Beautiful Shenandoah

The Fall 2009 NRHS Excursions are over, and hopefully everyone had a good time. I was not able to make either trip, but was able to get some photos of the Sunday run up the Shenandoah Line. The trestle movie is at Stoney Battery Road, and the bridge photos were taken at Natural Bridge Station, VA. Three GE Genesis units for power, and 17 cars consisting of 6 privately owned cars and 11 Amfleet coaches. The one car with the flat spot on the wheel made it easy to tell when the train was on the approach as it went over a bridge. You could hear it for miles!

Too long without an update, so here goes. The "Lost Engines of Roanoke" are lost no longer! VMT received the M2c 1151 and a tender,and the Baldwin DS44-660 #662. The M2 1118 and a tender are going to the Portsmouth (VA) Railroad Museum. The other Baldwin, #663 is at the Roanoke Chapter of the NRHS's 9th Street facility, and they traded the M2 1134 for their tank engine with Will Harris. Will also got the flat car with a tender body on it. All the tenders had been converted to tankers for MoW service, and the two larger ones were used until 1970.














Most of you know that the 917 went to Ohio last year, and it has been cosmetically restored as an attraction for a roadside resturant in Bellbrook, Oh.










Some answers for Mike, who had a few queries about the 1151. 1) The 1151 is sitting outside the fence because that is the only place we could put it for now. Two of the tracks inside the plant are in dire need of repair, and can hold no more rolling stock, and the other three tracks are full. It would have taken a large amount of engineering to get the cranes inside the fence to place the 1151 on the track due to ground conditions, and overhead restrictions. We are not too worried about someone wanting to 'tag' the engine because the paint will just help to preserve it. As you observed, there is not much left to take off of it, so that's not a problem either, but we did secure the cab and the auger space on the tender to eliminate the bums moving in. 2) The Southern Auto-Guard car that used to occupy the spot where the 1151 sits is now at the North Carolina Transportation Museum. We gave it to them because it never ran in Virginia, and they can do a better job (they have the room) of displaying it. 3) We did receive many parts that were removed from the 1151 many years ago, but the rods and pumps are sadly mostly gone. It may look bad as it is, but can be cosmetically restored without too much trouble. The guys over at the NRHS can do miracles with steel, and are in the process of doing a cosmo on the 1118 for Portsmouth. They will also do a cosmo on the 662, and maybe later we can get together and do the 1151. It will just take a while longer to round up, or manufacture parts to make it whole again. But for now, enjoy the view of the inside of the smokebox, because not many times do you get to see that. We will keep you up to date on the progress of the cosmo of 1118, but it will be some time before it is done. I give them at least six months, then it has to be trucked in two parts and put back together, and the finishing touches put on.

The Return

Two announcements to make today. One, the VMT Blog is once again in active status. It has been a long while since the last post, and we apologize for that, but now the time has come to get serious about this medium. We'll be posting on a regular basis with more of a bent towards the news of the transportation world, be it happenings at the VMT, or things that happen on the mainline, the airways, the highway, or the high seas.

And since we are now in that mode, here is announcement #2. The "Lost Engines of Roanoke" are on their way to freedom from the scrap-yard where they have been ensconced lo these fifty plus years. As some of you know, old #917 was liberated last year, and is now a roadside attraction in Ohio. Steam engines #1118, 1135, and 1151, along with diesels 662 and 663, and two tenders and a flatcar will be coming out by September 30, 2009, to make way for the Carrilion Hospital/Bio-Med Center expansion. The old mill is currently being demolished, and is about 70% down, and as soon as a temporary surface can be put down, work will commence on removing the Lost Engines. In the meantime, we have a couple of photos to share with you taken in the early springtime, before the vegetation takes over.

Giving Twice

‘Tis the season both to shop for Christmas and to make those end-of-the-year charitable contributions. Here is a way you can do both kinds of giving with one stop.

The VMT museum gift shop, Destinations, offers a great selection of special items for the transportation aficionados in your world. In addition, every dollar you spend there helps the museum.

Destinations stocks a delightful variety of gifts: T-shirts, sweatshirts and caps for the grownups and the young’uns. Calendars, mugs and clocks. An electic selection of videos, dvds and cds.

