Sits at Ridge Farm at the NKP crossing awaiting their Eastbound Manifest Freight ...note the volume of pipe connections leading to crossovers and signals in the middle of rural Illinois [Cairo Line] The local had just finished 'spotting' our last empty grain boxcar at the elevator there at Ridge Farm. - LAB - Lawrence Baggerly Collection.
More history there, Roger, and thanks for posting it. Those "pipes" were really prevalent emanating from control towers along the lines back then. I'm sure some of them caused the "armstrong" levers to be really tough to move. The Mike has had her classification lights removed. I thought they remained on the Big Four and Michigan Central after they were removed from engines on Lines East?
In years past, I had talked with old timers around the USA, about "armstrong" plants. Some of them had a trick to how they used the levers, others just cussed a lot and called the maintainers frequently.
I've read that the pipe lengths had to be adjusted periodically to compensate for temperature changes. The pipes would shrink with the cold which could prevent points from closing, or expand with heat which could prevent levers from getting into a locking position after points had closed. I don't know what temperatures, or what the length of pipe would cause this to become a problem. There was a first-person article in a recent Trains Magazine where a newbie leverman described having to spike a set of points when the pipe shrank too much during a cold snap.
Some time ago Tony Koester wrote about his trip to that area, while doing research for his NKP layout, to see what if anything still remained. One place he mentioned was a spot called Humrick, only a couple of miles east of Ridge Farm, where the NKP intersected the MILW. It was once a relatively busy location, with at least several hundred cars being interchanged each year. Old topo maps show a fairly large yard on the MILW line north of the crossing. Recent aerial photos reveal barely a scar in the earth where the rights-of-way once existed. You can still make out the location of the connecting tracks on the northwest and southwest corners of the crossing. Otherwise, almost everything else has been plowed under and, as Tony phrased it - it's just all so...gone.
This was a IHB ,H-5r, #260 transferred to the NYC in Dec. 49 renumbered 2/50 to 1337 . If you look closely at the base of the stack can see the marker light . We had the 1312, 1310 at Greensburg ,IN. during 1955 - 57 . LEW
