This weekend in The Daily Gazette and Amsterdam Recorder, another Bob story about Amsterdam Bar room History 

"Free-for-All at The Ivy Leaf"

Wednesday, Janaury 17, 2023

Over a thousand passengers had paid $37.95 each for the round trip from New York City to Niagara Falls on the Mohawk Valley Limited.

The Mohawk Valley Limited of 1968
By Bob Cudmore

In 1968 a steam locomotive-hauled passenger train had not passed through the Mohawk Valley for seventeen years.

Railfans were ecstatic and the general public became interested Saturday morning, October 12, when a 19-car excursion train was first pulled by an electric locomotive from Grand Central Station in New York City north to the railyards at Croton-Harmon.

Waiting there was a Berkshire-class steam locomotive, number 759, which had hauled freight for the Nickel Plate Road in its prime. Coupled to the excursion’s passenger cars, number 759 soon was chugging north toward Albany’s Union Station, slated for closure in a couple of months.

The Berkshire class of steam engines were named for the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts where they were used on the hilly Boston to Albany run. Berkshire locomotives had two forward wheels, eight driver wheels and four trailing wheels.

Berkshire engines were at first manufactured by American Locomotive (ALCO) in Schenectady. Later models, including 759 built in 1944, were made at the Lima Locomotive Works in Lima, Ohio.

Ross Rowland, a commodities broker in New York, was at the throttle of 759 when it arrived in Albany in 1968. Rowland had founded the High Iron Company to organize a series of steam-powered passenger train excursions with the goal of maintaining steam on the main lines of the railroads in the eastern United States.

Over a thousand passengers had paid $37.95 each for the round trip from New York City to Niagara Falls on the Mohawk Valley Limited.

The train’s arrival in Albany was covered in the Sunday Times Union of October 13. The father of young Amsterdam railfan Emil Suda saw the story. They had missed the train going west but decided to watch it Sunday on the return trip.

“What a fine autumn day it was, sunny and warm,” wrote Emil Suda. “As the hour came and went, it appeared the train was running late!”

Slowdowns for passing trains and unscheduled stops for water and coal slowed the excursion train.

Suda said there were a few others on hand as dusk was coming in at the old downtown Amsterdam train station, “The Mohawk Valley Limited appeared and rumbled down the track—not even slowing down for the onlookers who gathered!

“Regardless it was a sight, seeing those four main drivers of the engine roll along, and the coaches going by, and of course seeing some cinders fall to the ground from the smokestack.”

Some of the passenger cars were modern and some old style. At the rear was an open platform observation car from the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. There was a dining car, a restored Jersey Central baggage passenger car, and a Pullman lounge from Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited.

A private car up front carried Penn Central and Norfolk & Western Railroad executives. The Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central had merged earlier in 1968 and faced considerable financial problems.

U.S. Senator Frank Moss, a Democrat from Utah, was one of the private car passengers. Moss was a member of a Senate committee looking into the decline of passenger rail service in America.

In an article on the Mohawk Valley Limited’s visit to Rochester, reporter John McLoughlin in the Democrat and Chronicle wrote that “grown men and women” stuck their heads out of open windows on the train with goggles on so they could smell the smoke. The goggles protected against cinders causing eye injuries.

Locomotive 759 today is a static display at the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Suda, a model train enthusiast, has an O gauge model of a Berkshire locomotive like 759.

Friday, January 19, 2024

Jennet Conant discusses her book The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster That Launched the War on Cancer.  Also heard is film maker Nick Spark who lobbied for U.S. government recognition of medical doctor Stewart Alexander whose work chronicling the Bari disaster in southern Italy was the impetus to developing chemotherapy.

Mohawk Valley Weather, Wednesday, Janaury 17, 2023

16 degrees in The City of Amsterdam at 6:23AM