You’ll find puzzles, games and and throws (including one featuring the J611). A variety of toys including colorful, large wooden trucks that children can both assemble and then operate.

There are Christmas decorations and key chains. Badges and playing cards. Prints and posters and postcards. Magnets and maps.

And how could we forget the books? Books with rosters of locomotives and rolling stock. Books of railroad timetables. Coffee-table-sized picture books about trains and other types of transportation. Histories of various railroads in Virginia, the South, and across the U.S. Books that entertain or inform or inspire or all three.

The VMT museum store features products made in the USA. When you purchase one of our Made in USA products, you are helping the museum and helping to keep jobs in America.

Shopping for a child? Think beyond Thomas. We carry a line of beautifully made wooden engines and cars that are totally compatible with Thomas and Brio. Made in the USA and painted with lead-free paint, they are painted to look like real train cars. Children who are thrilled by the trains that rumble through Roanoke can now have the same NS or CSX cars on their home track.

Come on by. Or call the gift shop at 767-4651. Or roll on over to: http://www.vmt.org/destinations_museumshopRev.html You can ord-er items and have them shipped to your address. Make your trip to the VMT gift shop a challenge. See how many people on your Christmas gift list can be taken care of with one stop.

Destinations is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday from 1-5 pm. Come in VMT’s main entrance and turn to the right. You do not have to purchase museum admission just to shop. Of course, if while you're there you find this irresistible urge ....

Collections and Connections

This and that:

The Messimer Collection has had its grand opening. Housed in the front of the museum, near the gift shop, the exhibit displays an abundance of Greyhound bus memorabilia covering three-quarters of a century. The exhibit also includes Trailways items, a full size front of an Abbott Trailways bus and photos of local transit buses provided by the Commonwealth Coach and Trolley Museum of Roanoke.

Located in the same area is a new display celebrating Roanoke’s “other” railroad, the Virginian Railway. Though much smaller than the Norfolk and Western, the Virginian competed neck-and-neck with the N&W hauling West Virginia coal to Norfolk. The two railroads merged in 1959. This area is not finished. We plan to do a formal opening once the storyboards are completed and mounted.

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VMT is in negotiations with two other Virginia museums regarding the N&W locomotives at the Virginia Scrap Iron and Metal Company property. Hopefully the remaining vintage steam locos can be salvaged through a cooperative effort. We’ll keep you posted.

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This week the museum unveils the Jim Hyams serigraph collection. Serigraphs are prints made using the silkscreen process. The result is highly detailed paints of an almost photographic quality. Afterward the screens are destroyed, limiting the print run to a small number, sometimes only one.

The collection is being displayed at VMT in conjunction with the Roanoke Arts Festival and will remain there through the end of the year. The transportation-related serigraphs were produced by some of the premier artists in the genre.

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Soon we will feature a locomotive cab inside our building. Norfolk Southern donated the cab after converting an SD-40 diesel electric into a “calf,” a unit that cannot be operated solo but is lashed together with other locomotives to provide additional power. The six-axle SD40 was manufactured by General Motors' Electro-Motive Division beginning in 1966 and became the best-selling locomotive of all time.

The cab should be in place early in 2009. It will allow visitors to experience the inside of a diesel loco. In the future we hope to add a locomotive simulator to our collection.

Ridin' the Rails, part 2

On a train you experience the contrasts between the grubby and the grand, the seamy and the sublime.

To ride the rails is to understand the meaning of “the other side of the tracks.” You see the backsides of houses and businesses: junked cars, dilapidated buildings, tarpaper shacks, debris-strewn yards. (The graffiti is outstanding, however). And in these post-modern railroading years, you pass railroad depots in all stages of disrepair. Even some of the stations where Amtrak stops look like sets for a Stephen King movie.

On the other hand, to take the train is also to see grandeur from vantage points the automobile cannot provide: the untamed woodlands and rapids-laced streams of West Virginia, the sprawling cornfields and wheatfields of the Midwest, the raw majesty of the towering Rockies. The surgical cut made by the railroad right-of-way inserts the traveler shoulder-to-shoulder with the surrounding landscape. You feel like you could almost reach your hand out the window and touch that scampering deer or shake hands with the farmer on his tractor.

