The Lucius Beebe, DPM correspondence folder ... what if???

[Flintlock76]

Hmmm, you may be onto something Mod-man, we haven't heard from Mr. Steve since last Friday.

As they say in the movies, "It's quiet."  "Yeah, it's TOO quiet..."

[Fr.Al]

One wonders. I believe a few years back some lady spread the word on line the Dickens and Dostoyevsky met(BTW, my two favorite authors). I don't believe any evidence has ever confirmed this. I won't say for sure it never happened, but file it under highly unlikely.

[Miningman]

For crying out loud give the man a chance! Likely has to clear this with some folks, have a meeting or two, put things from a vanilla folder into a suitable format and so on.

You guys are acting like a bunch of triggered millenials .. go to your safe rooms and be quiet!

Hey did you read about the young man that was given a brand new BMW for his birthday and drive it into a lake deliberately because he wanted a Jaguar. Seems all his 'friends' could not fit in the car together as another reason. 

Can you imagine that! I was lucky to get a cake. 

[Fr.Al]

No, but I read about the straight A student who wanted a sports car as a college graduation present. When he did graduate, his father gave him a bible. Bitterly disappointed, the young man never opened the bible. When he opened the bible years later, he found his father had written him a check specifically for the sports car.

     Millennial? No sir, I'm a baby boomer who hasn't yet made it to the 21st century, just as my dad(who was old enough to be my grandfather) barely made it into the 20th.

     Incidently, when I ask for information about the Copper Country Limited, etc, it's not so much to write a dissertation. I'm interested in the human element, peoples personnel experiences. I'd be a poor man of the cloth(and I may be, at that) if I wasn't interested in people and their experiences.

[Miningman]

Beebe mistaken for Nazi Spy!

[Overmod]

Well, here it is Tuesday, the wanswheel flow has dried up too, and I have come to the conclusion that, upon editorial review, the Kalmbach higher-ups have decided to use the correspondence as a Classic Trains published story, quite possibly a series of published stories if there's enough of it.

That's not unreasonable.  It's too good an asset to 'waste' without some framing and discussion for moderns. who have little idea what made DPM special and, to the extent they understand Beebe at all, would conduct an increasingly annoying (especially to him!) expansion of discussion of just what 'partner' meant.

But it's still sad for us, we who have to wait, especially we who are not subscribers and will probably now have to peruse each new issue at the bookstore to see whether the column or whatever has started.  And equally unfortunately, since Kalmbach has essentially thrown the Mike MacDonald resource relationship away, we won't get a hundredth of the color, ring and stamp of the things that surrounded and flavored the correspondence.

One case in point:  Classic Trains in 2002 pointed out that Beebe famously jumped from the Century to the Broadway after NYC 'downgraded' the former (including with *shudder!* plebeian coaches, but did not report on his subsequent 'career' when PRR subsequently discovered -- no good deed goes unpunished -- that running the perfect train with attentive people still wasn't enough to have a profitable train net of all the Beebes left in the world.  Surely that was good for an exchange..

[Flintlock76]

You're probably right Mod-man, still, it would be nice if we were kept informed here as to the ultimate use of the correspondence, i.e. a "Classic Trains" article.  I'm a subscriber myself (Money well spent!) so I'm not likely to miss it, "If and when."

Still, I was darn near getting to the point Ingrid Bergman's character in "Casablanca" was when she confronted Rick in his office, pulled a pistol, and said...

"Give me those letters!"  

[Miningman]

Mixed Train Daily 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015028296724&view=1up&seq=7

 

 

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015028296724;seq=141;size=125;rotation=0

 

 

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015028296724;seq=143;size=125;rotation=0

 

 

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015028296724;seq=146;size=125;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015028296724;seq=144;size=200;rotation=90

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015028296724;seq=145;size=200;rotation=0

[Miningman]

 Watertown Arsenal 

 

https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:mss:mal:184:1846100:001/full/pct:25/0/default.jpg

 

https://thearsenalonthecharles.com/history/the-historic-arsenal/

 

https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/19/items/DTIC_ADA175855/DTIC_ADA175855_jp2.zip&file=DTIC_ADA175855_jp2/DTIC_ADA175855_0109.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

 

https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/19/items/DTIC_ADA175855/DTIC_ADA175855_jp2.zip&file=DTIC_ADA175855_jp2/DTIC_ADA175855_0113.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

 

https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/19/items/DTIC_ADA175855/DTIC_ADA175855_jp2.zip&file=DTIC_ADA175855_jp2/DTIC_ADA175855_0127.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

 

https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/19/items/DTIC_ADA175855/DTIC_ADA175855_jp2.zip&file=DTIC_ADA175855_jp2/DTIC_ADA175855_0128.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

 

https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/19/items/DTIC_ADA175855/DTIC_ADA175855_jp2.zip&file=DTIC_ADA175855_jp2/DTIC_ADA175855_0129.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

 

[Flintlock76]

Interesting stuff here!

