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| On Sunday, July 21, 1946, the Buffalo Chapter sponsored a special
excursion aboard the New York Central's "Peanut Line". A special
excursion train traveled from Buffalo's Central Terminal to North Tonawanda
NY and then along the "Peanut Line" to Caledonia NY. Follows is a
recreation of an article which appeared in the Buffalo Courier Express July
28, 1946 |
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| Peanut Line |
| 'Gallop' Has |
| Goober Flavor |
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Ambition Realized |
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By Railroad Fans |
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Buffalo railroad fans have real-ized a life long ambition. They have
eaten peanuts on The Peanut. It happened last Sunday when an "Iron Horse
Gallop" was made over this historic one-track branch of the New York Central
between North Tonawanda and Caledonia.
Russell H. Shapely, 178 Box Ave., president of the local chap-ter of the
National Railway His-torical Society, which sponsored the excursion, saw to
it that there was plenty of peanuts aboard the train to commemorate the
occa-sion. They were served unshelled in paper bags and in the form of
peanut butter sandwiches.
It was the second such trip of the fans
in the postwar period, the first having been made last month over the New
York, Ontario & Western Railroad between Oneida and Sidney. Next on
the agenda are tours over the Niagara, St. Catherines & Toronto and the
Ar-cade and Attica, scheduled for early in September. |
| Got Name
in 1855 |
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An excursion
over a little known or used line is considered a red letter day by the
railroad fans and the Peanut Branch of the New York Central proved ideal.
Orig-inally known as the Canandaigua-Niagara Falls Railroadm the name Peanut
has stuck since 1855 when the Central took it over and the late Dean
Richmond of Batavia, then operating vice-president, re-portedly referred to
the acquisition as "only a peanut of a line.:"
Though stll
an important rail link, serving among other big cus-tomers as National
Gypsum Co., in Clarence Center,The Peanut has seen its heyday as a railroad.
No scheduled passenger trains have run on it in more than a decade. One
freight makes a round trip daily on week days. On Sundays The Peanut is a
"dead duck," or was until last week
Looking from a window as
the special nosed out of North Tona-wanda at the beginning
of the run, one of he fans saw an elderly man apparently sunning himself in
the backyard. He was sitting in an arm
chair, a pipe in his mouth, his eyes closed. Aroused
by the train he awakened with a start and when he saw it
was not only a train, but a passenger train as well,a look of surprise
spread over his face and his pipe fell to the ground. |
| Even Cows Surprised |
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Further on, the train
surprised a housewife at her Sunday morning toilet. She had rushed to
the doorway to see what was hap-pening and it was apparently not until the
last coach had passed and she saw herself in the cynosure of several pairs
of male eyes on the observation platform that she realized she was standing
there in her scanties.
Elsewhere along the line,
cows came up to the fence to see the excitement. On the return trip, some
fishermen on a small lake near Akron Junction nearly cap-sized their boat
when one of their number stood up to point to the train.
Usually on their "Iron
Horse Gallops," the railroad fans are all over the train, in the cabin of
the locomotive, hanging out of the windows,etc. The older the coach-es, the
bumpier the roadbed and the more smoke they inhale, the better they like it.
In this respect their style was somewhat cramped last Sunday as the Central
gave them some of its air-conditioned coaches and you don't open the windows
on them. |
| Ticket Dated 1853 |
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At LeRoy, Earl E. Bloss,
a car-penter of that village as well as a railroad fan, boarded the special
and presented to President Shap-ley an unused excursion ticket on the
Canandaigua-Niagara Falls Railroad from LeRoy to the Falls,dated August 24,
1853.
Among railroad fans who
made last Sunday's "Iron Horse Gallop" were Edward G. Hooper of Balt-imore
Md., assistant secretary of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and president of
the national society; L. Newton Wylder of Lima, Peru, who happenned to be in
Buffalo on business at the time, and Rogers E. M. Whitaker of the magazine
New Yorker's staff, who came from New York City to make the trip.
Whitaker has travlled an
est-imated 500.000 in railroad fan trips, 375,000 miles since in 1936 when
he started to keep a tab on mileage. It is not unusual for him to hop a
plane to some distant part of the country just for the privilege of riding a
few miles on some antiquated railroad |
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