If you don’t know yet, the Friends of the OR&W have posted picture of the very battered car on. Facebook. Years of delicate negotiations led to the Friends getting permission to shore up the roof with temporary walls inside, then tarp it for winter. When owners Herman and Ruth Paine were alive, they took care of it, but their family didn’t. It’s in good hands now.

Is OR&W the Ohio River & Western narrow gauge?

Thanks,
Philip Marshall

Yes. Bellaire to Zanesville, then eventually cut back to Woodsfield. If you’re looking at Google Earth, the coach is along SR 26 between Ozark and Jerusalem.

I am glad to hear this news. I was hoping this car, and the combine south and east, were to be preserved 20 years ago. Later is not better, but preserved versus destroyed is awesome. The OR&W group did save combine 29 and moved it to a site. Coach 5 is shown being tarped here August 30 2024.


Here is a startup group worthy of your support!
https://orwfriends.org

Judging by what they did with the combine, they should be able to fix it given enough money. After a lot of false starts by previous groups, they really seem to be rolling.

Wish we could have had one of the locos back after WW2 and before the tsunami. Oh, well there’s W&W9669 snd the stable at EBT.

The car looks promising enough that with maga person hours it could be quite a gem.

I understand that when the OR&W closed, some of their engines were sold to now-unknown timber haulers in the South, so there is a greater than 0% chance that one of them survived.

If that is the case, a good perusal of Tom Fetters' Logging Railroads of South Carolina may help......... and if that fails,. start with Hilton's American Narrow Gauge Railroads..........

I have only three anecdotes to offer:A children’s book titled “The Little Engine that Laughed” features a narrow gauge engine and cars moved from a scrapyard to a tourist riad pre-WWII. The loco won’t steam properly until her former engineer, Rex, shows the staff how to handle her. Rex Armstrong was the usual engineer and I believe he may have had the last Woodsfield run. Heck of a coincidence.

Walt Gray told me there were familiar-looking locos washed far inland by the postwar tsunami. They had arrived, with coaches, before the war. None had any builder’s plates or other jewelry, but the coaches did still have advertisements in place.

Finally, Dad told me that while his ship was under repair in 1944, they had shore leave and he and his friends took a train to the cane fields. The locomotive looked familiar, if stripped. Once aboard, he noticed ads from our local stores in the holders. The conductor told him it was unlikely he’d have heard of the narrow gauge railroad from Bellaire, OH. Every time Dad told the story, the details did not vary.