Geoff, do these faces look familiar?

Lou (Lew?) Crawford on left, Elliot Ferris center, and Robert O. Lyons right.

IIRC, Lou was the senior O&W fireman and that kept him working. Moving to the right side of the cab would have meant he'd loose seniority and have less work,

This photo was framed and hung in the MNJ Station at Middletown. Photographer is unknown, but I suspect maybe Marv Cohen took the shot.

Ed Horan

I have postcards of the #103 in the New York State Museum. I am glad she is going to have another restoration. The Nutmeg State needs more steam!

The term Regionalism is what many but not all American museums follow. Two that have National collections are the Museum of Transport at St Louis with 29 steam locomotives and many other exhibits; the Illinois Railway museum with 27 steam locos and many other exhibits besides. I guess when you get that big; you can make some of your own rules!

Another museum that has a National collection is the Seashore Trolley Museum with their National collections of trolley and street cars.

Ted Miles, retired but still interested in trains, IRM member

Ed Horan,

Regarding the picture, YES they sure do look familiar, even though it was close to 60 years ago. Louie Crawford is who I fired for. Bob Lyons is the one who more-or-less ran the show. Thanks so much for posting this picture.

Your welcome.

Thanks for the discussion guys.

It sounds like the answer is that the New England part of "Railroad Museum of New England" is about the locale of the museum, not it's focus.

I hope the restoration goes well, the locomotive does seem like a perfect fit for a museum operation like this: big enough to seem like a "real" locomotive, but small enough to be easy to kept fed and watered.

Well, there are some people that think that the museum across the street from the Strasburg Rail Road is the 'Pennsylvania Railroad Museum', because of the large collection of PRR artifacts and equipment. Of course it is the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, with holdings from way beyond the PRR and the Commonwealth of PA. The same applies to RMNE; while the emphasis is on New England, items from other parts of the country are also in the collection. Better to be preserved in a collection, maybe far from 'home', than being scrapped.

That's actually a bit of a misconception, and is actually the reason I asked the question in the first place.

The Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania isn't just focused on the PRR, it is focused on railroads of Pennsylvania.

This is why they recently deaccessioned the NKP Berk. The Nickel Plate didn't have a large enough presence in the commonwealth to justify the expense of housing and properly restoring it. There were better organizations out there to do that.

I wasn't sure how closely the RMNE tracks to this type of collections management philosophy, which is why I was originally asking about the connection.

I remember meeting Pete Rasmussen in the early 1970's at the M&NJ offices in Middletown NY. At that time I was a young man trying to wangle my way into the engine-house that then was listed then in the guides as the home of #103 for a peek at her. The depot there was crowded with a bunch of musty dusty piles of ephemera of years gone by, and Pete himself seemed to appear at the very edge of the slope of the piles. Pete described their operations as subject to "The vagaries of business" with the GE 44 ton at the time. A Character for sure but didn't blow me off as some might have. Just as I was going to ask about the steam loco his office phone rang with- some problem with an online shipper and I never got back there.

staybolt,

I'm not disputing your account of your visit to Middletown, but the fact of the matter is that the 103 had left for Essex in either 1968 or 9 and the coaches along with the drovers caboose were stored in Johnson, N.Y., and their move to Essex was the last train out Johnson at that time around 1972. You would have been disappointed upon walking into what I called the steam engine house as the MNJ was using it to house their small MOW equipment. The Essex guys came over in the fall of 1974(?) to clean up anything the ESRM had left behind that they thought they could use.

I went to work at the MNJ in 1974. The desks in the station were clear and functional, each desk with it's own special use. Your description of the office sounds more like the late 1970's.
The MNJ was still using divisional rates that required the mountains of tariffs piled on all the desks. The MNJ did all the office work very old school. Waybills were scrutinized on delivery to make sure the customer and more importantly, the MNJ got good accurate rates. All of that required the piles of tariffs to research as computers wouldn't enter the station until after PTR's passing. In defense of that, the MNJ's outbound bills were seldom contested, as opposed to the computer generated rates on the inbound waybills we recieved and the reason a Station Agent was gainfully employed.

Ed, lol in an "Internet-less" world at the time I didn't know everything was gone, I probably had been looking at an older paper steam locomotive directory that was already out of date by the time it was printed. The slides I took that day of the red 44 tonner carry a March 1974 processing date, but may have been taken some time in 1973.
The irony of it all is that I never actually made it to Essex while 103 was operating !

Don't feel bad. My first time to Essex was in 1976 or 7. By then, the 103 had migrated from one end of the "dead" track to the bumping block. The next time I was over there was when PTR tried to persuade the Valley folks to let him buy her and bring her back to Middletown. Of course, they turned him down. But we didn't leave Essex empty handed. The Valley crew told us about the #11 and that it was for sale, although it needed considerable work.

Ed Horan

Just to provide some better dates than my memory. The MNJRHS magazine provided the following:

The M-1 Brill car moved out on a flat on 10/29/1970.
The 103 moved out on it's flat on 11/20/1970.
The cars that went to Essex were interchanged on 4/8/1971.

Ed Horan

What ever happened to the Brill car?

John

Please click on the video link for a look at the now running M-1.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMW0ulhQgn4

Ed Horan

Oh nice, thanks, didn't realize it was the same car.

John