Passing of Alvin F Stauffer

[Green_Elite_Cab]

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.

That does sound pretty intense. Maybe if it was a GG1 I'd be more inclined to contribute, that said a T1 sounds pretty good too.

If that is indeed the case about historical societies, then that is pretty disappointing. I'd love to be able to contribute as Mr. Debberthine has, though maybe I'll try to be much easier to get along with. I have no idea how to get companies to take my feedback seriously though.

I imagined i'd find people like that already occupying most of these Historical societies, and that I might find some real-life projects to help with (if they were building that T1 in New Jersey...) but its not really seeming like the case.

A few of the local NRHS chapters tried to get me to join a while back, and I was thinking about it, but I wonder if even they have any good projects to participate with.