I wonder what the story was behind Mr. Weston's dismissal as military storekeeper?

Lucius Beebe and Walter Winchell.  Winchell used to call him "Luscious Lucius," but not I suppose to his face!  Beebe looked pretty formidable.

Great shot of that coastal defense gun on the "disappearing" mount!  The usual photos you see of them have them in concrete revetments.  Another casualty of WW2, they were all dismantelled and scrapped post-war, their time had come and gone.

[Miningman]

 

P

please see this article in the next comment below in larger type.. thanks!!

 

Real Trains Are His Toys by Lucius Beebe, March 19, 1939

 

It is probable that no machine has ever exercised as urgent and abiding a hold upon the human imagination as has the railroad locomotive. From the time of the building of the first railroads, a little over a century ago. down to the present-day trains, untold hundreds of thousands of people have been delighted and fascinated by them. Even in an age that has evolved other wondrous methods of transportation, there are vast numbers of people to whom railroading is form of religion, the steam locomotive an all-compelling god.

 

In the United States, more than anywhere else in the world, the legend of railroading is a heroic and vital saga. It is an integral part of the national epic, inevitably associated with national destiny and the conquest of the continent. The cult of railroad worship in its purest form in the United States embraces a minimum tally of 200,000 enrolled and registered devotees — members of the various railroad clubs and groups of photographers, train-model fans and memorabilia collectors. Beyond this there are known to exist many hundreds of thousands who, though not communicants, still are to be numbered among the almost fanatical faithful.

 

There are, too, a variety of sects. There are fans for Diesel power and electricity; there are amateurs of the legend of the narrow gauge; there are strange apostates who bow before the trolley car and there are followers of a score of minor schisms. Only one who has encountered the species can know the fanaticism of the true rail fan, his fiery espousal of the deathless cause of tractive force, speed ratios and wheel arrangements, his scorn for the heresy of the horseless carriage, his contempt for the comedy of the flying machine.

 

America’s leading prophet of locomotive worship is Edward Hungerford, of the New York Central Lines. There are scores of other toilers in the vineyard of the roundhouse and classification yard, and there are preachers of the steam Jehu in every rail center and division point from Altoona to San Bernardino and from Omaha to Lancaster; and throughout the breadth of the land there are vicars and acolytes who know the dispatchers' schedules, the motive power and operations in their territory with a precision that confounds the professionals in the calling. But Ed Hungerford is the archetypical rail fan. He is historian and collector, photographer and enthusiast, a traveler of vast distances along main lines and upon forgotten spurs and branches, the confidant of presidents and division superintendents, a connoisseur of sentimental antiquities, practitioner and visionary, seer and doer in the railroad cause. He travels 75,000 Pullman miles a year for the sheer heavenly pleasure of doing it. He collects locomotives as a grade-school urchin collects aggies; he is prophet, propagandist and priest, and he arranges railroad spectacles and pageants involving scores of trains and miles of trackage with the practiced finesse of a dancing master arranging a debutante cotillion.

 

Just now Ed is working on the biggest show of his career: a pageant-drama to be called "Railroads on Parade" for the New York World's Fair. His experience as the Max Reinhardt of motive power includes the direction for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad of the widely hailed "Fair of the Iron Horse" at Baltimore a few years ago, the railroad exhibit "Wings of the Century" at the Chicago World's Fair, and his famed drama "The Parade of the Years" at Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition. He has also superintended any number of minor rolling-stock shows and caboose charades. But "Railroads on Parade" will top them all.

 

Ed Hungerford was born on December 21, 1875, in Dexter, just below the small city of Watertown, N.Y. His education was both varied and vicarious. Despite the fact that he was known as the bad boy of the town and due for no good end, he managed to get through the public schools of Watertown, spent two years at Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Massachusetts, and one year each at Cascadilla School in Ithaca, New York, and at Syracuse University. He had expected to go to Cornell and be an architect thereafter. A slight dispute between the faculty of Cornell and Ed, as to the amount of mathematics required to enter it, led him to pick Syracuse instead. One year of college life was enough. He decided that the architectural profession would have to worry along without him. And up to the present, it has succeeded in so doing.

