By Jon Rutter
Sunday News
October 26, 2008

One day in 1942, Rio Grande Southern locomotive No. 20 careened off the tracks in a mountain pass and pinched its boiler against a rock. Now, 66 years later, the Strasburg Rail Road mechanical shop is bolting and hammering the little coal burner back together again.

In about three years, it will be ready to chug down the line at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colo.

Resuscitating other people’s antique steam locomotives and coaches is a little-known side business of the Strasburg.

The company billed as America’s oldest shortline railroad is best recognized for shuttling tourists to Paradise and back.

But passenger runs have always been a break-even proposition, said Linn Moedinger, Strasburg’s president and chief mechanical officer.

Whereas, he said, some years the mechanical shop actually turns a profit.

The Strasburg’s two dozen or so welders, machinists and carpenters are ever occupied.

On any given day in the cavernous brick hall at the edge of the Strasburg yards, lathes spin off curlicues of shiny metal while acetylene torches hiss and pop and flicker. Steel rings against steel.

Besides No. 20, workers are restoring a Long Island Railroad behemoth whose boiler has rusted to a shade of cinnamon.

They’re building a replica stainless steel locomotive tender, also for the Colorado Railroad Museum, and refurbishing a miniature steam engine for a private collector.

The business is a curious one, Moedinger admits.

No one needs to bring back this geriatric rolling stock from the dead or keep it running far beyond what should be its earthly lifespan.

But people love the ornate Victorian coaches and clanking, panting, seemingly alive engines.

Demand for Strasburg restoration work is strong partly because the railroad has one of a dwindling number of shops that can provide such services.

“We never know what’s going to come in the door,” Moedinger said.

New days, old ways
On a sunny October day at the Strasburg Rail Road, the calendar hovers around 1915.

A hulking locomotive with a whistle that sounds like a hooting owl puffs into the wooden station.

Moedinger’s parents helped rescue the formerly weed-choked line from oblivion in 1958.

He started working there officially as a teenager a decade later.

The shop’s first contract job entailed transforming an 1896 Pullman into an open observation car for a movie, recalled the bearded, quiet-voiced Moedinger.

“Hello Dolly,” starring Barbra Streisand and featuring shots of the Strasburg train, was released in 1969.

The railroad put up its current mechanical shop in 1983. Over the years, the company has developed a cadre of craftsmen with highly specialized skills.

Rebuilding and operating historic rolling stock isn’t something you need a degree for, or can even get a degree in, points out Moedinger. But you do need to know what you’re doing.

“They used to blow them up with some regularity,” Moedinger said of the old steam locomotives.

These days, water added to burning coal still equals 200 pounds of pressure per square inch.

Even big, heavy parts can buckle under the strain. One notable accident happened in 1995 when a faulty firebox crownsheet in a Gettysburg Passenger Services locomotive released a plume of steam into the cab, seriously burning an engineer and two firemen.

Strasburg shop foreman Rick Musser said the historic iron horses “eat themselves up,” as would any mechanical beast with a fire in its belly.

And so boiler walls must be monitored ultrasonically for cracks and thinning.

Locomotives need regular checkups, which is why Strasburg engine No. 89 was recently sidetracked to the garage to get its smokebox swabbed clean.

(The railroad’s first priority is caring for its own stable of 17 passenger coaches and five working engines, Moedinger emphasized; then comes the outside work.)

Tinkering with a steam engine, which trainmen say is a relatively simple creation, has grown more complex as the supply of replacement parts from old roundhouses has dried up.

“You can’t just call up Home Depot and say, ‘Hey, we need one of these,’ ” said railroad-car restorer Gene E. Griffitts, who was giving a public shop tour on a recent Tuesday.

Strasburg craftsmen have learned to translate vintage blueprints and obsolete government codes to fashion their own museum-quality replicas.

According to Strasburg literature, the mechanical shop is one of three such facilities nationwide certified to build locomotive boilers from scratch.

Such labors are still accomplished to a large extent by elbow grease.

In the car shop, Griffitts said, each coach is hand-sanded and given three coats of paint.

