Locomotive

They like to call the sprawling locomotive works on the east side of town the Factory of the Future, but Building 10 - the cavernous main assembly building - was built in 1912 and looks like it. The floors are still paved with durable wooden blocks. Men behind steel masks still crouch with their welding torches on the massive locomotive frames lined up like battleships on the shop floor. A 200-ton crane shuttles overhead, occasionally lifting one of the hulks to another station.

In Ed Sholl's garage on Willow Street in Bordentown City stands an exquisite 14-foot replica of a railroad locomotive, a three-ton testament to the majesty of metal in the hands of a craftsman. If archaeologists were to come upon it a thousand years from now, they would be awed by the precision of his one-sixth scale steam engine - and bewildered as to why it was made. Sholl is a little bemused himself these days after spending more than 25,000 hours and 15 years creating this exact replica of the engine that pulled the Pennsylvania Railroad's crack Nelly Bly Limited.

About a half-century ago, on a spring afternoon, a New York railway executive struck a gentleman's deal with a St. Louis railroad physician that would reverberate many years after their telephone conversation ended. The doctor succeeded in acquiring a rare camelback locomotive that once hauled people through the rugged hills and mountains of northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania, its engine whistling and smokestack belching white clouds of steam. And since 1953, engine No. 952 has rested on tracks behind the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, subjected to years of rain and snow as weeds wrapped around the dormant steel wheels.

A series of Main Line fires - including a serious house blaze - caused by a malfunctioning Amtrak locomotive has alarmed Lower Merion residents who live near the busy tracks. And they're worried about Amtrak's response to the April fires. Amtrak dispatchers initially refused firefighters' requests to halt the malfunctioning train or to stop other trains to give firefighters better access to battle the fires, Lower Merion Fire Chief Charles McGarvey said. "I'm certain it probably will happen again," said Caroline Cuthbert, who lives on Hathaway Lane in Wynnewood, where one house was seriously damaged and other homeowners lost fences and trees to the rapidly spreading flames.

Want another Herschel Walker story to tell your grandchildren? How about this: Now you can say you saw this guy run right out of his shoes. OK, so maybe it was only one shoe. And maybe a defender pulled it off. But his 9-yard touchdown burst and 61 second-half rushing yards helped the Eagles gain their biggest victory of the young season - the 31-7 plastering of the previously undefeated Dallas Cowboys. He finished the game with 86 yards and two touchdowns on 19 carries.

The wedding was a joint idea, but the location was the groom's inspiration, the groom being Ed Cevasco, a railroad engineer and president of the New Hope & Ivyland Railroad. Cevasco and Lynn Taylor were married aboard a company locomotive yesterday in New Hope and took off afterward on a trip with the groom at the throttle of the train. After the ceremony, the couple (above) stepped down briefly from the balcony of the locomotive cab to greet guests and receive congratulations. Beforehand (right)

Royal Mail next month will issue six special stamps recalling the birth and evolution of the steam locomotive that appeared in Britain just prior to the debut of the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black. The stamps are peculiar in format, measuring nearly 2? inches horizontally and about 1 inch vertically. The extra-wide breathing room allows the designs to include the classic engines pulling coaches amid scenic landscape and puffing smoke. Five of the six stamps, which will be issued Jan. 13, picture locomotives originally owned and operated by the Big Four rail companies: the Great Western Railway; the London, Midland and Scottish Railway; the London and North Eastern Railway, and the Southern.

A man with a two-foot-long machete and a burning desire to blow his own horn halted a northbound Amtrak passenger train just outside Baltimore for more than 90 minutes yesterday, while several hundred passengers fumed. No one was hurt, and the man, identified by an Amtrak spokesman as Reginald Leon Moore, 34, of Baltimore, eventually was subdued by railroad and city police. The spokesman, John Jacobson, said police would decide whether to file charges against Moore after he is examined at a local hospital.

Ever see one of those big blue Conrail diesel locomotives and wish you could take her out for a spin? Hop aboard. Starting tomorrow in the Franklin Institute's renovated Train Room, visitors can sit in the cab of a 3,000-horsepower Conrail diesel and run a railroad. The cutaway diesel cab and its controls are the real thing, but they're hooked up via computer to a "G" gauge model-train locomotive that travels along a 40-foot-long layout just below the cab. The permanent exhibit is just one part of a major overhaul given the room - renamed Railroad Hall - by West Philadelphia architect and rail fan Bill Becker, with help from a $120,000 Conrail grant.

At the Franklin Institute, it's not exactly the show of shows, but more like the choo of choos. Beginning tomorrow, the popular Train Room - out of service for about six months, while it was being renovated with a gift from Conrail - will be reopened, renamed, as Railroad Hall. Along with the opening, the institute will unveil the hands-on show "All Aboard: Trains at the Franklin Institute," which combines locomotive artifacts of the 19th century with displays showing the latest in railroad technology.

