NKP 719

Hello Jim Kreider

That is SPEICAL but sad .   Maybe you get a model of the Berkshire #719 as MTH and or lionel makes NKP Berkshires and weather it and renumber to #719 just as you remembered it.  That would be really special !!! Just a thought.

"Men from Galilee , why are you standing here looking into the sky? You saw Jesus carried away from you into haven. He will come back in the same way you saw him go." Acts 1:11 ERV (Easy to Read Version)

Tiffany

Hi Jim,

I photographed what I now believe was the last eastbound steam run on 6/30/58 and 719 was the engine. She stopped to switch at Downing Rd in Erie and the note on my slides say that train weight was 6656 tons. It was very windy that day, and the wind was so strong that we initially did not hear the engine approaching, as we were standing on the leeward side of the small RR office on Downing. (That office was always closed unless a train stopped there.)

I can tell that is a late shot of 719 as the tender has roller bearing trucks. Among the early Berkshires, R/N 720 was also fitted with rollers on its tender.

Nice tale, Jim.  Bittersweet, but at least you saw it!  It was said that the Berks handled enormous trains in their last weeks of regular service.    5432's train was one of them. Wonder how many cars 6656 tons represented?

Love the NKP stories, Jim and Hudson!

Hudson:
Perhaps you can shed some light on the following;
It was August '57 and I was out on my bike doing some train watching. I pulled up to the Dean yard office on Downing Ave. just as it started to drizzle so I parked my bike under the eaves of the yard office building. You could hear a whistle as an eastbound was coming. Just before the train arrived a car pulled up and two or three guys jumped out and there was at least one Speed Graphic on a tripod. The 700 came drifting downgrade into Dean yard as she was preparing to stop.
I've never seen a picture of this happening. Any idea who these guys were?
On another note, how did you know 719's manifest on 8/30?
Jim Kreider

Jim,

I have no idea, but I have seen a few Jim Shaughnessy images of NKP taken in the summer of 1957. It wasn't one of the 3 people that I railfanned with, especially since we were not old enough to drive and we were all riding bicycles! From constantly looking at NKP pix over the years, I know that Don Wood and John Rehor and Phil Horning also photographed NKP, and I think at least two used Graphics.

The notation on my slides of 719 on 6/30 show 119 cars. I don't remember writing this but suspect, since my slides show the train in Dean siding, I probably asked a crew member. The engine was struggling with this load, probably because of the high winds. I also suspect the engine was overloaded as most NKP freights they tried to keep to around 100 cars, and this may have been due to siding lengths.

I like the late steam locomotives that were around 1925 to the 1950s.I have 5 in my collection pulling freight.And special passenger trains.The last one is a L&N big emma.Thing is my mothers best friend name was emma.Some times life can be funny.

Hudson:

Beautiful photo of the 719 in familiar territory. In all likelihood you did capture the last Buffalo division eastbound run of a Berkshire. Diesels by that time were doing more of the work if I recall correctly and the 700's were not being turned around anywhere near as fast anymore.

Not so of course in the heyday of the Berkshire era.

My grade school days were spent attending St. Joseph School at 24th and Sassafras and a buddy and I had to cross the track at 19th street on our way to school in the morning. Well if a train were coming, chances were that little Jimmie was going to be late for school (my buddy went on), unless my dad or one of his close friends were in the tower in which case I could not get away with it. When the nun asked why I was late I simply said that I had to wait for a train but she never asked me what side of the track I was on. Of course had she asked I would have had to "fess up" because as mom and the Blues Brothers said, you can't lie to a nun. Besides I may have been brave but I wasn't that brave.

On one such occasion I saw the 776 go east in the morning. Coming home from school, often one of dad's friends was working the tower and he kept a little black log book of all the engines that passed (I sure wish I had that book now). He would invite me up to look at the book and it showed that the 776 went west again in the afternoon. Dad worked the 2nd trick that day and he told me that the 776 went east again that night. Busy engine!

Jim Kreider

This picture above, which is great by the way, brings to mind a question I've been meaning to ask for a long time.  Why is it that in that era, it seems in many pictures that the track is sitting on TOP of the ballast, where now the ties are bedded IN the ballast?

Diesel Bob,

I do not know the answer to your question. The engine and train are on the Dean siding, and you can see by the difference between the mainline track and the siding why mainline trackage used to be called "the high iron". In those days I am sure that mechanized track gangs were not so numerous, and it might be that NKP track maintenance was mostly manual labor. By the way, I never see a NKP track gang anywhere unless there was a wreck/derailment!

Thank you for your kind words re the picture. My camera was a cheap east German import called a Vebur with an adjustable (for distance) viewfinder, that never seemed to work well, hence the large foreground expanse. I guess what I was doing was somewhat unique since the vast majority of railfan photographers at that time were all shooting black and white.

Re the NKP Berks handling big trains, excerpted the following from Trains' Oct 1962 "All Steam" issue, devoted to the 700's  (by John A. Rehor):

"In those last weeks of steam operation, the 2-8-4's were assigned to trains of whopping length and tonnage. For example, the 747 worked a 185-car train, Time Freight 37 west, out of Bellevue, on June 6, 1958. Two days later, it handled the same train with 212 cars (!!!) . It was not uncommon for a single 700 to work 8000 to 10,000 tons over the road."

I recall the Trains article and know that a NKP Berkshire was capable of that performance. However, a Berk with about 4000 drawbar HP on an 8000 ton train is 0.5 HP per ton, which is a drag freight category. (Most freights in the early diesel age were dispatched at 2-2.5 HP per ton, and intermodal was assigned power at 4-6 HP per ton.) I do not know a lot about the NKP operation Bellevue to Ft Wayne or Ft Wayne to Calumet but sidings may have been longer. Here on the east end of the RR, it was more of a higher speed RR. I have timed a NKP Berk (#763) at 63-66 mph after coming off the East Avenue bridge and under the highway bridge at Franklin Ave. They had to run faster...there was a 15 mph speed limit on the street trackage through Erie!

A great engine on a great railroad!

5432:     John Rehor wrote up a typical NKP 700 powered train in "First 56, Engine 758", same mag.  "73 loads, no empties, 3487 tons".........think that was the more commonly seen hotshot, with the horsepower ratio you cited. And that's what made the Nickle Plate a lot of money !

Mark,

You bet! NKP did not let cars sit in yards-and had a survivalist instinct to keep trains moving. With single track, at least through here, that was somewhat of a challenge at times. If a NKP freight did not take the siding at Dean Yard for a meet, you could not catch it until it reached Buffalo. And few freights that were eastbound used the sidings. I suspect that NKP, like the NYC, had predominantly eastbound freight, although The Saucer (aka "The Flying Saucer") regularly ran westbound, with double headed Berks used mostly on weekends. That was a power balancing move as we could never find a lot of 700's at South Park (Buffalo). We usually avoided it as South Park was not "friendly" to railfans. At Conneaut no one ever bothered us.....