 

Three years ago he changed alma maters. St. Lawrence University, up at Canton, New York, gave him the degree of Doctor of Laws and he returned the compliment by making her his alma mater. He has not regretted that step.

 

Mr. Hungerford 's professional career began on the Rochester Herald in 1896, and after two years there he shifted to the New York Sun for a term twice that length. The transition from newspaperman to railroader was gradual but inevitable. From the Sun he went to the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, as its press agent, and from his desk as public-relations council he moved, seven years later, to Wells Fargo in an executive capacity. From express service to pure railroading was only a short step and in practically no time he found himself Centenary Director for the Baltimore and Ohio and a director of the Central.

 

The showing made by the American railroads at the Chicago World's Fair irritated Hungerford. Various roads put in individual exhibits, and while few of these were actually bad, he felt that at best they were scattering shots against their great opponents of the highway. He saw General Motors walk away with the transportation section of the Fair the first year and Henry Ford do the same trick the second year, and that depressed him. He then and there made up his mind that, if he could help it, there would be nothing of the sort at the New York Fair.

 

After a great deal of negotiation, Ed finally succeeded in getting the roads east of Chicago and St. Louis into a sort of working agreement for the World's Fair. A committee was appointed by their presidents, and Hungerford was made a member of it. The committee met one day in the boardroom of the New York Central.

 

"What kind of a plan can we have— just for a starter?" asked someone.

 

"I have it," said Ed. He sent down to his office and his secretary brought up one of the big green pads he loves to use — and there was a complete layout for the whole thing. Hungerford, who is intensely creative, had been working it out for months — that is, the Railroad Exhibit Building, very much as it has been built at the World's Fair.

 

For his own particular interest in it, however, he has reserved the pageant-drama, "Railroads on Parade." He wrote the script of the show and wrote it lyrically, and designed the stage and settings for it. He planned the thing in all its detail and only regretted that he did not know enough about music to write the score. Kurt Weill did that for him.

 

When one of his shows gets under way Ed lives with it, morning, noon and night, in an old-fashioned private car the Central has given him, and which is spotted on a spur just offstage. When "Wings of a Century" was running he witnessed most of the 1,154 performances it played to more than 2,000,000 people, and now he is a little worried for fear his maximum seating capacity at Flushing Meadows (of some 3,000,000 persons for the summer) isn't going to be sufficient.

 

His flair for dramatizing the lore and legend of the "high iron" stems from Ed's earliest boyhood in Dexter. His life pattern has been conditioned by the celebrated high-liners and luxury limiteds, the hot-shot freights and the gleaming side rods and valve motion of eight-wheelers and Pacifies, Mallets, Mountain types and Santa Fes thundering up the grades and across the switch points and diamonds of the nation's railroads. He has ridden "head end" on the Century as it rocketed through Cleveland on the Chicago run, and fired for veteran "hoggers” wheeling their varnish over the Cajon and the Gloriata. He has ridden in the private cars of Presidents and in the "crummies" of drag freights. At various  times he has been employed as newspaper reporter, editor, press agent and advertising manager. He has written eighteen books and nearly a hundred magazine articles.

 

But during all his varied experiences, the urge to climb aboard the Overland Limited or the Chief or the Black Diamond or the Banner Blue has been strong in him and he has covered more than eighty per cent of all the railroad mileage in the country and knows every city in it except Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which he’ll get around to one of these days.

 

Today, Ed is an ample and friendly figure and an integral part of the New York scene. Although he has a game leg and sometimes walks with crutches, he has kept his hair, his disposition and his appetite. The last of these is, in fact, a noteworthy institution, and to scores of waiter captains and mailres d'hotel from New York to San Francisco he is known as a gourmet of distinction.

 

His hobbies are his camera (with a carefully filed collection of 30,000 negatives taken all over the world), his vast library of travel and transport, covered bridges and historical Americana. He deplores exercise and his favorite sport is riding the cable cars in San Francisco. He is a constant theatergoer and has a weakness for opera, particularly Manon, Traviata and Carmen. He goes to work at eight in the morning and frequently quits by lunchtime so as to have plenty of time over his food at his favorite restaurant. He gets to his office on Sunday as well as week days, just to reassure himself that the trains are still running and are (within reason) on time. He is married into happy domesticity, and an institution in the Hungerford household is the three games of rummy that, rain or shine, in sickness or in health, he plays with Mrs. Hungerford every evening before retiring.

