Nickel plate Berkshire Locomotive 765, built in 1944 by Lima Locomotive Works, sat in Lawton Park in Fort Wayne before being removed and restored to operating condition by members of Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society.
All images © 2008 by Robert E. Pence
The morning of departure, before work I went trackside near Fairfield Avenue to get some photos. Not surprisingly, things were running late and I had to choose between being late for work and sacrificing the photos. My relationship with my boss was already shot beyond repair, but I was pretty sure his boss wouldn't let him fire me, so the choice was easy.
The train stopped at the former Wabash Depot site to pick up the mayor and other dignitaries for a short ride.
765 arrived in Peoria a few days before the excursion weekend, and worked freight on the TP&W for a shakedown. It performed well, and the railroad officials were impressed with its ability to muscle freight up Washington Hill.
On the day of the Peoria-to-Keokuk excursion, I met up with a group of friends from Chicago. We weren't impressed with some parts of the consist, 23 cars long, put together by Golden Arrow. The PRR P-70 coach we boarded looked like it had come straight from a scrapyard, still with the original lettering lined out in white paint. One of our group was a car inspector on Northwestern, and nonplussed by the noises the car made, he suggested we move forward. We did and found a very nice coach, not crowded and with not very many children.
Photo run-by en route to Keokuk. The diesels behind 765 were there to take over west of LaHarp, where the steam engine was taken off to be turned and serviced.
No one had given a heads-up to the businesses in Keokuk, and on a Saturday afternoon the only restaurant open was a KFC. The concession car had run out of food about halfway, and seven hundred or so hungry passengers descended upon that KFC like a horde of locusts. The poor employees probably never knew what hit them.
Even though our return trip passed through some of the towns rather late at night, there were groups of people at just about every street crossing to watch the train pass.
The Sunday trip was to Watseka, Illinois, and return. US 24 runs parallel to the TP&W, and on my way home I kept an eye out for the train. At Gilman, Illinois I saw a southbound freight on the Illinois Central.
I met up with the returning excursion just west of Watseka.
While snooping around the nifty MoPac Depot at Watseka, I heard a diesel horn. My unpreparedness and the speed at which MoPac ran their trains combined for a not-very-sharp photo. This guy was really moving.
The depot has since been moved to a park near downtown, where it is a museum.
Approaching Sherman Street
Many steam excursions feature a photo run-by. The train stops and passengers wanting to take pictures are allowed to detrain. The engineer backs up the train some distance, and then runs past, often with as much smoke and noise as possible.
Waiting for a freight train to pass before backing the excursion train up the wye.
The yellow hose is bringing water to refill the tender. 765's tender holds more than 20,000 gallons. Locomotives in excursion service usually use a second tender or auxiliary water tank to avoid having to refill frequently; 765 acquired one after these trips. Local fire departments often help out with water, hooking up a nearby fire hydrant and sometimes bringing a pumper to speed up the flow.
Preparing to depart. The copious clouds of sooty black smoke happen when fresh coal is added to the firebox, as oils and other organic matter burn off. A skilled fireman who is familiar with his locomotive and route can minimize smoke in towns and residential areas by anticipating the need for coal and firing accordingly.
Big locomotives like 765 use steam-powered stokers to feed coal from the tender to the firebox when running on the road, but must be hand-fired when standing still because the lubrication for the stoker engine is driven by the motion of the driver rods.
765's tender holds more than 20 tons of coal, usually enough for 100 to 150 miles depending on the weight of the train, speed and nature of the terrain. A big locomotive working hard can consume a ton of coal every five or ten minutes, clearly beyond most firemen's shoveling ability.
Back in Fort Wayne
Handsome consist.
Step boxes are down, ready for boarding.
Highball!
Servicing the locomotive at Lafayette for return to Fort Wayne.
Arriving back at East Wayne Yard.
Turning the engine on the East Wayne turntable.
I rode quite a ways in the last coach, with the back door and a couple of windows open. It wasn't long before little drifts of cinders started to accumulate around the seat stands and in the corners.
All the way to Orrville the main rod bearing ran hot, necessitating frequent stops to shoot it full of grease. At Orrville, the crew tore it down and took the bearing to the Will-Burt Stoker Co., where the owner generously provided use of his factory's machine shop to remachine it.
That didn't completely resolve the problem though, and both days the trips started out with steam but were finished behind Conrail deisels.
Boarding passengers.
Down to the wire.
Waiting in a siding for an eastbound freight
Back at East Wayne Yard after the Chicago Northwestern trips
The photo run-by was done at Peru after the passengers detrained.
A railroad is no place for clowning around!
We made our scheduled departure, and somewhere south of Ashtabula we took siding to wait for a southbound ore train. After a while we could see his headlight, but it didn't seem to be getting closer very fast. A short time later, radio traffic revealed that an ore jenny near the end of his train had broken an axle and torn up some track.
We ended up getting backed down a track that ran off to the west. I'm not sure what it was, but may map indicates it might have been part of the former Erie. We sat there all night, next to a marshy woods that harbored huge, ravenous mosquitoes. I think I spent most of the night on the ground as close to the firebox/ash-pan as I could get, hoping the heat would jam their radar. It seem to work, to some extent.
Around daylight we saw some traffic move on the line, and shortly thereafter we moved out. As we passed the derailment site I saw a broken spring and other parts and pieces of the ore jenny's truck strewn along the right-of-way.
We stopped in Ashtabula to top off the tender, and then had a fairly uneventful and quick-paced ride to Bellevue. Passing through Cleveland I became so engrossed with the sights as we paced some rapid-transit trains and then crossed the Cuyahoga Valley on that long viaduct, that I completely forgot about my camera. I've kicked myself ever since.
I don't remember where or when I took these. I like them, though.
