Patric moved his cars across the track to a siding next to the Amtrak station in Houston instead of across the main line from it. New paint job and different lettering too.
What is "Patrick Henry Creative Promotions"? Is their company function actually railroad related? Or?
Creative Promotions is a company that specializes in providing services to other companies to promote their brand name, create menus, photograph food and beverages, develop advertizing, catering and a bunch of other promotional stuff. Their direct connection with railroads is that you can charter the to cars for corporate functions or personal use. Otherwise, the founder and owner of the company, Patrick Henry, owns the cars and uses them for personal trips and to entertain friends. His late dad, who he named the dome-lounge car after, worked for the Santa Fe and used the ATSF business car fleet extensively. So, Patric grew up traveling on business cars. When his business became successful, he bought these two cars for his own use but to help pay for and maintain them, merged them into his business. His mom, who he named the sleeper after, is still alive and enjoys traveling on the cars whenever she can.
Salvaging ties from a heap of mostly rotten ones pulled up at the old site of the Houston Railroad Museum. The museum is moving to Tomball, Texas. Sent from my DROID4 using Tapatalk 2
Well, we recovered over two dozen ties that can be used again before we called it quits. These will be added to more that were saved when the rails were first ripped up. Some day we hope to put rails back down and open the museum again. The museum was evicted from its old location in East Houston and will probably move onto some land that the City of Tomball, Texas is providing. Most of the rolling stock is in a storage yard in Houston, the rails, good ties and everything else is being moved to a temporary lot outside Tomball. Some of the stuff at the storage lot.
Wish I could help somehow. Museums are the only we can recapture yesterday. Most of it takes capital that is beyond most of our scope of affordability. Best of luck.
Sorry for the phone quality picture but had to get a picture while I had a chance. Normally you see nicer patch jobs than spray paint but you can see they simply tried to cross out spray paint over the BNSF and to the left of that there was a HLCX was spray painted over after being bought I assume. Been in the yard a week, the first time I saw it I thought I was crazy thinking I saw a BNSF engine but finally got the picture. Not sure if it will be sent off for painting or not, had been in a siding but was idling with other engines when I stopped.
Thanks, we will need a lot of luck but we have confidence that we will get all our ducks in a row. This is the second move in the history of the museum. The first was from Union Station in downtown Houston to the Railwood Industrial Park in East Houston. The first move was necessary because Amtrak had moved all operations out of Union Station in 1974 and all the tracks were being removed from the valuable rel estate. (The area is now Minute Maid Ballpark, home of the Houston Astros) The land at Railwood was supposed to have been deeded over to the museum by the rel estate company that was developing the industrial park. However that never happened and slipped through the cracks. Then the company on the next property offered the developer a huge sum of money for the land so that they could expand and $$$ seems to have won out over a 40 year old hand shake agreement. Here is part of the museum's rolling collection on its way to the storage yard.
Rattle can letters and numbers do happen. In my vicinity a Watco GP39-2, ex-UP, was done that way. It works, but looks a bit tacky.
The consist sandwiched between two UP locomotives was eight passenger cars, (one of them on an 80' flat car), a tank car on a flat car, three 20 foot containers on a flat car, a helium car, two cabooses, two Alco S2 switchers and one Baldwin DS44-750 switcher. Two more passenger cars had already been moved.
That's one train that I would gladly wait for at the crossing gates - no matter how long it took! History includes our rail heritage, and museums need support to preserve that. Which is why I joined the CRHA and give my support to keeping the memory alive.