 

Nothing in the world so fascinates Ed (unless it's covered bridges, another even more unwieldy but passionate hobby) as discovering and collecting vintage locomotives. For the filming of a forthcoming railroad epic, a Hollywood studio acquired four ancient "muzzle loaders" and a considerable variety of rolling stock, but it would hardly have been a day's work for Ed, who rounds up venerable eight-wheelers, Moguls and Prairie types by the tens and scores without batting an eyelash.

 

He recently heard that on a lumber railroad in Georgia there was still functioning one of the original steam engines that ran on the Sixth Avenue elevated in New York in the seventies. Delighted with his find, he plans to purchase the relic and put it on the lawn of his country place — if ever he has a country place.

 

The now abandoned but once rich and famous Virginia and Truckee Railroad in Nevada has always proved a happy hunting ground for railroad collectors, and from its disused roundhouses high in the Sierras, Ed has acquired numerous antique items of importance. His most recent acquisition, a graceful American-type locomotive in a beautiful state of preservation, he planned to drive East himself as an advertisement for the World’s Fair, but the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that it would need new boiler tubes before they could permit it to run under its own power over a regular right of way, so the project was shelved and the engine is being towed East in less grandiose style.

 

For his World's Fair pageant Ed has assembled what is probably the largest collection of motive power and rolling stock of all periods ever to be brought together for a single exhibit. Fifteen full trains hauled by such historic engines as the Stourbridge Lion, the Tom Thumb and the Best Friend of Charleston, together with their most modern counterparts from the Central's shops, will be shown in the play itself. Elsewhere on the premises will be exhibited in stationary form twenty other locomotives of various periods. There will be five complete foreign trains on view from Italy, Great Britain, France, Poland and Russia.

 

The pageant itself will contain such historic scenes as the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869, when the Union Pacific joined the rails of the Central Pacific and established the first transcontinental railroad, and there will be up-to-the-minute scenes of freight handling and train dispatching with a cast of 250.

 

"Railroads on Parade" will be a "must" for rail fans young and old, from the camera-toting members of the Railroad Enthusiasts to the scholarly curators of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, if for no other reason than that it has been written and designed, produced, directed and devised by the greatest rail fan of them all — Ed Hungerford.

 

[Miningman]

Easier to read larger type:

Real Trains Are His Toys by Lucius Beebe, March 19, 1939

 

It is probable that no machine has ever exercised as urgent and abiding a hold upon the human imagination as has the railroad locomotive. From the time of the building of the first railroads, a little over a century ago. down to the present-day trains, untold hundreds of thousands of people have been delighted and fascinated by them. Even in an age that has evolved other wondrous methods of transportation, there are vast numbers of people to whom railroading is form of religion, the steam locomotive an all-compelling god.

 

In the United States, more than anywhere else in the world, the legend of railroading is a heroic and vital saga. It is an integral part of the national epic, inevitably associated with national destiny and the conquest of the continent. The cult of railroad worship in its purest form in the United States embraces a minimum tally of 200,000 enrolled and registered devotees — members of the various railroad clubs and groups of photographers, train-model fans and memorabilia collectors. Beyond this there are known to exist many hundreds of thousands who, though not communicants, still are to be numbered among the almost fanatical faithful.

 

There are, too, a variety of sects. There are fans for Diesel power and electricity; there are amateurs of the legend of the narrow gauge; there are strange apostates who bow before the trolley car and there are followers of a score of minor schisms. Only one who has encountered the species can know the fanaticism of the true rail fan, his fiery espousal of the deathless cause of tractive force, speed ratios and wheel arrangements, his scorn for the heresy of the horseless carriage, his contempt for the comedy of the flying machine.

 

America’s leading prophet of locomotive worship is Edward Hungerford, of the New York Central Lines. There are scores of other toilers in the vineyard of the roundhouse and classification yard, and there are preachers of the steam Jehu in every rail center and division point from Altoona to San Bernardino and from Omaha to Lancaster; and throughout the breadth of the land there are vicars and acolytes who know the dispatchers' schedules, the motive power and operations in their territory with a precision that confounds the professionals in the calling. But Ed Hungerford is the archetypical rail fan. He is historian and collector, photographer and enthusiast, a traveler of vast distances along main lines and upon forgotten spurs and branches, the confidant of presidents and division superintendents, a connoisseur of sentimental antiquities, practitioner and visionary, seer and doer in the railroad cause. He travels 75,000 Pullman miles a year for the sheer heavenly pleasure of doing it. He collects locomotives as a grade-school urchin collects aggies; he is prophet, propagandist and priest, and he arranges railroad spectacles and pageants involving scores of trains and miles of trackage with the practiced finesse of a dancing master arranging a debutante cotillion.

