(The preceding two paragraphs taken from RR page 3.)
Let's set the stage (which is singularly appropriate since the ruins have been turned
into an arts center and theater) by giving a sense of the huge scale of the place;
here's what's left of the grand entrance (north end) on 27 Sep 1987:
(27 Sep 1987 photos by and © 1987 S. Berliner, III)
The couple in front give some idea of the colossal size of the entrance; but wait!
That arch in the background is an artist's attempt to show the actual vastness; it is
the size of the back (south) end of the trainshed and in the exact location. The
construction to the right rear is a large-scale model, perhaps 1:10, to which I'm afraid
I paid insufficient attention then.
Walking south to the big model, here's a shot of the arch from much closer up and it
STILL doesn't give any inkling of just how huge it actually is:
Beyond the kiosk and the stockade and such, much closer to the west column
supporting the arch, I stumbled on the ultimate horror to a railfan; there's the poor
skewered decapod:
-
[Shooting against a rainy, late-afternooon sky, the shadows were just too much
for my camera, so I have lightened the photo to show some of the loco detail, thus
washing out the western tower and west end of the arch behind and above it.]
Later that same day, in the Museum für Verkehrs und Technik (Museum of Transportation
and Technology), I found this HO model of the old station as it was before the war:
(28 Jul 04)
Walking around the model, there's the rear (south) end of the trainshed; the arc at
the top is the same arc as delineated by the post-war arch:
All that for only six tracks (albeit long ones)?
Finally, to put all this in perspective, here's the model photo flipped right for left (the
station IS symmetrical, after all), with details of the first photo (the entrance and the
arch, with that couple in the foreground) superimposed offset, but to scale:
27 Sep 1987 photos by and © 1987 S. Berliner, III
[If anyone has more current photos of the facades which I may reproduce here, send
them along with permission, bitte.]
Märklin released the Anhalter Bahnhof in Z scale (1:220) for it's 2003 line; see my
Z page 5.
On my way to cross into the Eastern Sector at Checkpoint Charlie in divided Berlin on
27 Sep 1987, I spotted a paper HO model of the terminal in the window of a closed
hobby shop on the Friedrichstraße; a new friend in Germany thinks that Otto's
Fibelverlag put that out around 1980 or so.
That same new friend sent me a précis of the history of the Anhalter Bahnhof from
the end of WWII (taken largely from "Der Anhalter Bahnhof und seine Lokomotiven",
ALBA-Verlag); the station survived the bombings of Berlin rather well, with its
walls and ends relatively intact. The roof was destroyed, but the open shed
was in regular use after the partition of Germany; then, with the railroads controlled
by East Germany on its founding in 1949 and the terminal being in the Western Sector
of Berlin, the East redirected trains to the Schlesischer Bahnhof (Schlesien@
Station - later Ostbahnhof - Eastern Station) at the Stadtbahn (east-west line)
starting in 1952, for greater control over passengers. The terminal lay
disused until the West Berlin government wanted to use the land and began
demolition in 1956, which progressed slowly; by 1961 only the grand front
entrance of the Anhalter Bahnhof still stood (another "monumental act of
vandalism"). It then became a listed monument and the demolition
was stopped but it took until 1965 to carry the rubble away! Here, from
the files of das Bildarchiv Preußischer
Kulturbesitz (bpk - Prussian Picture Archive Culture Collection), is Will
McBride's 1957 photo of the terminal:
(bpk - all rights reserved)
The same friend advised that the Decapod was number 52 2751 (Henschel 2 991 in
1944), a "Kriegslok" (war-locomotive); based on the type 50, the 52 was stripped to
basics to save material. During the war and in the early postwar years, some
6,500 were built. After WW II, the locos went to the Deutsche Reichsbahn of
the German Democratic Republic (East Germany); the DR used them until the 1980's.
In 1987, artist Wolf Vostell made the 52 2751 into monument against war at the
Anhalter Bahnhof. After some months, the monument was taken to Marl in
West Germany (that must have been just after I saw it) and he thinks it is still there.
Nowadays, the type 52 is Germany's most active steam loco; a lot of them have
survived so he thinks it's okay to have made one into a monument.
A note re the Class 52; they can be found all over Europe, from Norway to
Turkey and Russia; after WWII, virtually all European railways had some
locos of this type. The 52 2006 (together with 19 1001) was shipped to
the U.S. and sat for some years at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Some locos of
class 52 went after WWII to the western Deutsch Bundesbahn, but were
retired by 1963. The 52 2751 went to the eastern Deutsche Reichsbahn.
