Steam & Excursion > 765: BACK IN BLACK

After 10 years of waiting my patience has been rewarded! Today I saw NKP 765 for the first time, and boy what a SIGHT! To smell the cinders, to hear the compressor, to feel the warm metal, and to see a happy crowd, all of it made my day. What can I say to the 765 crew other than my hat goes off to you guys for doing such a great job! Can’t wait to see her strutting her stuff on the main line and joining a few friends down at the Ohio Central next year for Trainfest06’.

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This is one of my favorite shots I took today.

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No doubt about it, this is one happy fireman!

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In the belly of this berk.

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It was one wonderful sunny day!

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Wheels a ready to rumble!

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Looks like he’s heading a hot freight into the sunset.

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Another view, glancing down the boiler.

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B&W, taken with red filter toward late afternoon light.

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In color

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What can I say B&W suits steam very well.

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Wow, Thanks for the Pics! A Berk perhaps the best balanced looking example of superpower.? Time to look up the dates for the OC NRHS 06' extrazaganza next summer. Hey Fitz, if there was ever a time to come back east again.....! Great job 765 Crew.

And here is the Wabash caboose toward sunset to end the day. Once again it was a terrific day! And congrats to the fine folks at Fort Wayne for doing an A+ job with the open house events! Should be another great day Sunday when they’ll have caboose and speeders rides, along with cab tours! God speed 765!

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Just curious, Which is bigger in weight and length, Berk 765 or (pocket) Northern 6325?

The 765 looks absolutely marvelous. Wow!!! Thanks for sharing these excellent photos.

Looking sharp! Never seen her with the smokebox still in black, different and very nice. How long before the graphite turns grey?

Congrats to the crew, looks like the "Easy" part is done... now for the hard part.. finding a place to run her:-)


BTW: I hope it was understood that I don't believe the work the Fort Wayne guys and girls have put in in the last 12 year is easy but, with insurance and railroads being the way they are today it will look like it was.

Thanks for sharing these great images!

Yes, the insurance matter is huge. Thanks virtually entirely to the manner in which the courts treat railroad-related injuries and the litigious illness we find ourselves lead to over the past fifty years or so.

The insurers fear huge defense expenditures, even if cases are won. Thus, premiums are high and coverage difficult to obtain.

Premiums would drop if the income available from investments was to rise, and coverage would become a bit more available at the same time.

However, until the legal side of things is brought under some better degree of control the insurance problem is not going to subside, period.

John

I took my father (old enough to remember the Berks in regular service) & son(age 3) over to New Haven on Sunday for the open house. I was very impressed how well attended the event was and how well the crowds were handled. The wait for the cab tour was about 1-1/2 hours but it was well worth the wait. We didn't have time to take either the caboose ride or the speeder ride but they appeared to be well patronized as well. All in all a great job done by the Fort Wayne group! Hopefully something soon can be set up trips in the region (I'd love to see something on the RJ Corman from Lima to St. Marys - probably the closest thing to "home rails" you can get in today's environment) so the magnificient machine can be seen in motion.

railfan4449 Wrote:
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> In the belly of this berk.


How did you take this shot? I tried a couple of these in China last month and was unsuccessful in capturing the proper image with the DSLR.

I took these shots with my Canon Rebal XT, mostly with the 18-55 kit lens, On that shot I had set the camera to P mode, ISO 200, exposure 1/60 f5.6, meter mode was Evaluative Metering. Hope that helps.