 

Just now Ed is working on the biggest show of his career: a pageant-drama to be called "Railroads on Parade" for the New York World's Fair. His experience as the Max Reinhardt of motive power includes the direction for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad of the widely hailed "Fair of the Iron Horse" at Baltimore a few years ago, the railroad exhibit "Wings of the Century" at the Chicago World's Fair, and his famed drama "The Parade of the Years" at Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition. He has also superintended any number of minor rolling-stock shows and caboose charades. But "Railroads on Parade" will top them all.

 

Ed Hungerford was born on December 21, 1875, in Dexter, just below the small city of Watertown, N.Y. His education was both varied and vicarious. Despite the fact that he was known as the bad boy of the town and due for no good end, he managed to get through the public schools of Watertown, spent two years at Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Massachusetts, and one year each at Cascadilla School in Ithaca, New York, and at Syracuse University. He had expected to go to Cornell and be an architect thereafter. A slight dispute between the faculty of Cornell and Ed, as to the amount of mathematics required to enter it, led him to pick Syracuse instead. One year of college life was enough. He decided that the architectural profession would have to worry along without him. And up to the present, it has succeeded in so doing.

 

Three years ago he changed alma maters. St. Lawrence University, up at Canton, New York, gave him the degree of Doctor of Laws and he returned the compliment by making her his alma mater. He has not regretted that step.

 

Mr. Hungerford 's professional career began on the Rochester Herald in 1896, and after two years there he shifted to the New York Sun for a term twice that length. The transition from newspaperman to railroader was gradual but inevitable. From the Sun he went to the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, as its press agent, and from his desk as public-relations council he moved, seven years later, to Wells Fargo in an executive capacity. From express service to pure railroading was only a short step and in practically no time he found himself Centenary Director for the Baltimore and Ohio and a director of the Central.

 

The showing made by the American railroads at the Chicago World's Fair irritated Hungerford. Various roads put in individual exhibits, and while few of these were actually bad, he felt that at best they were scattering shots against their great opponents of the highway. He saw General Motors walk away with the transportation section of the Fair the first year and Henry Ford do the same trick the second year, and that depressed him. He then and there made up his mind that, if he could help it, there would be nothing of the sort at the New York Fair.

 

After a great deal of negotiation, Ed finally succeeded in getting the roads east of Chicago and St. Louis into a sort of working agreement for the World's Fair. A committee was appointed by their presidents, and Hungerford was made a member of it. The committee met one day in the boardroom of the New York Central.

 

"What kind of a plan can we have— just for a starter?" asked someone.

 

"I have it," said Ed. He sent down to his office and his secretary brought up one of the big green pads he loves to use — and there was a complete layout for the whole thing. Hungerford, who is intensely creative, had been working it out for months — that is, the Railroad Exhibit Building, very much as it has been built at the World's Fair.

 

For his own particular interest in it, however, he has reserved the pageant-drama, "Railroads on Parade." He wrote the script of the show and wrote it lyrically, and designed the stage and settings for it. He planned the thing in all its detail and only regretted that he did not know enough about music to write the score. Kurt Weill did that for him.

 

When one of his shows gets under way Ed lives with it, morning, noon and night, in an old-fashioned private car the Central has given him, and which is spotted on a spur just offstage. When "Wings of a Century" was running he witnessed most of the 1,154 performances it played to more than 2,000,000 people, and now he is a little worried for fear his maximum seating capacity at Flushing Meadows (of some 3,000,000 persons for the summer) isn't going to be sufficient.

 

His flair for dramatizing the lore and legend of the "high iron" stems from Ed's earliest boyhood in Dexter. His life pattern has been conditioned by the celebrated high-liners and luxury limiteds, the hot-shot freights and the gleaming side rods and valve motion of eight-wheelers and Pacifies, Mallets, Mountain types and Santa Fes thundering up the grades and across the switch points and diamonds of the nation's railroads. He has ridden "head end" on the Century as it rocketed through Cleveland on the Chicago run, and fired for veteran "hoggers” wheeling their varnish over the Cajon and the Gloriata. He has ridden in the private cars of Presidents and in the "crummies" of drag freights. At various  times he has been employed as newspaper reporter, editor, press agent and advertising manager. He has written eighteen books and nearly a hundred magazine articles.

