used less and less from the 60's onward and was mostly just rusting by the early '80's. The tracks, some of which were in the streets and ran down the piers, were pulled up or paved over in the mid-90's in spite of a proposal to use them to connect with proposed light rail service to Virginia Beach and downtown Norfolk (sailors commute too). A freight station remains near ADM Taussig BLVD with an ex-Southern caboose on a stretch of track next to it (as of ca 2000). Two small GE switchers in faded yellow paint rested outside the fence next to a grain elevator. An ALCO diesel with either CC or A1A trucks once sat derelect for years near the carrier piers. The slanted cab sides were evidence that it was built for use in Europe. The piers were constructed of concrete and were open. Only the Supply Piers (3 and 4) had buildings somewhat like the Walther's pier structure but less ornate.NWS Yorktown ceased using trains for weapons transport in the late '90's. Now each weapon is brought out on a flat bed truck vice several of them on a string of 50' flatcars. Most of the view of the weapons station from the York River is obscured by a healthy forest. The pier is L shaped to keep the ships far out in the river for obvious reasons. Some covered barges may also be moored to the pier.The shipyard in 2000 still had an extensive rail network, but was seldom used. The rail network reached all of the piers and surrounded the dry docks. One of the more interesting track arrangements was where the tracks for the large traveling cranes crossed the railroad tracks. Most of the rail movements in the '90's were to position flat cars, boxcars or tank cars for various purposes (carry heavy equipment and tools and offload fuel or other chemicals). They would generally stay put for months while a ship was being overhauled. No equipment was fit for interchange and stayed on the shipyard property. Navy railroad equipment is normally painted gray similar in color to the ships. Some tank cars were black. Flat cars were '50' as I recollect and boxcars and tank cars were 40' and all were built in the 1940's and '50's. Some box cars had the roof walks removed. Some tank cars had the little scaffold surrounding their single domes. Reporting marks were USN and the cars did not carry Navy insignia or the name of the base they were assigned to. Motive power were GE center cab switchers painted yellow (the Bachmann 44 tonner would be a good stand-in although I think the locomotives in use at the shipyard were 60 ton). The Walthers Front Street Warehouse is a good stand-in for the buildings on the shipyard many of which were built in the decades following the Civil War. Newer buildings tend to be on the fringe near the fence line.
I served until 2001 and was recently interested in the possibility of re-enlisting in the MOS of 88U. If you'll do a search for US Army Reserve MOS 88U, you will find a number of articles that should help you out. All military rail units are reserve component units. Now, some reservist work full-time so dont let the term throw you off. I live in NC and we have a military railhead at Stoney Point (?name?) near Wilmington. There is an article out there that addresses the success of the rail unit operating during Desert Storm in 1991. I hope this helps.