Steamtown Diesel Excursions?

[steve levine]

(Due to circumstances beyond our control, all Lackawanna Valley Excursions will be pulled by a Diesel-electric locomotive).This from Steamtown NP's WWW site.Does anyone know how long this has gone on?or how long it will go on?I was going to go chase the Tobyhana,PA excursion tomm,untill I see that it wont be steam?

[alzubal]

the trips to Carbondale are diesel and the trips to Tobyhanna are steam.
unless something has changed. the line up through the Lacawanna valley is restricted to the diesel iwas told why when we road to Tobyhanna last month but i don't remember why
Al

[steve levine]

Thanks,I hope you are right!

[harmon44]

The Carbondale trips are restricted due to weight, The last time they used steam, it was the Baldwin 26.

[metman499]

In the summer of 2003 they used CP 2317 for the Carbondale trips. I rode one of them. Generally they seem to run a diesel when there are two trips on the same day, given there is usually only one operational main line steamer at a time.

[mxdata]

Just for information, there is a posting that appears in the special historical study section of the Steamtown web site says they do not consider diesels to be suitable as museum displays because their mission is the preservation of steam era equipment, but they have found them convenient to keep around as switch engines for situations where they cannot get a suitable steam engine to do a job. I take that to mean "in an emergency we will operate whatever we can get to run".

[Alcoman]

Just for information, there is a posting that appears in the special historical study section of the Steamtown web site says they do not consider diesels to be suitable as museum displays because their mission is the preservation of steam era equipment, but they have found them convenient to keep around as switch engines for situations where they cannot get a suitable steam engine to do a job. I take that to mean "in an emergency we will operate whatever we can get to run".

Maybe what we need is a "DIESELTOWN" in Scranton.


Never mind that the Steam and Diesel Era overlaps each other in the 1930's and 40's.

[mxdata]

A good point, Alcoman, there are indeed several decades during which steam operations and diesel operations overlap, and the DL&W was a diesel pioneer so their steam/diesel overlap was rather long compared with some other roads. And do I recall correctly that the east end of the Scranton shops (the single ended area with the parallel tracks) was built specifically to be a diesel shop? In fact I think the shop design or something very similar to it is shown in EMD's standard catalog of diesel shop facilities from the early years of dieselization.

[K3CXG]

Hmm. "Dieseltown USA?" Nahh. Just doesn't have the right swing to it. How about..."Diesel Valhalla?" Now THAT sings! Maybe they could locate it at the old D&H Colonie Shops complex, if Scranton is out of the question. Sweet!

Mike