1941: Class J locomotive, #600, departs the N&W's Roanoke Shops establishment. The locomotive, using the 4-8-4 ("Northern") wheel arrangement, was the first of fourteen to be built, from 1941-1950. They would see service in the N&W's passenger service, pulling the railway's Powhatan Arrow, Pocahontas, the N&W-Southern Tennessean, and other passenger trains throughout the then-small N&W system.

The locomotives would serve from 1941 until 24 October, 1959, when #611's last run was made. By this point, the Norfolk and Western's new management. i.e. Stuart T. Saunders, had committed to a program of diesel locomotives, thus obviating the need for steam locomotives. Locomotive #600 had been retired at Lambert's Point on 16 June 1959.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 11:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This comes to me courtesy of a contact in the Bristol, Virginia area: The Norfolk Southern Railway recently operated a journalist's special over the NSR's trackage from their Bristol, Virginia yard to somewhere in Bulls Gap, Tennessee. The train, a two coach effort pulled by EMD GP59 4637, was run in order to illustrate to journalists and others the actions of people along railroad tracks.

The Bristol Herald-Courier covered this event, and its article is here. If you're one of the cookie-blocking types, you will have to deal with a fistful of the things, mostly spawning from Media General's electronic empire.

Grade crossing safety is another one of things where transportation companies are largely forced to rely upon the common sense of their fellow Americans in automobiles. As a result, there's a fair amount of collisions and a lesser number of fatalities involved. The industry's grade crossing safety group, Operation Lifesaver, notes in its statistics that there were "2,929 highway-rail grade crossing collisions" in 2003, with those producing "329 fatalities", according to preliminary Federal Railroad Administration statistics.

This started out as more of a rail enthusiast post, but let me close with this: Ten thousand tons plus of train traveling at sixty miles an hour needs something like a mile and a half to stop from the point of emergency brake application, or so I've been told. Three thousand pounds of car can relatively stop on a dime. It is in your, the driver's, interest to defer to the train.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 11:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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