An exciting time for railroad history

It’s an exciting time for railroad history, the beginning of a host of ever expanding recognitions of the importance of railroading in American life. Big locomotives seem to get the headlines, but much is happening across the country.

“Streamliners at Spencer” at the North Carolina Transportation Museum this weekend (May 29-June 1) is a four-day photography festival, featuring locomotives of the 1930s through the 1960s.

Norfolk & Western 611 is at Spencer for the streamliners weekend and eventual restoration after a send off party May 24 at the Virginia Museum of Transportation. Norfolk Southern sold a fine-art painting to help restore 611, which will join Southern 630, NKP 765, and Southern 4501 (later this year) in NS’s 21st Century Steam Program.

“No. 611 is an American classic, a reflection of a time and a people who put the country on their backs and carried it into to the modern age of railroading,” said Wick Moorman, NS chairman. “611 is not an NS, N&W, Virginia, or Roanoke locomotive. It belongs to everyone and every generation.”

In a transaction facilitated by NS, the  Museum of Transportation, St. Louis, and the Virginia Museum are discussing an exchange: bringing N&W Y6a 2156 back to Roanoke for five years and sending Southern Railway General Motors EMD FTB unit to complement the St. Louis museum’s FTA demonstration unit.

Thanks to the R&LHS’s Southern California Chapter, Union Pacific is returning 4-8-8-4 Big Boy 4014 to service. The locomotive arrived at the UP Cheyenne Steam Shop May 8 after a multi-month trip from California.

B&O Railroad Museum is transferring Chesapeake & Ohio 1309 (2-6-6-2) to the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad for restoration and operation. Nevada State Railroad is marking the restoration of its 1875 Glenbrook locomotive with a ceremony July 5.

A replica of the the 1868 Leviathan 63 is touring the county and a second replica of the Cilvil War locomotive, William H. Simpson 17, is running at Steam into History, New Freedom, Pa.

NS, UP, and Amtrak have painted fleets of heritage diesels over the last several years, all celebrating predecessor railroads or former paint schemes.

The Coalition for Sustainable Rail is looking at the preservation and research of steam power from another angle. The coalition acquired Santa Fe 3463 to preserve the locomotive and to perform reversible alterations so that it can serve as a test bed for modern boiler, biofuel, and power systems technologies. The coalition acquired the locomotive, which was rusting away in a Topeka park, from the Great Overland Station, and the engine to be transported to Minnesota.

And there is more. The Center for Railroad Photography & Art’s exhibition “Railroaders: Jack Delano’s Homefront Photography” in partnership with the Chicago History Museum will be on display in Chicago through 2015. [I was a participant.] It equals other major railroad art and photography exhibits of the last decade, “Railroad Vision,” 2002, Getty Museum, Los Angeles; “Tracks,” 2008-2009, George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; and “Art in the Age of Steam,” 2008-2009, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. Congress to establish a new national historic park on Chicago’s far south side at Pullman, the location of George M. Pullman’s railroad car factory and planned community, established in 1881. Its association with labor and civil rights history and a bitter 1894 strike enhance the site’s significance. Pullman would join the Steamtown and Golden Spike sites managed by the U.S. National Park Service.

A new grant giving group, the Tom E. Dailey Foundation Inc. Chicago, supports railroad history projects.

Stations are calling attention to their centennials, Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan throughout 2013 and Union Station at Kansas City on October 30. “No Further West: The Story of Los Angeles Union Station,” organized by the Getty Research Institute and presented at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library through August 10 coincides with the 75th anniversary of the opening the station. Iowa Pacific is returning luxury Pullman service to the rails.

The High Line in New York City, an out-of-use railroad trestle converted to a public landscape, is open from Gansevoort Street to West 30th Street. However, the final section of the park — the High Line at the Rail Yards — is under construction. Chicago is building the Bloomingdale Trail and Park, stretching 2.7 miles through four northwest side neighborhoods, on an unused, elevated rail line along Bloomingdale Avenue.

The Association of Tourist Railroads and Railway Museums, formed in 2013 by a merger of the Tourist Railway Association and the Association of Railway Museums, is representing the industry. ATRRM has been both a supporter and participant in American Alliance of Museum’s annual “Museums Advocacy Day” in February, during which representatives from museums in all 50 states visit Congressional offices in Washington, D.C.

And there are some amazing survivors, such as more than 60 ex-Santa Fe semaphore signals in New Mexico installed in the 1920s that are in service today on the Southwest Chief route between Colmor and CP Madrid, the junction west of Lamy with the New Mexico Rail Runner Express extension to Santa Fe.

This is just the tip of the iceburg. Stay tuned.