Abandoning the Community

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.