When we were growing up as teens in the 1970's, Saturday mornings filled my sister and me with funky anticipation. We'd race downstairs, flip on the Magnavox, and settle in to experience "the hippest trip in America" - Soul Train . See, Soul Train wasn't just any television dance show. Soul Train belonged to us. Soul Train showcased our R&B music, our artists, our dances, heck, even our black hair-care products. It was our cultural touchstone at a time when we were learning that, yes, black was beautiful - even if we weren't quite sure if we believed it yet. But Don Cornelius, Soul Train's pinstripe-suited, haystack-afro'ed, deep silken-voiced creator and host, affirmed it for us. That's why it's so ironically sad that news yesterday of Cornelius' death at 75, from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home outside of Los Angeles, came on the first day of Black History Month.

SCRANTON - Like the other students attending RailCamp 2011 this week at Steamtown National Historic Site, Mitchell Smithbauer hopes to come away with a better understanding and appreciation of railroading past and present. Unlike most of his fellow campers, however, he arrived with some hands-on, real-world experience - his family operates Bucksgahuda & Western Railroad Co., a two-foot-gauge railroad at St. Marys founded by his grandfather, Bill Bauer, and three of his brothers. "I already know a lot of the stuff that people are talking about," Mitchell, 14, said Tuesday.

George Mathias Cross Jr., 88, of West Philadelphia, the first black locomotive engineer to drive a passenger train into 30th Street Station, died of cancer Thursday, July 7, at a hospice in Northeast Philadelphia operated by Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital. When Mr. Cross made his landmark trip in 1966, he was featured in the Pennsylvania Railroad Co.'s monthly bulletin, said his son, George M. Cross III. "He mailed it to me at the Great Lakes naval base, and I showed it all around, and it created quite a bit of excitement.

Amtrak hopes to make train service on its Northeast and Keystone corridors faster and more reliable with 70 new locomotives ordered from Siemens Mobility for $466 million. Siemens Mobility, a division of the German electronics and transportation giant Siemens AG, said Friday that it would assemble the locomotives at its light-rail manufacturing plant in Sacramento, Calif., with some components produced in plants in Norwood, Ohio, and Alpharetta, Ga. The first "Amtrak Cities Sprinter" locomotives, based on Siemens' "EuroSprinter" locomotives in service in Europe and elsewhere, are scheduled to be delivered in 2013.

Paul Keenan is not a railroad buff in the usual sense of the term. He has no model train set. He does not retreat in the evening to a finished basement to don an engineer's cap and devote himself to a childhood fantasy of working on the railroad. Yet Keenan is a railroad lawyer, and in that role he sees enough of the inner workings of the modern freight rail system to make most train buffs green with envy. He travels the country along with his colleagues at the Jenkintown-based firm of Keenan, Cohen & Howard P.C., representing railroad companies and trucking firms in legal disputes, often with shippers.

A series of Main Line fires - including a serious house blaze - caused by a malfunctioning Amtrak locomotive has alarmed Lower Merion residents who live near the busy tracks. And they're worried about Amtrak's response to the April fires. Amtrak dispatchers initially refused firefighters' requests to halt the malfunctioning train or to stop other trains to give firefighters better access to battle the fires, Lower Merion Fire Chief Charles McGarvey said. "I'm certain it probably will happen again," said Caroline Cuthbert, who lives on Hathaway Lane in Wynnewood, where one house was seriously damaged and other homeowners lost fences and trees to the rapidly spreading flames.

1829 The first issue of The Inquirer appears on June 1. Yuengling Brewery is established. Eastern State Penitentiary opens. Andrew Jackson is inaugurated as the nation's seventh president. 1830 The first penny newspaper, the Cent, is published in Philadelphia by C.C. Conwell. Godey's Lady's Book is published by Louis Godey on Sixth Street near Chestnut. 1831 Matthias Baldwin founds what becomes the world's largest locomotive works. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its first bishop, dies at 71. Allen led black movements for equality in an era when people believed that the most African Americans could achieve would be a status between slavery and citizenship.

Several auction houses will continue to ring in the new year this weekend with sales featuring musical items. The first is tonight in Boothwyn, where Briggs Auction Inc.'s regular Friday sale will include a collection of cowbells, as well as a bronze locomotive bell. The 25 cowbells - some American, some European - are among 400 lots from a prominent Newtown Square estate that are included in the antiques, accessories and decorative items Briggs will offer beginning at 5 p.m. The bells, to be sold with other bovine collectibles, are expected to go for $10 to "a couple of hundred" apiece, according to Briggs president John Turner.

In the foggy darkness of the early morning of April 30, 1900, the Cannonball Express, trying to make up time, barreled down the tracks toward Vaughan, Miss. Ahead, three trains were moving to side tracks to let the Cannonball pass, but an air hose broke on one of them, stranding four cars on the main line. In the fog, the Cannonball engineer didn't see the caboose lights on the stranded train until the last minute. He ordered his fireman to jump but stayed in the locomotive himself, desperately trying to slow the train.