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Well, then there probably is truth to both our stories!! =) I find the fact that you worked "railroad" in Huntigton extremely interesting, but I'll try not to bug you to death with "too many" questions..=) I grew up in Ft Wayne just a stones throw away from the point where the Old Wabash crossed the St Mary's river. So the Wabash was somewhat of my first interest in Railroads (as a wide eyed child). The Old PRR crossed the St Mary's about a mile north of that point, so in a very child like manner, the PRR became "the other guys" in my sphere of influance. Never would I have imagined that the PRR owned the Wabash at the time (57-64), any info on how that came about would be both informative as well as entertaining.... Years later, developing an interest in how Ft Wayne came to be known as the "summit city" I was doing a bit of "back path" investigating along the little river, and the wabash river between what they called "the old portage" between the Little and the St Mary's river, and the old Attica lock and Dam, and found the remnants of the old canal to be profuse in Aboite township, Roanoke, and especially Andrews. Fun research all of it. I'll bet that as a railroader in Huntington, that big Glacial morraine was a lot of fun having to deal with? I used to see diesels in mid train on the N&W that I had no idea at the time "why" were in mid train, buth my retrospective guess must be that they were "Distributed power" for that morrain...since they were northbound only. The "bidding war" story regarding the Nickel Plate, came from a really nice big book That I mused throough at the Denver Railroad museum called "Illustrated history of the Nickel Plate Railroad" which was a huge book, that i still wish I would have bought a copy of from their bookstore...very informative..very fact filled. Last saw it in 1986, probably long out of print now..=( Didn't know the NKP was narrow guage to St Louis, appreciate your filling me in...Did they ever upgrade it? Last "silly kid" question..=) the New York Central had a spur that went from their mainline in Waterloo down to Ft Wayne that still had freight traffic into the mid/late 1960's I recall for sure. And road improvements made at some of the crossings in Ft Wayne well into the 1970's preserved the "navigability" of that line, at considerable effort. Just musing over a recent "map of the month" in trains magazine, depicting an historical disection of Conrail and it's progenitors, the line is omitted from the map. Any thoughts as to why? The line is now abandoned, but I am relatively confident that the line was necessary to get #765 out of mothballs (post 1976 I believe) since that line is the one that used to go right past the location where #765 sat and rusted for years.
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