Such work doesn’t come cheap — Musser mentioned six-digit-range sticker shock — but it does come highly recommended.

“Strasburg is known throughout the country for the quality of their workmanship and their attention to historical accuracy,” said Donald Tallman, executive director of the 49-year-old Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden.

“They’re a wonderful shop to work with,” added Tallman, who said he’s done business with Moedinger for years. “[His] is the premier restoration shop. He does it the Old World way.”

Moedinger said the Strasburg sometimes consults and subcontracts with other businesses, such as the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in southwestern Colorado.

“What we attempt to do is not duplicate other markets too terribly much,” Moedinger said.

As to the Strasburg’s specialty, he added, “If it’s big and ugly, we can work on it.”

According to Moedinger, the railroad has also become adept at building passenger cars and melding traditional techniques, such as heating and beating with sledge hammers, with newer technology, such as computer-assisted drafting, biodegradable oil and no-lead paint.

An experimental initiative these days is crafting new coaches out of weatherproof PVC plastic instead of the more traditional poplar boards.

A priority is teaching younger employees the knowledge hard-won by Moedinger and the other “old heads” of the road.

Proper attitude is key, said Musser, the shop foreman, who counts bringing back to life Strasburg engine No. 475 as one of his most satisfying projects.

You have to familiarize yourself with the oddities of each locomotive, added Musser, who said he has learned never to speak ill of the steamers while they are in hearing distance.

“They’re moody. … They’re jealous.” And they’re among the coolest contraptions ever invented, Musser said.

“They built these things with slide rules. It’s a lost art. That’s what this is becoming.”

Impressionist visits Strasburg Rail Road

By Larry Alexander
Intelligencer Journal
October 4, 2008

You’ve heard Sen. Barack Obama. You’ve heard Sen. John McCain. Now hear President Theodore Roosevelt.

In this time of political speeches, the 26th president of the United States will make a stop this weekend at the Strasburg Rail Road, riding the rails with voters and giving whistlestop speeches from the rear platform of the President’s Car.

“During his campaign in 1912, he did hundreds of railroad stops,” said Gib Young, who has been portraying Roosevelt for the past seven years.

A living historian and Civil War re-enactor, Young said he had often been told he bore a strong resemblance to Roosevelt. Then one day he ran into Richard “Fritz” Klein, one of America’s top Abraham Lincoln impressionists, who told Young the same thing and asked if he’d ever thought about portraying Roosevelt.

“He said if I ever think about getting into it seriously I should let him know, because he could get me work,” Young said in a phone interview from his home in Indiana.

Young decided that if an artist of Klein’s caliber thought he could do it, he’d give it a try.

“I decided if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right,” Young said, “I truly admire Roosevelt. I don’t necessarily agree with all of his politics, but I admire the type of man he was tremendously.”

To do the impression properly, Young studied rare film and audio clips of Roosevelt in order to perfect the president’s mannerisms and vocal style.

“Actually, he had a very high-pitched voice,” Young said. “Audibly, his voice was irritating.”

To give people an historical interpretation of Roosevelt, he portrays the Republican and former Bull Moose Party candidate circa 1915, four years before his death at age 61.

“I don’t do the lean, mean fighting machine who charged up San Juan Hill or the cowboy,” Young said. “I’m Theodore Roosevelt, the explorer and naturalist.”

He stays in first person and does not acknowledge questions like “When did you die?” or inquiries about today’s politics.

“If someone asks ‘Who are you going to vote for?’ I say ‘Theodore Roosevelt, of course,’” Young said.

Young has been to Strasburg before, both as Roosevelt and as a tourist, bringing his grandchildren along to ride the rails.

“The people there are super,” he said. “I tell people wherever I go, ‘Strasburg should be your big vacation spot at least once.’ ”

As Roosevelt, Young will pose for photographs and sign autographs.

“I can sign his name better than I can sign my own,” he said.

Young travels the country doing Roosevelt, including a stop in South Dakota at Mount Rushmore, where he appears with Klein and two other men who impersonate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He said audiences love his impression.

“I have not been anywhere where I have not been joyfully, positively and happily accepted,” Young said. “People like TR.”