Just a note of thanks for the update. I first ran across your site on PC about three years ago. I am several years older than you and grew up in New London, Ct. where the PC interchanged with the CV. Both had small yards in New London and both let you ride in the cab while they switched cars! Mostly all gone now and forget about any cab rides. I subscribed to the PC Post for two dollars a year and had a chance to work the tower at New Rochelle in ’74, but opted to go on to college. I have kept a small collection of transition era NH-PC paperwork, mostly found trackside and now and then like to look through the stuff. Like one of your commenters, I also practiced drawing the two worms in love on my notebook in school. The emblem was clever, the management less so.
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What an amazing collection of PC stuff. My father was Pennsy starting in ’49 and then PC until his stroke in ’69. He worked the Newton switch tower near Laketon, IN until they computerized the switching and then was in Fort Wayne on that switching computer.
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Hi, As another teen (from suburban Philadelphia) that liked the PC, I enjoyed visiting your site.
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Hey there, just wanted to drop a line and say your Penn Central archive site is a huge asset to fans of the railroad. I am actually only 21 and I became a fan through my family’s ties to the railroad. I am a 3-rail O-gauge modeler and have been on a mission for about a year now to collect all the O-gauge manufacturer’s highly detailed Penn Central products. Check out the thread we have going on it on the OGR forum right now. I’m PC9850, the guy who started the thread: is for Penn Central 9850. It was an Alco S-2 switcher that I have a photo of my grandfather standing next to when he worked for the PC as a trackman. My entire family was off the boat from Italy and he worked for the entire lineage of PRR through Conrail and Amtrak.
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Stopped by your pc site and a very great site it is.. I am very much in love with PENN CENTRAL. THANKS
CONRAIL HISTORICAL SOCIETY MEMBER
PENN CENTRAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY MEMBER
NEW YORK CENTRAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY MEMBER
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Hello, A Texan by birth, Built: Dallas, Tex., 1946, living in Bavaria, looking at a Penn Central site on the Internet? You gotta be crazy! Fact is, after three years in the US Army Transportation Corps, I returned to Dallas with my new “frau” who I met here in Germany while assigned to the 49th Transportation Group, and hired out on the Cotton Belt as a switchman. A year later found me in Ft. Worth, still with the SSW, until September ’68, when I was cut off while employed in the old Hodge Yard (now used by Ft. Worth & Western). I went downtown and hired out with “John” Santa Fe and marked up on the Dallas Extra Board. There I switched some more until my wife got homesick. We returned to Germany and in October 1979 I hired out on the German Federal Railway and switched and served as a service representative in passenger services at the Nuremberg Main Station until retiring in August 2010. Oh yes, before I forget. In June 1959 my stepfather moved the family from Dallas to Tampa, Florida. My hangout was down at Tampa Union Station, watching the fine streamliners of the Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard Air Line bring happy vacationers from the Northeast to the sunny beaches of the Sunshine State. There are still a lot of “Sunny Beaches” in Florida. Most are of the two legged human variety though…. 🙂 I never got to see Penn Central although I almost hired out on the Great Southwest Railroad, a switching line in Grand Prairie, TX, which WAS in fact, a Penn Central controlled company as PC owned the Great Southwest Warehouse outfit! Though this didn’t come to pass I did switch countless Penn Central freight cars on the Cotton Belt and (please sing: “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”…hey, you guys sing real well! Though I have fond memories of workin’ on the railroad in Texas, I did consider staying in New Jersey where my wife had a aunt who was married to a retired claim agent off the Erie-Lackawanna. In some ways I wish we had stayed in Jersey or at least I shouldda shucked the job in Texas and returned there with my wife.
I have always been a “Train Nut” according to my cousin who still lives in Texas. She sends me newspaper clippings from the area papers when there is some railroad story in them to this day. At age three and one half my mother took me on a journey to visit my father in Indiana and we took the Santa Fe from Dallas to Chicago. After a visit on the old family farm we headed to New York City. I had an uncle who was in the US Army and stationed on Staten Island. My mother didn’t remember the road we took but she says it may have been the Nickel Plate. How we got from Buffalo to New York City remains a mystery as does the railroad that we did take out of Chicago. At any rate, I became a railfan when I was still knee high to a Texas grasshopper! I have always been an admirer of the New York Central’s fancy streamlined Hudsons. Those 4-6-4’s were the most beautiful steam locomotives to ever run on steel rails in my opinion. My favorite electric is, hands down, the Penny GG1, thanks to the Lionel catalogs. On my way to Germany in January 1965, after graduating from the US Army Transportation School at Ft. Eustus, Virginia, I stepped off the Pullman car that Uncle Sam had bought passage for me, and across the platform in Trenton, NJ, a southbound “Clocker” flew through the station behind a “G”. Man, I became a Pennsy fan on that cold winter morn’!
With Saturday morning “steam ups” at Ft. Eustus all through the fall of ’64 behind me, I knew when I got to Germany I would see some more steam. I got my first look under the Frankfurt train shed while heading for a train that cold evening, having been flown from NJ to Frankfurt on a USAF MATS cargo plane, to take a buddy from Cleveland, Ohio, (we are still good friends to this day) and me down the Rhein River to Heidelburg on the German Fed behind a beautiful blue E10 B-B electric. That juice machine flew over the rails that evening and gave me a thrill I remember to this day! I fell in love with the Deutsche Bundesbahn’s 2-10-0s! Little did I know then that one day I would be cashing paychecks paid to me for working for the DB here in Deutschland!
Hey, I almost forgot why I am writing this mess from a big Texas mouth, how silly of me! I just want to say that I really really enjoy your site and thanks for putting up a lot of stuff on a railroad that was hated by many, employees, commuters, railfans, but never by me! Somehow it just followed the right of way of the modern merger movement of the times and I accepted the fact. It is a hard row to hoe though for me to accept the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. I personally feel that the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific merger should have been approved at the time. I remain a fan of the railroads of New England despite my Texas roots, the New Haven is at the top of the list followed by the Boston & Maine. I find it awesome that the B&M; held a contest once upon a time and let school kids name steam locomotives. This was the Public Relations by them back then that helped make America such a great nation that it was and still is!