 

But during all his varied experiences, the urge to climb aboard the Overland Limited or the Chief or the Black Diamond or the Banner Blue has been strong in him and he has covered more than eighty per cent of all the railroad mileage in the country and knows every city in it except Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which he’ll get around to one of these days.

 

Today, Ed is an ample and friendly figure and an integral part of the New York scene. Although he has a game leg and sometimes walks with crutches, he has kept his hair, his disposition and his appetite. The last of these is, in fact, a noteworthy institution, and to scores of waiter captains and mailres d'hotel from New York to San Francisco he is known as a gourmet of distinction.

 

His hobbies are his camera (with a carefully filed collection of 30,000 negatives taken all over the world), his vast library of travel and transport, covered bridges and historical Americana. He deplores exercise and his favorite sport is riding the cable cars in San Francisco. He is a constant theatergoer and has a weakness for opera, particularly Manon, Traviata and Carmen. He goes to work at eight in the morning and frequently quits by lunchtime so as to have plenty of time over his food at his favorite restaurant. He gets to his office on Sunday as well as week days, just to reassure himself that the trains are still running and are (within reason) on time. He is married into happy domesticity, and an institution in the Hungerford household is the three games of rummy that, rain or shine, in sickness or in health, he plays with Mrs. Hungerford every evening before retiring.

 

Nothing in the world so fascinates Ed (unless it's covered bridges, another even more unwieldy but passionate hobby) as discovering and collecting vintage locomotives. For the filming of a forthcoming railroad epic, a Hollywood studio acquired four ancient "muzzle loaders" and a considerable variety of rolling stock, but it would hardly have been a day's work for Ed, who rounds up venerable eight-wheelers, Moguls and Prairie types by the tens and scores without batting an eyelash.

 

He recently heard that on a lumber railroad in Georgia there was still functioning one of the original steam engines that ran on the Sixth Avenue elevated in New York in the seventies. Delighted with his find, he plans to purchase the relic and put it on the lawn of his country place — if ever he has a country place.

 

The now abandoned but once rich and famous Virginia and Truckee Railroad in Nevada has always proved a happy hunting ground for railroad collectors, and from its disused roundhouses high in the Sierras, Ed has acquired numerous antique items of importance. His most recent acquisition, a graceful American-type locomotive in a beautiful state of preservation, he planned to drive East himself as an advertisement for the World’s Fair, but the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that it would need new boiler tubes before they could permit it to run under its own power over a regular right of way, so the project was shelved and the engine is being towed East in less grandiose style.

 

For his World's Fair pageant Ed has assembled what is probably the largest collection of motive power and rolling stock of all periods ever to be brought together for a single exhibit. Fifteen full trains hauled by such historic engines as the Stourbridge Lion, the Tom Thumb and the Best Friend of Charleston, together with their most modern counterparts from the Central's shops, will be shown in the play itself. Elsewhere on the premises will be exhibited in stationary form twenty other locomotives of various periods. There will be five complete foreign trains on view from Italy, Great Britain, France, Poland and Russia.

 

The pageant itself will contain such historic scenes as the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory, Utah, May 10, 1869, when the Union Pacific joined the rails of the Central Pacific and established the first transcontinental railroad, and there will be up-to-the-minute scenes of freight handling and train dispatching with a cast of 250.

 

"Railroads on Parade" will be a "must" for rail fans young and old, from the camera-toting members of the Railroad Enthusiasts to the scholarly curators of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, if for no other reason than that it has been written and designed, produced, directed and devised by the greatest rail fan of them all — Ed Hungerford.

[Overmod]

Someone needs to fact-check this, but I think...

His most recent acquisition, a graceful American-type locomotive in a beautiful state of preservation, he planned to drive East himself as an advertisement for the World’s Fair, but the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that it would need new boiler tubes before they could permit it to run under its own power over a regular right of way, so the project was shelved and the engine is being towed East in less grandiose style.

... I think the way it was 'towed east' might have been FAR more grandiose than just running it under its own power.

In fact, if I'm not mistaken, it had no fewer than 5000 available streamlined-steam horsepower to do it.  

[Miningman]

Posted by Overmod on Thursday, August 22, 2019 8:19 AM

Someone needs to fact-check this, but I think...

