Interlocking Tower 49-A was a New York Central signal/switching tower located a mile west of Buffalo Central Terminal. John Prophet made some of his best recordings of New York Central, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo trains from here. John's best friend, Sam Herrington, was an operator in the tower and he was able to get John inside to make recordings dozens of times when working the evening shift. It was a very warm evening this Sunday, October 24 in 1951, and the neighborhood surrounding Tower 49-A was alive with activity. John captured every bit of it.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad entered Buffalo, NY after it had acquired the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh in 1932. Regardless, it used the trackage and stations the B R &P had been using since 1881. John Prophet visited the Buffalo Division of the B & O, which ran between Buffalo and Pittsburgh, and made dozens of recordings featuring steam-powered trains as they were either approaching or leaving passenger stations. He also took several cab rides in B & O engines. These recordings were made in 1950 and 1953; the last years of B & O steam on the Buffalo Division. This episode of Living With Steam features some of the many recordings of the B & O John made during this period of time.

Thunderstorms and trains together create a fantastic audio experience. When the "train" is pulled by a steam engine, the experience is even more thrilling. In this episode, we'll travel with John Prophet to Big Moose, a small town in the Adirondack Region of New York State. It's here, during a strong thunderstorm, that John captured two New York Central trains on the Central's Adirondack Division which ran between Utica, New York, and Montreal, Canada. Big Moose was also the scene for a well-known murder that put the small Upstate New York town on the popular-culture map. Thunderstorms, trains, and murder... all in this episode of Living With Steam.

Episode 6 of Living With Steam takes us to Niagara Falls, NY, and New York Central's Tower 65. This area was known as "Suspension Bridge" on all NYC timetables due to the history of this area where the very first railroad suspension bridge was built back in 1855. We'll learn more about the original Suspension Bridge, built by Charles Roebling, and how a visit from a special Pere Marquette train brought John Prophet out to Tower 65 in December of 1948. Be sure to visit Facebook.com/LivingWithSteam for maps and other visuals that will help better describe this complicated area of Niagara Falls.

In this episode, we learn about Buffalo's streetcar system and hear IRC recordings made in North Buffalo in June of 1950. Then, we visit the Erie Railroad's Tower FW and learn how interlocking towers work. Finally, we take a ride with John Prophet on TH&B train #380, pulled by Hudson engine #502,  as it makes its run from Hamilton, Ontario to Buffalo, NY. 

In this episode, we visit New York Central's Tower 50 in Buffalo. NY on November 26, 1949. While perhaps not as "glamorous" a location as some others that John visited because there were no grade crossings where an engine could show off its whistle, Tower 50 was nonetheless an incredible location if you wanted to hear "train movements" since the tower was surrounded by tracks coming from several busy NYC lines in addition to freight yard trackage. We'll also hear the story of how John Prophet came into my life and why it's important to make it a point to record conversations you have with people who are able to preserve history; regardless of what that history may be. Finally, we'll learn about John's favorite place to visit; Renovo, PA... the town the Pennsylvania Railroad built.

If portable tape recorders weren't available until around 1955, how did John Prophet capture his railroad sounds beginning in 1948? We'll learn all about the Webster-Chicago wire recorder in this episode and how John was able to work around its limitations in order to make the recordings featured on Living With Steam. This is portable "home recording" in its infancy and we'll explore how it was done.

Before 1948, when portable sound recording devices came on the market, the only way for a Railroad Enthusiast like John Prophet to capture and preserve their love of trains was to use a still camera or a movie camera. What types of cameras were used and how difficult was it to capture a moving train using an old-fashioned 8mm movie camera?  Featured in this episode are recordings from Bay View Tower in Blasdell, NY.

In this episode, we’ll take a look at why archival preservation on film or audio recording device is such a necessity. Since we’re interested in the railroad industry of Buffalo, why was it so important to take pictures or make sound recordings of trains?  Why did people find the need to preserve anything especially if what they were interested in was so common and thought to never go away? If the railroad industry was such an important part of American lives, why did most of it seem to disappear so quickly?

Welcome to Living With Steam. This bi-weekly podcast features the sounds of railroading in Buffalo and Western New York from 1948 to 1955. The recordings featured in this program were captured in the field by John Prophet using a portable wire-recorder; a technology that many people have never heard of. Regardless of how "lo-fi" they may be, these recordings capture an element of industrial history that has long since vanished from Buffalo, NY. 

Each episode contains stories about how the recordings were made in addition to how my involvement with the archiving of the wires came to be. Some historical information about Buffalo's railroad history is woven in as well. 

Please note that although these recordings center around Buffalo and other locations in Western New York, if you are a lover of authentic steam engine and railroad sounds will thoroughly enjoy what you'll hear.