03-27-2014, 08:46 AM
Green_Elite_Cab Wrote:I haven't gotten the new Keystone, and I haven't heard about this new built T1 (is this the BLI model?). Hopefully, I'll get more in the loop as time passes.
I've been trying to get involved in some of these organizations so that I can learn a little more, but so far my experiences haven't been fantastic. No one local appears to be on the Conrail Historical Society (and few there have been able to answer my questions), and though my club has recently made everyone join the NMRA (they pay the dues), I haven't been able to go to any of the NMRA meets either.
There's a group trying to raise $10 million to have a new PROTOTYPE T1 built. Apparently there are places like Poland that are willing to take this sort of thing on. I wouldn't hold my breath; where are they going to run it? The UP, for instance, will no longer allow third-party steam equipment. You gonna run it up and down on the Strasburg?
By and large, the technical and historical societies have outlived their usefulness. When they worked closely with the manufacturers in the 1980s to upgrade their paint and detail, they were irreplaceable. On the other hand, there were always the guys who on their own measured every inch of whatever prototype and badgered the manufacturers to get it right. I knew one of them, the late Hugh Debberthine, who did things like travel to the Detroit area to get to the Keystone low-level PRR train that was in a junk yard and measure and photograph the whole thing. As his obituary said, if there was a question on where the grab irons were on a B60 roof, he was the guy who'd find one and climb onto the roof with a tape measure. He was hard to get along with, and he certainly didn't work within the PRRT&HS, although he was another low-membership number guy like I am. He would have badgered the manufacturers PRRT&HS or not. (And he did -- the importers hated him, but they listened.) A lot of the improvement was due to guys like him and not the T&HSes.