In 1972 while delivering new locomotives, I handed an EMD SD45-2 manual to Charles P. Dillon, the Master Mechanic of the Erie Lackawanna shops in Marion, Ohio. He wrote his name on the cover and put it in his desk. Look what showed up on eBay 50 years later.

PC

Demand it back. >;-D

The seller had a very reasonable buy-it-now price due to the writing on the cover, so I purchased it for donation to a group where it will be preserved. The Erie-Lackawanna SD45-2 delivery seems like it was just yesterday, but actually it was more than fifty years ago. They were good locomotives, all with the post 72J heavy-construction crankcase engines. The EMD-designed (for FT locomotives) Erie Railroad diesel shop where they were delivered has now been a freight car repair facility for more years than it served as a diesel locomotive shop. EL SD45-2 3678 is shown on its first night on the railroad.

PC

More ought to be written about the initial FTs on the Erie. Aside from the shop operations, the facilities built for refueling were state-of-the-=art then -- and still better than what many railroads use today.

Interesting that you mention it, the shop and the FT delivery were the subjects of a two-part prototype study article series beginning in the January 2009 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman magazine.

PC

It’s interesting how that writing made it less valuable to some but more valuable to others.

A few years ago an eBay seller offered a copy of the EMD history ON TIME very cheap because somebody had written notes all through it. Turns out the person who scribbled all the notes was Hal Hamilton, founder of the company.

PC

WHERE IS THAT COPY AND WHO HAS IT???

... and, would there be any chance of it being scanned and posted online, or archived ??

BTW, that Erie diesel shop looks an awful lot like the "Zephyr House" we have in Denver. It fits 4 Graybacks (Burlington talk for F units) at a time over the pits and next to the ramps.

The copy of ON TIME with the Hamilton notes has been in a secure collection and is headed for preservation by a reliable organization. The writing in the book was compared with greetings that Hamilton wrote in autographed books given to EMD employees, and his very distinctive writing matches perfectly in style, pen type, and ink color.

There also exists one autographed book with a greeting to Alexander Winton. This was obviously not the Alexander Winton who founded Winton Engine Company, it was for his son Alexander, who would have been in his 40s at the time that the book was printed.

Regarding the Marion Diesel Shop, the location of the exhaust uptakes, servicing fixtures, and openings in the platform hand rails were all designed for a four unit FT lashup. When other units were purchased and assigned to the shop, the FT exhaust uptakes were replaced by an inverted collector with roof mounted blowers that could service any type of diesel. Over the years that followed, the other shop fixtures were modified to make them more adaptable.

Notice the original FT exhaust uptakes in four groups of four collectors each, to match the stack spacing on a four-unit set of FT locomotives.

PC

When I first walked through the Marshalltown (IA) diesel shop many years ago, one of my guides told me that it had been built by the M&StL primarily to service F units, and it did seem pretty well suited for the task, albeit not a large facility as such things go.

Slightly less prominent, but I have a few things signed by George Codrington, President of Winton and later Cleveland Diesel.

Here's another small piece of history (or two): By the time I started working in the Zephyr House, 45 years ago, everything had been modified to service three six axle motors, or four four axle ones. Not only were the exhaust collectors modified, but lube oil and water hoses had been extended enough so that we never had to respot a consist when working tops and bottoms. The Erie shop was obviously set up to do mostly deadwork, while ours had two runthrough tracks with doors on each end, with deadwork being done mostly in a single stub ended track. All three tracks were serviced by an overhead crane, and a sizable drop table on the east end, in addition to the area used for working tops and bottoms. In my time the ramps were re-enforced concrete, with no lockers or parts storage on them, but they may well have been set up like the Erie shop was when our facility was new.

Railroad employees mark the passage of time by telling stories of smashups, so here are the top three for the Zephyr House:

Third place award goes to a now unknown hostling crew in the mid sixties that made a hard joint with an F unit parked outside of line three, our deadwork track. There was no derail outside the shop (until after this incident), the door was open, the drop table was lowered all the way, the F unit had no brakes set, and (as you probably already figured out) the joint didn't make. She took off, and fell nose first into the drop table pit, jamming herself into it at a 45 degree angle. When I started as a hostler helper, one of the old steam era machinists showed me a picture of this mess, which he had taped up inside his locker. (I was expecting to see a pinup of Betty Page.)

Second place goes to two friends of mine who won't be named in order to protect the guilty. They were spotting line three one night in the mid 70s, using three SD9s on the track outside the building, and they had ahold of four dead units inside the shop. It's pretty hard to see somebody giving signs in there if you're running from an engine that's outdoors, so the helper gave a nice big backup. The hostler throttled up accordingly, and didn't stop until the last motor was halfway out in the parking lot. He told me that everything was quiet before then, but that it looked like "you were stirring an anthill with a stick" after the engine went through the wall. Ever since that night, the Zephyr House has had three runthrough tracks.

Sometime in the mid 80s, we were real short of bodies. I worked for seven months straight on the extra board, out on my rest every time, without a day off, sleepwalking through all those shifts. One night we had another hostler, but no helpers came to work. I was ready for a change, so I grabbed a lantern and filled in as hostler helper. We had the same situation with one guy inside spotting a string of dead motors, and the other guy seven motor lengths away driving. When I told him to take 'em ahead there was immediately a loud scraping noise on the other side of the power where I couldn't see what was going on. A good half dozen times I gave a washout and checked around "real good" before proceeding, but still couldn't figure out why the same thing was happening over and over. I thought maybe I was dragging a welder or battery charger by a ground clamp, or maybe had a track chain wadded up underneath somewhere, then there was a horrendous crash, and then silence. I still couldn't figure it out, but as I was tying handbrakes and setting chains afterwards, I found an airbox door all crumpled up like a ball of aluminum foil jammed between the airbox and the ramp. So I told the shift foreman about it, then I went home at quitting time.

Eight hours later, when I next signed the register, somebody asked me if I "did all that damage in line two", but I had no idea what they were talking about... until somebody showed me, that is. The night in question, somebody forgot to close the airbox door on one of the dead engines before pulling the blue flag and releasing the track for movement. The door was gray, which matched the concrete perfectly, and the hinges were exactly the right height so that it laid perfectly flat on the ramp. I skidded it the length of the building until it slid under the wheels of our traction motor crane, which twisted out of line until it fell into the drop table pit !!! Nobody else heard the noise except the shop foreman, and he later told me that "you hear things go boom all the time around here". That's how come the airbox door had been demolished, and we thought that had made all the noise. We never thought to check the bottom of the drop table pit. Ever since that night they've had to use the overhead crane to change out traction motors... The first place award for screwing up was given to me because they didn't write me up for that !!! We were too short handed to fire one of the only guys that came to work consistently, plus the second shift foreman had left the airbox door open, so I was punished by being called back to work as soon as I was rested.

So now you know... "The Rest of the Story".

Is there a link to the Ebay listing?