Saturday, November 19, 2022

Santa Fe 2-10-4 No. 5030, displayed in a Santa Fe park since 1959, is getting a refresh thanks to the Old Santa Fe Association


Volunteers from the civic association cleared trash and weeds and set up a new fence around the 380,300-pound machine. They repaired some of the rust and corroded metal from the boiler before giving it a fresh coat of paint.


No. 5030 is one of twenty-five oil burning Texas-type 2-10-4 5011 Class locomotives built for Santa Fe by Baldwin in 1944. Designed to haul heavy freight at speeds approaching 70 mph, they also pulled passenger troop trains during the final years of WWII. 

Modern features of the 5011 Class included Timken roller bearings fitted to all axles, cast-steel beds with integral cylinders and lightweight rods. No. 5030 is one of five preserved Santa Fe 2-10-4s

I just learned that the San Diego Garden Railway Society installed a train set in the radiology department of the San Diego’s Children’s Hospital





While out of the way, the display is quite visible in the waiting room of the Radiology Department. The train is set in motion when a passerby trips an electronic eye.

in 2006 a new, (they also did this in 1994) indoor, large-scale layout was unveiled in the waiting room conceived and designed by San Diego Garden Railway Society’s (SDGRS) resident art director, Bob Treat, and built by members of the club.

The first was opened back in January of 1994. That layout faithfully served its purpose for many years, but eventually wore out in spite of ongoing maintenance. Frankly, it was dirty and far too noisy. We began receiving complaints from the hospital’s staff and they quit running it.


After hosting the 16th National Garden Railway Convention in 2000, the SDGRS board of directors and convention committee considered ideas regarding what should be done with the proceeds we had realized from the convention. Among other things, it was decided that the hospital’s layout either be refurbished or completely rebuilt. Bob Treat, an award-winning art director, volunteered to come up with a design and present it at an upcoming board meeting.

Bob’s design was totally different from the original layout. It was pure whimsy and fantasy. Furthermore, this design had a specific purpose. His concept was that the layout would represent a journey from an apprehensive, rocky area to a calming, pastoral area, much like what the children at the hospital go through. Trains would travel through the entire color spectrum, from the jagged red and purple mountains to the rolling green and blue hills. Bob’s concept and design were unanimously approved

Ain't that cool!?!? 

Railroad hospitals, ever heard of them? They were a medical-care system that provided complete employee medical through compulsory payroll deduction.

This system was pervasive on Class I railroads in the Far Western and Southern regions, but uncommon in the Eastern Region, where only the C&O and the Wabash were so governed, both stemming from managerial heritage -- the C&O was a Collis P. Huntington Road, the Wabash a Gould road. The Milwaukee Road was so governed only on lines west of Mobridge, South Dakota. The Great Northern, Soo Line, Burlington, and Chicago & North Western were the only major western roads without a medical-care system; however, Burlington subsidiaries Colorado & Southern and Fort Worth & Denver, and C&NW subsidiary Omaha Road, had medical-care systems.

Medical care through fixed periodic payment was also widespread in industrial-scale western metals mining (Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada), industrial-scale lumbering in Oregon, Washington, and California, and in coal mining throughout the United States. Some steel mills and large, integrated industrial establishments also featured company medical systems, such as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in Birmingham. The first railroad hospital, in Sacramento, California, and railroad health-care system was instituted by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1865. The same system began to appear in coal mining at about the same time, some believe it was an outgrowth of British coal-mining practice but there's not a lot of information about the origins of employee medical-care systems in the 1800s.

The system only indirectly arose from the high injury rate; the root causes were:

(1) the Federal Employers' Liability Law and no federal or state workmen's compensation law, which enabled the employee injured in the line of duty to recover damages from the employer through a lawsuit, which as interpreted by a jury of peers (and in a railroad town whom else might be found on the jury) was viewed by the railroad companies as too lucrative to the injured employee;

(2) a lack of established medical services in remote and frontier environments, and lack of likelihood that medical services would self-develop without company support;

(3) inclusion of medical care in employment was viewed by companies as an inducement to attract employees that otherwise would decline to work in remote and frontier environments;

(4) an widespread ethos of paternalistic practices by large corporations during this era, particularly because the labor force was so heavily made up of immigrants; corporations as well as the general public felt that the labor force needed to be Americanized in language, culture, lifestyle, and social practice.

The very first medical subspecialty organization in the U.S. was the Railway Surgeons. Unlike physicians of today who at least in theory are supposed to put the interests of the patient before the interests of anyone or any institution or company, the Railway Physicians gave their primary allegiance to the company, and viewed their major challenges as the identification of malingerers, defending the company against lawsuits, competition from unaffiliated physicians, and maintaining their access to the free pass.