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/NysAAOSw~~NbXdJb/s-l1600.jpg

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=196;size=150;rotation=0 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=197;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=198;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=199;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=200;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=201;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=202;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=203;size=150;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=mdp.39015023079547;seq=204;size=150;rotation=0

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023079547&view=1up&seq=7

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=uc1.31822035082023;seq=1;size=125;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=uc1.31822035082023;seq=3;size=125;rotation=0

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=uc1.31822035082023;seq=6;size=125;rotation=0

 

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id=uc1.31822035082023;seq=7;size=125;rotation=0

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822035082023&view=1up&seq=1

 

[Overmod]

That's a fascinating trove of information about the 2-4-0 Bowker, but I don't think that's the 4-4-0 Beebe attributes to Hungerford.

Is that the same UP 58 that was photographed (and run with) the UP turbines 1 and 2?

 

[Miningman]

 The owner of the Virginia & Truckee RR was the uncle of Beebe's big boss at the Herald Tribune, which was a great paper. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Herald_Tribune

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden_L._Mills

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogden_Mills_Reid

Overmod-- your attachment didn't fly 

[Overmod]

Miningman

Overmod-- your attachment didn't fly

Source encoding was incompatible.  Damned if I don't remember one of Beebe's books having a picture of turbines 1 and 2 and the 4-4-0 together!

[Miningman]

That's too bad. Perhaps later... meanwhile Mike sends this 

Posted by Overmod on Thursday, August 22, 2019 1:02 PM

That's a fascinating trove of information about the 2-4-0 Bowker, but I don't think that's the 4-4-0 Beebe attributes to Hungerford.

http://www.bnsf9187.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2100460

Excerpt from 1939 article by Edward Hungerford

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/collecting-iron-horses/

Such was mine only a little while ago in the castle-like stone roundhouse of the once busy Virginia and Truckee’ Railroad at Carson City, Nevada, Engine No. 12 of that road (long ago, in 1871, when the Baldwin people first built her at their Philadelphia works they called her the Genoa), was there but had not turned a wheel since 1905. Yet she had been kept in good condition, free from rust and corrosion.

It was not too difficult a job to put her in running order again; load her, with her tender, on two flatcars and ship her across the continent to a railroad ship in the Bronx and there make her ready as an actor for a play which I had written for the New York World’s Fair. Transformed, No. 12 of the Virginia and Truckee has become the Jupiter of the Central Pacific, a prominent actor indeed in the historic American episode of the driving of the final spike-the Gold Spike in the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, May 10, 1869.

Gilbert Kneiss brought her across the continent for us, riding, eating, and sleeping for eight days and eight nights in a wooden coach of the old Central Pacific lashed atop a flatcar. He is something of a locomotive collector himself. In recent years a good many of the smaller railroads of the West Coast—especially the logging roads—have folded up and gone out of business. Here he found a fair field for collecting these old engines.

 

He discovered the old J. W. Bowker, 1874, also of the Virginia and Truckee, on a logging road which was being abandoned at Hobart Mills, California, acquired her for the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, and brought her down to an enthusiastic reception in front of the Ferry House at San Francisco. She also came East with the Genoa for the New York Fair...

 

[Miningman]

Did you know?... that Beebe's Father died in Pennsylvania Station while waiting at a departure gate with family members. A year earlier Lucius lost his brother, a war hero, in a plane crash.

[Miningman]

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/1448  Beebe’s grandfather

 

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/1443  Beebe’s father

 

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/1445  Beebe’s brother

 

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/1449  Beebe’s portrait

 

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/1450  Beebe’s dog’s portrait

[Miningman]

LIFE and Death 

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/2391

https://digitalheritage.noblenet.org/wakefield/items/show/1745

 

[Penny Trains]

My dad had a copy of this book and I inherited it:

512 pages with hundreds of half tone drawings from sources that are often overlooked(?) today (Harper's Weekly, The Police Gazzette, etc.).  A fairly easy read too.

When I showed it to the retired Army Master Sargeant I worked with back in the 80's at Cedar Point, he said "Lucius Beebe?  Sounds like 'luscious boob'" 

Also, I don't know if there's a blood tie or not, but my mom does the bookkeeping for a lawyer named Beebe.

[Overmod]

Bumping this.  I have not forgotten.  Y'all shouldn't forget, either.

Steve promised us correspondence, nearly a month ago.  Surely it's time for the first installment ... perhaps in sync with publicity for the 75th anniversary book on DPM?

