Good morning. 33° and sunny. Yesterday's Spring like temperatures will not be repeated today. Picked up another cold, which is at best very annoying. Not for nothing, after my bout with pneumonia, last October, I was fine until the day before Thanksgiving, when I had my flu shot. I have been gagging and wheezing ever since. Supposedly, there is no correlation, but...
How much can they get for the GG1 steel? The 4876 pictured above, has been in the custody of the B&O Museum folks since the mid 1980s. when I lived in the Baltimore area. I've been in Jersey for 33 years now, and the Museum has done nothing with it, in that time. Seriously, it that necessary to preserve every piece of equipment that ever ran on the railroad? The B&O Museum should be concentrating on a sampling of equipment from the B&O, Chessie System and CSX, who endowed them. Obviously, not a priority to the Museum or their benefactors or it would be repainted and prominently displayed.
In a similar vein, the Penn Central donated the PRR Historical collection of steam locomotives to the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum at Strasburg. The Museum practically destroyed these relics, when they removed the asbestos, and have allowed them to sit in the weather almost to the point where they are virtually beyond restoration. They are attempting to raise money to cosmetically restore them one at a time. These locomotives last ran in 1957. How long does one expect the junk to last when you don't maintain it. Most of the folks who ran these things and cared have passed, and believe me, the future generations don't care about them any more than they care about other old stuff.
The other day, the Marcal Paper Plant, located off the old Erie RR in Elmwood Park, NJ, literally burned to the ground, taking 500 jobs with it. It was another one of those 100 + year old brick industrial structures with a "Historic" Neon sign. We discussed similar structures in this forum, recently.
The firefighters had to reposition their resources outside of the collapse zone as the fire gained the upper hand. There was more concern expressed about the loss of the "landmark" neon sign, than the loss of 500 manufacturing jobs. Somewhere, we have lost our priorities.
Boris