Posted by
John Greenly on
URL: http://c-sng-discussion-forum.254.s1.nabble.com/the-caboose-that-never-was-tp8369p10451.html
Hi Jim,
welcome aboard this train again, even if it is headed for the asylum! Let's throw a lump of coal in the stove and boil up a cup of coffee. No worries about having jumped off for a while, I did too, back there on a slow curve. Little did I expect that this C&S world, my favorite escape from real life, would get to be too much like work, where as a scientist I am often trying to extract reliable information from fragmentary and compromised data. There, I doubt everything, especially when I'm certain of it! I'm always on the lookout for contradictions or lapses in logic. That's hard work and stressful, and I sort of fled from this topic for a while because of that.
Thank you for taking up the challenge of working toward a timeline. I have tried to avoid talking about dates, except to bring up questions, because I am very much less knowledgeable on the history than you and others here.
But, here we go, in the spirit of careful inquiry I have a couple of comments and questions on your post.
First let me try to lay out the basic issue as clearly as I can, trying to avoid all but established fact.
We now have evidence, in the form of photos, not just the 313 photo, but also all the others of cars without cupolas that I have been able to measure, that a number of the waycars originally run on the DSP&P had at some time wheelbases much shorter than the 9 feet quoted in all modern references, drawings and models that I know of. We have confirmation of a 6' 4" or so wheelbase on two folio sheets that agrees with my 313 measurement.
We have the famous photo of 306, ca. 1900-1901, with its center cupola, straight ladders, and the spidery, equalized, 9 foot wheelbase undercarriage, a type that was in common use on other roads including the D&RG and many standard gauge lines.
These are, I believe, facts.
We also have all those references, drawings and models of the early waycars with the equalized 9' undercarriage. Here's my first and most important question: where did these all come from? Are they really all the result of looking at the single, clear 306 photo and just assuming that all the cars were built with this undercarriage? At present I don't think I have seen any contemporary (original to the early period) source for this information, it's all modern stuff, from long after the cars were rebuilt.
Is this right? Seems to me that this is the basic question we need to answer clearly. Please, everybody, help out on this one.
My next question follows this line further. Jim, you said that some subset of the cars, including 306, were rebuilt between 1890 and 1898, with the equalized 9 foot undercarriage. I don't know the source of this information, would you please help me out on this?
To follow this question a bit further, Jim, how do the folio 27 sheets tell us about pre-1908 cars as you suggest, if the sheets date from 1911? This can be true if they contain "fossils" of earlier configurations that were not updated properly. That seems entirely likely, given all the infuriating anomalies that you are doing a fine (and dizzying) job of exposing. It looks as if all we can do is view the folios as a faulty summary of the cars, haunted by ghosts from their past. However, I don't see, without other independent information, how we can infer an actual date for those anachronisms on the sheets except to say simply that they have been carried over from some time before 1911. Fact: we do know from the famous photo that 306 had its equalized undercarriage by 1900-1901. Jim, you must have other information to suggest an 1895 date for 308/1006 to have acquired its 9 foot undercarriage, rather than, say, 1905, or any other year before 1911. Also there is no way from the folio sheet itself to know whether the car in 1911 had the equalized version, or the modern version, of the 9 foot undercarriage. Is there a photo I've forgotten or not seen? Again, I'd be much obliged to know the other information that applies to this. If you've already said it earlier in this thread, I apologize profusely, I think I'm coming up against my aging memory limitations here!
many thanks,
John
John Greenly
Lansing, NY