All in all, the Deutsche Reichsbahn had some 500 locos of class 52, which were
modernized and used until the 1980s.
-
@ - Schlesien (NOT Schleswig) is a region south-east of Berlin,
most of which has belonged to Poland
since the end of WWII [Schleswig is a region at the Danish border (north-west
of Berlin)].
NEW YORK, BOSTON & WESTCHESTER RAILROAD
(moved from RR page 2 on 18 Mar 03)
The Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps (914-723-3003 or 722-2222 or 472-1125 -
there are several listings) had contacted me regarding their old station {at 300
Heathcote Road on the Heathcote Five Corners}, which was apparently a sand and
gravel works and then the NYB&W station on Heathcote Road in Scarsdale.
By incredible coincidence, my folks rented there in the summers when I was born
and only a few years old, in houses directly next to their station, and on either side
within a mile! I heard from Bill Adams of the SVAC on 16 Nov 97 that, to date
(paraphrased), they had dug down 17 feet from the floor of the old station.
One of their Junior Corps. members did some research on the building and found
some neat stuff. It seems that the building they now use was the second on
the site. The first one was built in 1912 as a material transfer station and was
used to supply local road building crews. An article in a local paper had a
detailed description of the station and how well it fit in with the feel of the town.
Most locals were against having a freight station in Scarsdale. Around 1920,
the building apparently was removed and the spaces below filled with large rocks and
dirt. The openings to the tracks were sealed and the new station was built on
a new foundation. They have been digging down next to one of the six
supports to find out how far down it goes. So far, they have room for one floor
but think they will get down to another. The article said that the cars would
dump their loads and it would be moved to the waiting carts; if so, then the floor
should be at least 4 to 6 feet down from the point they have reached.
Anyone with info. on the NYW&B's Scarsdale station should write to Bill Adams at the
Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps. at P. O. Box 92, Scarsdale, New Yorknbsp;
10583, or e-mail Bill at CptBluStar@aol.com
{this didn't work 01 Jan 99!}.
More to follow on this odd development, if I hear anything.
A good site for the NYW&B is Pierce
Havilland's on his NJ, NY & CT Railroad Page,
which now has its own NYW&B page.
RR MISCELLANY
This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything, but my brother-in-law is from far
north-western Colorado and he and my sister were out that way earlier in 2002 and
my sister shot 1906 Brooks 2-8-0 #641, former Colorado & Southern standard gauger,
sitting on display near the LC&S depot in Leadville (there's more plow than loco!):
cropped from 2002 photo by S. Berliner, III's sister - all rights reserved
Speaking of western RRing, I was out in California in late April-early May 2004
and took Amtrak's California Zephyr (great!) from there to Chicago and the
Lakeshore Limited (not so great) home from Chicago directly into New York's
present excuse for Penn Station via the Hudson and the former West Side
Freight Line. While out there, I documented the
roof detail of Foley Bros. #110-1, the only surviving twin-engined
(100/108-ton) pioneer boxcab road switcher, out in the high Sierras at the
Portola RR Museum. On the trip home, I took a few photos from the
trains, most of which were disasters, but caught a snow shed somwhere
around the Donner Pass-Truckee area which came out well:
(08 May 2004 photo by and © 2004 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
I also was awake when we pulled into Omaha, Nebraska, just before dawn
on Monday, 10 May 2004, and what to my wondering eyes did appear but a
UP Big Boy and a Centennial! There was just no way I could nail them
in the darkness with no flash and no tripod, so I jammed the camera against
the glass of the car window and held it there while the automatic exposure
control did its very-slow thing; the result was far from satisfactory but here
they are in a composite and in the two source photos:
(10 May 2004 photos by and © 2004 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
They turned out to be #4923 and the DDA40X class loco, #6900, donated to Omaha by
the UP in Jun 88 and now behind a chain link fence.
[Please don't ask me how the building height changed from frame to
succeeding frame shot sequentially in the same spot against the train window!]
I've always known there were real RR Porta-Potties; here, courtesy of Dan Dawdy of
Ribbon Rail Productions, from his
ever-changing Oddity of the Month page,
is UP's version:
(photos from and © D. Dawdy, by specific permission - all rights reserved to source)
The tow-bar is probably thermally variable, lengthening drastically with rising
temperature, and those cans presumably carry additional water for flushing (oh,
yeah!). :o)
Here it is in the fully extended position (to provide olfactory relief):
[original photo from and © D. Dawdy, by not-so-specific permission :·) - all rights to original reserved to source]
Harold H. (Hal) Carstens, founder and publisher of
Carstens Publications, Inc., best known to us for its three hobby
magazines,
Railroad Model Craftsman,
Railfan & Railroad, and
Flying Models magazines, was a doughboy in WWII; he favored me
with two photos of him before he got into the hobby publishing business:
(Cropped thumbnails - click on pictures for full, larger images)
[photos courtesy H. H. Carstens - all rights reserved]
The one (left) is of him on bivouac in March 1944 at Camp Grant, which was
near Rockford, Illinois at the confluence of the Rock & Kishwaukee Rivers.