The train itself is a study in contrasts. Amtrak uses the names of glorious streamliner routes of the past such as The Crescent, The Empire Builder, and The Hiawatha. In reality, Amtrak service is more freightliner than streamliner, a Greyhound with flanged wheels. The facilities are adequate, the food is mediocre, and the staff ranges from gracious to grouchy. All this is not surprising, given the paucity of federal support for passenger railroading.

On one leg of my trip, the snack bar menu posted on the wall had cancellations and price changes scribbled in ink. As I sat waiting for a breakfast table, I heard a woman behind me exclaiming to her traveling companions, “In the brochure it all looked so nice.”

In addition, trains run habitually behind schedule. My eagerly awaited visit to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is scuttled due to the hours we sit waiting behind a broken-down freight train on a single track main line in southern Indiana. Even without such mishaps, passenger trains often run infuriatingly late because of the heavy freight traffic on the lines Amtrak leases from railroads such as CSX and Union Pacific. It’s more cost effective, a conductor tells me, for those roads to keep their lucrative freight traffic on schedule and to pay Amtrak the contractual penalties for the delays.

Nevertheless, it’s still a lark to take the train. I love the size and power of those diesels. The rocking and lurching of the coaches. The excitement of racing past grade crossings with their flashing gates and lines of cars. The sights of wide-eyed children running toward the tracks and construction workers laying down their tools to wave.

All of this reminds me why a place like VMT is so important. The railroad is wound tightly into the strands of America’s DNA. At levels deeper perhaps than we sometimes understand, trains still lure us, charm us, and speak to our hearts. You cannot really understand this nation until you understand its history with trains.

In the last couple years, congressional funding for Amtrak has become more generous. Given the concerns about global warming and fossil fuels, perhaps some of the more fascinating chapters of America’s rail history have yet to be written—a dream both grand and sublime.

Ridin' the Rails, part one

I anxiously drive north from Roanoke on a gorgeous autumn afternoon. My train is scheduled to depart Clifton Forge at 4:08 and I can’t afford to miss it—the next one won’t come for two more days. I whip into the CSX parking lot and hurry with my luggage to the makeshift waiting area.

I needn’t have worried; the train is running 30 minutes late. After all, this is Amtrak. The half-dozen waiting passengers have plenty of time to gab, and we do. It’s my first reminder today of how different train travel is.

We talk of freight cars and end-of-train devices and reminisce about previous rail journeys. You seldom find airline passengers engaging total strangers in conversation like this. Besides, what can you tell about a previous airline journey: how much turbulence you encountered or how stirringly the flight attendant gave the mind-numbing safety recitation?

These people are the first of many I will encounter on my trip to St. Louis. Many of them are not riding the train just to get somewhere but to get there by rail. Whether they prefer the meandering pace and unique panoramas or seek a slice of nostalgic Americana, how they get there is almost as important to them as the destination itself.

Some pretend the golden age of American streamliners still exists and they have boarded the posh Broadway Limited or the gleaming Silver Meteor. Others relish the chance to see the countryside from a different perspective, glimpsing towns and fields and mountains from angles you can’t reach by car. The serious rail buffs among us are delighted to watch train operations at point blank range—rail yards, sidings, spurs and the “business” side of industries.

In the diner I meet an 81-year-old lady, who obviously doesn’t lack for money and who can barely walk. She has had joint replacement surgery on her knee and needs it on her hips. Yet she is determined to have what she calls her “last hurrah,” one final glorious train trip. In Chicago she will board the Empire Builder for Seattle, then roll down to Sacramento on the Coast Starlight, and finally reach Reno via the California Zephyr. She doesn’t sound nearly as excited about her two weeks in Reno as she does about the process of getting there.

Back in my coach I converse with my seatmate, who is from Wyoming. The county. In West Virginia. She regales me with tales of growing up as one of 15 children of a coal miner and moonshiner and of her 20 years as a long haul truck driver. She is headed for Kansas to see her first great grandchild.

And my destination? I am traveling to St. Louis by way of Chicago to spend a week with my daughter and son-in-law. For me also the ride is half the fun. I haven’t been on a passenger train since my trek from Richmond to Orlando years ago. Too cheap to reserve a sleeping berth, I will ride in my coach seat all night long. My body will get too little sleep and my clothes will get too many wrinkles. By the time I reach the windy city, I will have been aboard for 19 straight hours.

And I will not care, for I am riding the train.