All-
Thanks for the many replies. Some various follow-ups...
McGee and MtHS. Yep, when WRM disclosed his intention to donate, there was a
lot of comment and help from NPRHA members about how-to, etc. The choice of
MtHS was WRM's alone and now, years on, it isn't nearly as accessible as his
contemporary's (Ronald V Nixon) at the Museum of the Rockies which is on the
Web and searchable. (Oddly enough, I forgot to look at the Nixon collection --
he probably has a few shots of just what I'm looking for!) Anyway, it was a
deeply personal choice that really won't pay off until somebody takes the
entire MtHS by the scruff of the neck and gives it a good kick in the pants.
There's the old saw about the HS using it's piece of the NP's Last Rail as a
convenient doorstop. Anyway, to its credit, the NPRHA did take an assortment of
WRM photos and put it together as a traveling road show as a temporary exhibit
at museums. It came out to the White River Valley Museum in Auburn, Wash., but
after that I am not sure where it went. Current whereabouts might be available
at www.NPRHA.org.
Q tank car fleet -- dwarfed the NP's (I think they were well under 50), but
sounds much like similar use -- company service only. Has the BRHS _Bulletin_
ever covered the Q and oil traffic, the Q's tank car fleet, or Q freight
service during the World War Two period?
Q FTs... like the NP, they went into the trouble spots. (Actually, after
delivery they broke in on the Badlands of North Dakota, a bad water bad grade
territory which also served as a tax-dodge for the NP to get around Washington
state sales tax [according to NP lore.]) Shortly after that they went to
Stampede Pass to handle traffic through the tunnel. As ordered the NP skipped
dynamic brakes, but after a tour of the ATSF FTs they went back and reordered
with dynamics. Does anyone know if the Q ordered with dynamics off the bat, or
went joyriding with the Santa Fe guys before being convinced?
Private car service survey -- that's very interesting! Do you recall what year
this was, or if it was an effort just before the US entry into World War Two? I
seem to recall Robert Aldag made a comment at a Lexington Group meeting many
years ago that management on the Erie clearly saw what was coming and went out
to their dead lines to get every teakettle, velocipede or serviceable ball
bearing ready for the crush of war traffic they knew would soon come their way.
(Pretty good thinking -- did Q management gaze into the crystal ball with the
same clarity?) I had the chance to ask a GN officers who was on the railway
just before World War Two and he said flatly no, the GN didn't get ahead of the
curve as the Erie did. (I don't know that the NP did, either.)
Thanks for the replies!
John Phillips
Seattle
"I will put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeve multitude," says Inez
Mischitz. "What they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles,
sprees, scrapes and and sorrows. The oral history is a great hodgepodge and
kitchen midden of hearsay. A repository of jabber. An omnium-gatherum of
bushwah, gab, palaver, hogwash, flap-doodle and malarkey. The fruit of more
than 20,000 conversations. What people say is history, what we used to think
was history, is only formal history, and largely false. I will put down the
informal history or I will perish in the attempt."
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