Unlike railways, compulsory medical care in the mining industries typically included the employee's families. Pregnancy was not covered; the employee paid a separate and often exorbitant fee to the company medical system for each birth. Treatment for venereal disease was excluded in virtually all company-administered medical-care systems.

Company medical systems in coal mining often provided grossly substandard medical care offered by unqualified or unlicensed physicians in squalid clinics. Many coal mining companies used the medical system as a profit center with captive customers. A major investigation of coal mining medical systems at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and conducted by the U.S. Naval Health Service in the mid-1930s resulted in exposure of these practices, with the result being that coal mining health care was transferred to the United Mine Workers Union, and the burden of payment effectively transferred from the coal miner to the coal consumer. Railroad medical systems suffered a less ignominous outcome because unlike coal mining their hospitals and institutions were large-city based and thus had greater pressure to conform with progressive medical and social thought and standards. They gradually faded away under cost pressures into typical PPO or HMO type insurance; I believe the last railway hospital to close was the Southern Pacific hospital in San Francisco in the 1970s. Some railroad hospital associations still exist, but are entirely an insurance organization.

The traveling public was rarely treated in a railroad hospital; treatment by a railway surgeon or hospital usually required the passenger to sign away his or her right to sue for damages. The level of treatment was at the discretion of the railway surgeon and the outcomes for the patient were whatever the railway surgeon said they ought to be. This is not to be confused with emergency medical treatment.

Of tangential but striking interest, railways that offered medical care systems had a strikingly lower employee fatality rate than railways that did not, in the 1905-1920 period. (I did a multiple regression analysis back in graduate school to see if this was the case.) The three safest raillroads in the country, in terms of number of employee fatalities per total man-hours of employment were the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Illinois Central, and Denver & Rio Grande Western -- all at least two standard deviations above the norm most years. The least safe railroads were the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad -- three standard deviations below the norm most years. The least safe western railroad was the Milwaukee Road. I seriously doubt that the railroad medical care system had any direct influence on reducing the fatality rate, but more likely a railroad that had a management style that would include a hospital system also was a railroad that took safety more seriously, and a railroad that needed a hospital system by reasons of remoteness was one that had more incentive to not kill off too many employees, as replacements were not close at hand as they were in the teeming cities of the Official Territory. Official Territory states were also the first to pass state Workmen's Compensation laws (New York State 1910), which removed much of the benefit to a railway of operating a railway medical system.

It's also of interest that compulsory Workmen's Compensation laws, bitterly opposed by business interests and rural states for many years, extending into the last Southern state, Mississippi, not until in 1948, was opposed by business because without employees could only seek redress through the courts. Poll taxes and jury selection criteria in the early 1900s tended to favor juries composed of businessmen. Later after the abolition of restrictions on jury composition, business interests realized the jury system was becoming adverse to their economic interests, and flipped their position to support Workmen's Compensation. Railroads are still outside of the Workmen's Compensation system.

Stan Johnson's book, The Milwaukee Road's Western Extension, which has a chapter devoted to medical care for the workers.

Of tangential but striking interest, railways that offered medical care systems had a strikingly lower employee fatality rate than railways that did not, in the 1905-1920 period. (I did a multiple regression analysis back in graduate school to see if this was the case.) The three safest raillroads in the country, in terms of number of employee fatalities per total man-hours of employment were the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Illinois Central, and Denver & Rio Grande Western -- all at least two standard deviations above the norm most years. The least safe railroads were the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad -- three standard deviations below the norm most years. The least safe western railroad was the Milwaukee Road. I seriously doubt that the railroad medical care system had any direct influence on reducing the fatality rate, but more likely a railroad that had a management style that would include a hospital system also was a railroad that took safety more seriously, and a railroad that needed a hospital system by reasons of remoteness was one that had more incentive to not kill off too many employees, as replacements were not close at hand as they were in the teeming cities of the Official Territory. Official Territory states were also the first to pass state Workmen's Compensation laws (New York State 1910), which removed much of the benefit to a railway of operating a railway medical system.

https://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/128096.aspx

sweet 55 Nomad


Chevy sedans and station wagons of the period had upright pillars, a higher windshield, and more curve on the roof’s edge. 
Nomads, however, have B- and C-pillars with pronounced forward angles. The Nomad’s tailgate and liftgate are laid way forward to match those angles, and they’ve got a nice low roof, so the side windows are lower as well. The projection of forward motion even at a standstill is clear.
 


https://www.hagerty.com/media/member-stories/tri-five-tales-restoring-this-1955-chevrolet-nomad-was-worth-the-effort/

typical scumbag former Border Patrol agent charged for hiring undocumented illegal aliens as cheaper commercial truck drivers

Ricardo Gonzalez, 39, his wife, Natalia Gonzalez, 35, and Alex Lopez, 33, were arrested on November 17 and charged for their roles in a conspiracy to hire illegal aliens by fraudulently obtaining immigration permits, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.


