More History of the Other IRM

Our friend Bill Stewart sends us some more pictures and stories from early railway preservation in Indiana:

When my friend John Fuller forwarded these images this morning I thought we had perhaps stumbled across a small pot of gold.  It turns out there were only a few silver coins in the bottom, but coinage worth snatching up in any case.  To explain:

You will recall that in 2007 Jan Girardot and I chartered IRR 65 for an IRM excursion in memory of the then recently deceased Dr. Howard Blackburn, one of the original 1953 contributors to that car’s preservation and arguably the man responsible for whatever success the Noblesville museum enjoyed in its earlier years.  Now 13 more years have gone by, Doc’s widow has passed away, and his daughter has entrusted John with 60 trays of 35mm slides for review and preservation.  Here are some with CNS&M and CA&E connections that I thought might be of interest to you.

These pictures document some scenes along the 1964 or 1965 Anderson Railroad Club fan trips we discussed earlier this year.  Those trips originated in Anderson and operated south at least as far as Westport (possibly North Vernon) and north at least as far as Warsaw (possibly Goshen or Elkhart) on the New York Central’s Michigan Division, once an important secondary main line that was by then entering its final years of usefulness.  Passengers on the Anderson Railroad Club trips were accommodated in North Shore cars 154 and 172 (finding images of the 172 in this deck would have created the metaphorical pot of gold mentioned above; alas, we see only the 154).

This is the magnificent Big Four/NYC depot and division office building at Wabash, where steam helpers once pushed freights up a long grade out of the Wabash River valley.

Next is a scene at Knightstown, later home to a landlocked, ill-fated tourist railroad that operated for a few years following abandonment of most of the Michigan Division south of Anderson. 

The last two show the train at the NYC and Nickel Plate depots in Rushville.  It’s remarkable that all of those structures were still standing even then, and of course each was demolished not many years afterward.

Of perhaps greater interest is the image below.  It’s the best view I’ve seen of CA&E 318 and the North Shore combine and MD car parked together at Westport.  The track to the right is the NYC Michigan Division main, looking north toward Greensburg and, eventually, Anderson, Marion, Warsaw and Elkhart.  The IRM equipment is parked on the last few feet of the former Milwaukee Road Indiana line (Chicago-Westport).

 

In weekend operations 0-4-0 No. 11 hauled the 318 southwest about a mile and a half, then backed up to complete a round trip.  Looming in the background is the former NYC tower from Greensburg, stripped of its first-floor stilts and transported by flatbed to Westport, then dropped on the ground to serve as a bare-bones ticket office.  In this scene Mrs. Blackburn is keeping an eye on her kids clambering about on the handcar.

One weekday afternoon in the summer of 1966 I took a circuitous route home from Cincinnati to inspect the “museum” at Westport.  All was quiet in the village, and I saw not a soul as I strolled around the grounds.  Within ten minutes, however, a car pulled up in the parking area – not a police car, but a new Cadillac coupe.  Out stepped friend Dick Simons, future co-author of Railroads of Indiana, the capstone volume on the subject, and a former colleague of my mother’s on the editorial staff of the Indianapolis Star.  Of course we were amused that we had each undertaken a similar mission that day.

After completing inspections of the equipment, we came to the little orange speeder you see parked in front of the handcar.  Without hesitation, Dick began tinkering with the engine and the controls.  After about two minutes it fired, filling the air with the “pop-pop-pop-pop” exhaust common to such machines.  “Ready?” Dick asked.  “Sure!”  And off we went, a fortysomething gent (Dick) and an 18-year-old college student (me) leaning into the breeze as we rocked along, westbound on a two-man fan trip over two miles of the Milwaukee Road -- in Indiana. 

The weekend IRM trains stopped at the east end of a pile trestle out of safety concerns, but we flew right over that structure at top speed and kept going over the remaining mile or so of track, trimming the weeds along the way.  On the way back we stopped to take a closer look at the trestle, then completed our excursion and left the speeder where we had found it about twenty minutes earlier.  Looking at this Doc Blackburn slide from that same era makes me wish I had taken a camera with me for that “routine” trip to Cincinnati and return.