Trackbolt wrote:What ever happened to Ross Rowland and his T-1 2101 or was it 2102. See what happens when you get old, you start forgetting the important stuff. I car hosted on an excursion behind that locomotive back in the 70's.
Trackbolt
As metman said, the 2102 was bought by the Blue Mountain & Reading railroad back in 1985 and ran in Eastern PA until the early 1990s. It's now out of service, in storage on the Reading & Northern at Port Clinton, PA. I took some pictures of it when they rolled it out last year for the open house / 20th anniversary celebration. Some pictures of it are
here on my webpage .
As for Ross's 2101 that was used on the Chessie Steam Special, it was less fortunate. In Feburary of 1979, while in storage at a Chessie System roundhouse in Silver Grove, KY, the building caught fire and burned down, supposedly causing great damage to the 2101. Because Mr. Rowland was running the Chessie Steam Specials, the railroad traded him the (much better shape) C&O 614 for the 2101. The 614 was then quickly restored to service in order to run the Chessie Safety Express trains. The 2101 was repainted in it's American Freedom Train colors and placed on display at the B&O museum in Baltimore, MD as AFT #1.
The 614 is also currently out of service and in storage on the R&N at Port Clinton, PA. It too can be seen in the pictures on
my webpage.
The reason I said "supposedly" above, is that there are rumors that the 2101 wasn't really damaged as bad was said. I don't know the details, but it's a good rumor and Mr. Rowland got a nicer locomotive.
Here's a
picture of it right after the fire.
JimE
[url=
https://web.archive.org/web/20141029052 ... rains.html[/url] - (Actually, that server doesn't exist any more, so I point to the web archive version....)