According to the indictment, starting in February of 2017, the trio recruited and hired undocumented workers as truck drivers and paid them less due to their citizenship status.

The scheme to hire the workers involved a letter from a fictitious Mexican trucking company which was used in the process of helping them to obtain an I-94 permit, which allows a visitor to travel farther than 25 miles from the border and remain in the United States for more than 30 days.

Bob Karakashian has hung on to his A12 Super Bee Six Pack for over 50 years




His parents drove a Coronet Station Wagon, and his older brother had a 1965 Coronet with a 426 Street Wedge. So, it’s easy to see how Bob got his love for the Dodge brand. 

Another life-altering moment for Bob came when his family moved from Highland Park to Farmington Hills, Michigan, in the mid-to-late 1960s. One of his neighbors was none other than Tom Hoover

“In 1969 I was in my second year of college and I wanted to buy my first new car. After driving my brother’s ’65 Coronet with the 426 wedge, I knew I wouldn’t be happy with a 383 Road Runner or 383 Super Bee, as they ran about the same as the 426 wedge. I really wanted a 426 hemi Road Runner, GTX or Super Bee but it just wasn’t feasible, being a full-time college student at Lawrence Tech University,” reminisced Bob.

The Mopar gearhead he was, Bob asked Tom Hoover for some advice on what new car to purchase. “Bobby, I think we have a new package coming out that you’re really going to like,” said Hoover.

With that, Hoover gave Bob all the specs on the new mid-year A12 Six Pack option on the 1969 Super Bee with a matte black fiberglass liftoff hood held on by hood pins, Dana 60 axle with a 4.10 ratio and, of course, a 390-horsepower 440 big-block with three Holley carburetors mounted on an aluminum Edelbrock intake


With a mere 1,400 miles on the Super Bee’s odometer and with that pungent new car smell emanating from the interior, a Racer Brown SSH-25 camshaft and JR Headers got installed to give the already stout 440 Six Pack even more horsepower. “My mother and father were so upset seeing their son take apart his brand-new car, but when they saw Mr. Hoover helping me and teaching me things like how to degree a camshaft, set ignition timing, adjusting the carburetors and other things, my parents’ attitude quickly changed.

By the early to mid-1970s, Bob’s Six Pack Super Bee saw less street duty and more drag strip usage, specifically racing in Super Stock and eventually Stock Eliminator. During this period, Bob’s Super Bee was used as a development vehicle to evaluate prototype performance parts and packages for the new Mopar Direct Connection program.

With its original red paint still shining bright, pristine engine compartment looking as if you can eat off it and interior that smells as fresh as when it was delivered to the dealer in the spring of 1969, it’s hard to tell Bob’s Super Bee has made thousands of passes down the drag strip. Make no mistake, it may look like a restored muscle car with only 20,000 miles, but Bob’s basically stock blueprinted 440 Six Pack Super Bee can click off 12.0-second ETs on the skinny production G70X15 Redline Bias Ply tires anytime at any track.



Gray Baskerville and his '32 roadster






Baskerville's '32 was originally built as a drag car by Paul Horning, but was found to be too heavy to race and was converted to street car use. Horning was killed in a motorcycle accident before he could have any fun with it.

Horning was Baskerville's best friend, and so Gray purchased the car from Horning's mother in 1966 and proceeded to drive it everywhere, everyday, until 1981, when he bought a truck, stating he didn't want any Hollywood types crashing his car.

That a roadster was a daily driver, and the only vehicle that Gray owned, for about 15 years, is remarkable. It wasn't trailered, and he drove it across country numerous times to hot rod events, back in the good ol days when he wrote enjoyable articles. 

Gray was a really good writer, in the way that you ENJOYED reading what he wrote, as much as what he wrote about. Thankfully, it's all saved for history and accessible any time you open an old Hot Rod magazine

He was a champion of things like Bonneville, of the history of hot rodding, and of traditional hot rodding. He was as connected as anyone has been or ever will be in the automotive aftermarket world. Gray was loved by all and even though the majority of us never met him, we knew his words were honest and from the heart. That shouldn't be rare among auto enthusiast writers, but it's very hard to find.  

Dave and Mike found a Mach 1 in a junkyard, and have the tv show money expense account to buy it, and get it running... damn, ain't that sweet!




