More preservation history from Bill Stewart.
(Note: in the following, "IRM" stands for Indiana Railway Museum!)
5] In June 1965 the Anderson Railroad Club operated
another excursion on the same NYC division, this time to the north of its home
city to perhaps Goshen or even Elkhart, where turning facilities were
available. This photo shows the train at Warsaw.
In 1964-65 I was a high school senior in north suburban
Indianapolis and a dues-paying member of the Indianapolis Railfans Club – and
yet I knew nothing about either of those trips until years later (which is still
a source of some irritation, because I would have eagerly purchased a ticket for
each!).
The 1968 Penn Central merger spelled the end for the
southern half of that NYC division, because all Louisville traffic was rerouted
to the former PRR main line through Indianapolis. Abandonment of the segment
through Westport occurred in 1971. I rode the last train, the clean-up run from
Westport to Greensburg, which consisted of the PC Geep dispatched as a light
engine from South Anderson Yard, 0-4-0 saddle-tanker 11, two Erie Stillwell
coaches, some PRR X29 express cars, the heavyweight all-room Pullman
Night Star and perhaps some
other freight equipment I’ve forgotten.
By then there was no love lost between Westport and IRM;
in the early Sixties the village had envisioned itself as a future tourism
mecca, thanks to the museum, but now it was, in the words of the city fathers,
“abandoning the community,” despite the inability of a small, all-volunteer
organization to influence national commerce or the affairs of a bankrupt Class I
railroad.
After the trains stopped running, but prior to clean-up
operations and track removal, the village unwisely paved over the Main Street
crossing with a heavy (perhaps twelve inches or more) overlayment of asphalt,
intended to smooth an irritating dip in the roadway. When the PC Geep arrived
to retrieve the IRM equipment it sliced two clean flangeways through the
week-old asphalt. About twenty minutes later, when the assembled train was
departing, the low-hanging firebox of 0-4-0 11 took out most of the remaining
asphalt, leaving a deep trench between the rails. Once again the village paved
the crossing, only to have to do it a third time after the rails and ties were
removed weeks later.
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