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."