[Overmod]

Flintlock76

I did some checking and the quote is from Beebe's "Mixed Train Daily," and it's not a Beebe quote. The quote is from D.W. Thomas, the owner of the Chesapeake Western...

Ironic, then, that the Chesapeake Western dieselized very early, with splendid if low-horsepower Baldwins -- and with publicity in the Baldwin magazine in 1948 about "Robert E. Lee's Railroad Goes Diesel."  Note the specific reference to the motor trains so blasted in Beebe's Thomas quote.  Note also the many innovations hinted at in Thomas' approach to business -- and their costs.

Two of the three Baldwins were the last Lost Engines of Roanoke and one of those, beautifully cosmetically restored, is one  of the crown jewels at VMT.  I find a certain irony in all this...

[Flintlock76]

I haven't forgotten either, I'm just tired of asking about it.  

If it ever shows up it'll land like a thunderbolt or if the correspondence is about nothing it won't show up at all.  

Interesting article on "Robert E. Lee's Railroad."  Had me scratching my head for a bit, "Robert E. Lee's WHAT?"  But then it all made sense.

Makes me wonder how American history would have been different if General Lee had quit the Army in say, 1840 or so and gone railroading.  As a West Point trained engineer his services would have been quite in demand!  

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

Flintlock76

                                                                                         

Makes me wonder how American history would have been different if General Lee had quit the Army in say, 1840 or so and gone railroading.  As a West Point trained engineer his services would have been quite in demand!  

 

For openers, the Southern Rebellion may have been put down in a lot less time.

[York1]

CSSHEGEWISCH

For openers, the Southern Rebellion may have been put down in a lot less time.

 

As a Louisianian, I have to correct your statement:  "For openers, the War of Northern Aggression may have ended in a lot less time."    (Please don't take me seriously!)

[Overmod]

As an ex-Louisianan, I feel I have to correct your statement further: "For openers, South Carolina's pointless war of aggression might have ended in a lot less time..."

Or indeed, never gotten to the point that it involved Virginia, a state that really Knew Better, or Alabama, the only region that actually had much chance of sustaining itself in a confederated model, or Louisiana, which would suffer far more from attempting to secede than it would ever have gained from the Davis model of CSA run incompetently from Richmond (no offense, Wayne, but they really folded up dismally there at the end, the only time their own 'competence' became involved...)

There's a reason I recognize the firing on Sumter every year by flying the Palmetto Flag upside down, the international symbol of distress.  Too much mouth and not enough brain down there where North Carolina tapers off.

Compare the two here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPXEdJ_Gtx0

[Deggesty]

Yes, the War for Southern Independence could well have ended sooner. And if Hiram Ulysses Grant had been in command in Virginia in 1862, the war could have been ended sooner.  I do not know the result if General Joe Johnston had not been wounded early in the Seven Days' Battle (McClellan's retreat to Hampton Roads), and man trained in engineering appointed to command the army of Northern Virginia. 

[Overmod]

Deggesty

Yes, the War for Southern Independence could well have ended sooner.

The War for Southern Autonomy should have been fought when it would have been relatively easy to win, in the early 1850s when Massachusetts was threatening to secede from a Southern-dominated Union.  Had the argument remained firmly on states' rights and not become distracted into a defense of the peculiar institution of incompetent chattel slavery, I think the result would have been some sort of negotiated agreement (probably mediated by England) whether or not there was any long string of compelling military victory.

Personally I suspect the outcome against that cautious little McClellan -- for all that I respect him as a railroader -- would have been little different with Johnston than with Bob Lee.  I don't think quick action against Grant in the early months would have resulted in anything meaningful other than a forced evacuation of the District of Columbia (probably to either Philadelphia or New York, neither of which were ever thinkable targets for actual Southern military action) with the efflorescence of jingoist Northern sentiment that 'losing DC' would have inspired.

One thing that I think would have influenced the early course of the war would have been adoption of Northern-style 'chattel servitude' mill labor in places like Tredegar, when the time came to build modern munitions quickly and then maintain them.  Among the interesting things available to the South at the start of the War was a 48-shot (if I remember the number correctly) repeating rifle using cartridge ammunition with relatively low tendency for powder or primer fouling.  It is difficult to imagine any maneuver in the early battles against such a weapon, the point being that the initial 'war of Northern aggression' into the South would have been even more of a fiasco than it evidently had become by 1862, and a mediated peace more likely.