I'm not a fan of their show, mostly from not being willing to get a subscription and a Motor Trend account because I am still pissed off at Motor Trend. Yes, that is true, and you'd need to go back to the fucking over Motor Trend did to their subscribers (posted about 15 years ago) to know why. I doubt there are 5 people reading today that have been reading since I started in 2006, and that's sad that so many I once knew by name have disappeared for unknown reasons, and I suspect it's old age. 

Any way, Mike and Dave have a show you're already familiar with I am sure, and if you aren't a subscriber, like me, but agree it's a show that's a pleasure to watch, you can see this episode without a subscription at You Tube, because Motor Trend's app sucks, is limited to 720p, and it stops every 6 minutes for no reason


then the follow up, skip the first redundant 8 minutes 


It's REALLY nice to see photos I made show up on some friend's facebook page!


I took this photo, and many others, at the Motor Transport Museum here in San Diego county. If you'd like to see the other photos of this 1939 White, https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2013/02/1939-white-cab-over-engine-coe.html
If you'd like to see the other 24 galleries and articles I posted from that collection of rusting in place Reos, Diamond Ts, etc https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/search/label/Motor%20Transport%20Museum

This 1925 American LaFrance Type 75 was originally dispatched to the West Palm Beach Florida Fire Department, and served as pumper #4 until about 1966.

this would be just incredible to drive across country in something like the Great Race, or even better, slowly through the small backroads while taking the time to stop everywhere to see everything
 

Of course, for such an enjoyable use, unlike museum time showing it's functional accessories, I'd leave everything in storage like that spotlight, extinguishers, ladders

After it's retirement, the pump was removed and a simple touring style body was installed, and it served duty at a resort providing transport for wedding parties and tours. 

The chain drive American LaFrance chassis traces its origin to the early days of motoring. The design of the 1904 Mercedes was recognized as the most advanced at the time, and many manufacturers followed the design and configuration. The Simplex Automobile Co. was one such manufacturer. The Mercedes 50hp was copied by Simplex in New York City. 

The engines were large T head models with three speed transaxles and dual chain drive to the rear wheels. They even copied the shape of the radiator. 

When American LaFrance decided to seriously get into motorized fire apparatus in 1909, they bought two Simplex car chassis upon which they built two rigs. They then went on in 1910 to copy the Simplex and built their own rigs from the ground up to a larger capacity then the Simplex/Benz. American LaFrance offered their chain drive chassis until 1927

https://www.hemmings.com/classifieds/cars-for-sale/american-lafrance/type-75/2636621.html

Am I right in thinking this is a roadster? 

Go Kart appreciation. They cost too much then, cost too much now, and I still want one. Anyone that's had some time in one at a go kart racing track probably feels the same


Bug Engineering was founded in Azusa, California, in 1958. Later renamed K&P Manufacturing, it was known as the world’s oldest kart manufacturer until operations ceased in 2014.



Thanks Terry for sharing these cool photos! Now HERE'S a look behind the scenes of railroad bridges!


that's 1 Million rail road ties in ONE winter


and now it's easy to see how they made so many of these bridges and plumes

Thanks Terry! 

an Italian government project is under way to transform the Appian Way (Via Appia) into a pilgrimage route from buzzing Rome to nautical Brindisi,


in 2015, Italian writer Paolo Rumiz decided to walk the Appia for La Repubblica newspaper. 

The one problem: There was no modern map of the route.

He contacted a prominent hiker who has spent nearly four decades traversing Italy. For two months,  Riccardo Carnovalini overlaid military maps, ancient shepherd paths, and satellite imagery to plot the Appia’s course.

Ancient Romans following the Appia encountered a station to swap out their horses every 10 miles, and a guesthouse every 20 miles.

Rumiz’s journey drew the attention of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, and in 2015 the Italian government announced a plan to resurrect the route. Centuries of lawless development had left archaeological treasures in private hands, and ancient villas recklessly remodeled. Preservation has begun, but without visitors, the Appia could be forgotten again. 

Taranto, a port city roughly 40 miles from the Appia’s end. This is the only city founded by the Spartans outside Greece, and a row of Greek columns still stands near the water.

the 1981 Cadillac Sedan de Ville d'Elegance had a factory AM/FM/CB radio/8 track


In 1981, buyers of new Cadillacs got an AM/FM stereo radio as standard equipment. Most buyers moved up to the AM/FM/cassette version (8-track was considered quite obsolete by the early 1980s), which cost an extra 290 bucks (about $987 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars). If you wanted to start squawking out ten-codes to the truckers, you had to shell out $495 for the AM/FM/8-track/CB or a high-roller $560 for the AM/FM/cassette CB ($1685 and $1906 in today's dollars).