"It was bitchy cold with the winds off Lake Michigan." The other (right)
was taken circa 1945 in Manila, Philippine Islands.
That smile hasn't changed one bit!
Hal also found this amazing old photo of arch-bar-trucked Carstens Products
car C.P.C.X. 109:
(13 May 03)
(Thumbnail image - click on picture for larger image)
[cropped from photo courtesy H. H. Carstens - all rights reserved]
Just look at that odd offset door location! Hal says it is a standard
gauge, double-sheathed refrigerator car. Does anyone have more info.
on this car or the company?
He didn't know of any "Berliner" cars; see
Berliner Bier (beer) cars.
TROLLEYS
(moved from BHRA page 10 Feb 2005)
This will alienate me forever from the hobby but ALL "modern" so-called
"trolley" cars (and especially the San Francisco cable cars), are NOT
"trolley" cars at all! They all are powered by overhead wires (or catenary)
contacted by poles or pantagraphs, or by underground wires contacted by shoes (or
are pulled by cables).
True "trolley" cars were powered from overhead wires but the contact was
made by a tiny cart (the "trolley" or "trawler') {t}rolling along the wires on small
metal wheels, and the power from the wires ran through the wheels to the cart to a
flexible wire cable (or cables) hanging down from the trolley to the car roof or end.
Actually, I suppose a trolley could consist of a single wheel or two wheels in a yoke,
hanging from a single wire, but I've never seen any such that I recall.
(10 Feb 05)
Since the demise of the "trolley" car, the Brits have called their electric streetcars
"tramcars" or "trams".
So now you know. Go on, hate me. - The Master Nitpicker.
Staten Island RR
Speaking of trolleys, did you see the trackless one on the preceding page,
under Oddities, the Staten Island trackless
trolley? Well, there was (and may yet be again) a Staten Island
Railroad. That is NOT the Staten Island Railway, which is
a part of the MTA's NYC Transit ("subway") System, nor the SIRT
(Staten Island Rapid Transit, the SIR's predecessor to 1994). Rather,
it is a serious, very old (ex-B&O) freight railway spun off by CSX to NY City.
It will once again serve the "Chemical Coast" of SI, running eight miles from
the New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook, the Department of
Sanitation’s Fresh Kills Transfer Facility, and two industriies, and connecting
with the mainland across the Arthur Kill lift bridge, which is being rehabbed.
(03 Apr 05) and
(04 Apr 05)
The folks at the (Long Island)
Syosset Scrapbook, who have shared many great shots with me, sent me
four old photos, for which they have no provenance, showing SIRR ALCo S-2
switchers #485 and #487 and crewmen:
(03 Apr 05)
[photos courtesy Syosset Scrapbook - all rights reserved]
Now, can anyone tell us all about the locos and the crewmen? Bill Russell came
right in with the info. that they were S-2s, part of a 1944 group, SIRR
#482-489, which were renumbered to B&O 9026-33 when the B&O consolidated their
roster, so we now know the photos are from 1944 or later. The tank cars in
the background might help experts date them even closer.
(04 Apr 05)
John C. La Rue, Jr., has a collection of almost 30,000 RR photos in
his collection (of which some 1,500 are of the PRR - see a photo of PRR boxcab A6
#3905 from his collection on my PRR boxcabs
page); he can be reached at:
-
27491 Duvernay Drive
Bonita Springs, Florida 34135-6029
Tel.: 239-992-8802
E-mail: MOFWCABOOSE@aol.com.
Steam lovers, see my Science and
Technology page! Ah, the power of steam!
There is an incredible simulation program by Charlie Dockstadter on steam valve gear
available on the Alaska Live Steamers VALVE GEAR ON THE
COMPUTER page.
THUMBS UP!
THUMBS UP! - Support your local police, fire, and emergency personnel!
S. Berliner, III
To contact S. Berliner, III, please click here.
of this series of Railroad pages.
© Copyright S. Berliner, III -
2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
2005
- All rights reserved.
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