WRECK OF THE OLD 97 SPECIAL EVENT

Danville Amateur Radio Society and Lynchburg Amateur Radio Club Inc. in a joint venture are doing a Special Event Station on September 27 using call N4W on 7297 14297 khz ssb and 7097 and 14097 khz on CW. QSL via W4DF More later.

Click here, The details are posted here on the Danville Amateur Radio Society web site.

A little history of the Old 97.

Train numbers are assigned numbers to scheduled operations, like airline flight numbers.

Simply, trains were (and still are) a scheduled run from one point to another with some kind of regular frequency.

Southern Railway train number 97 was a mail train run from Washington to Atlanta.

The locomotive and cars are assigned to this train out of a motive power and rolling stock pool.

So, the Engine number has nothing to do with the train number.

A few railroads would place placard on the engine designating what train that engine is pulling, but to my knowledge, Southern Railway did not use this.

The engine that just happened to be pulling train 97 that day was locomotive #1102, a 4-6-0 engine built by Baldwin Locomotive works in Philadelphia. #1102 rolled out of the factory less than a year before the wreck.

Now what a 4-6-0 means is there are 4 small un-powered wheels up front, then 6 powered driving wheels under the locomotive boiler, and no trailing un-powered wheels.

The term for this style wheel arrangement is a ten wheeler.

The hundreds, if not thousands during the later part of the ninetenth century and the first decade of the twentieth built this type of engine.

The train consisted of a baggage car two mail handling cars and an express car.

Southern Railway was contracted by the government to run mail trains for the US Mail.

The railway was obliged to pay a penalty if these trains were late, giving Southern the incentive to run them fast.

Also Southern operated a fast express service, like today's FEDEX or UPS, giving the reason for the express car on the end.

There were no cabooses on these trains.

All the men aboard were either Southern Railway or US Postal employees.

The postal employees sorted mail in the cars while in route.

After the wreck, postal employees quickly gathered and took charge of what mail that was not destroyed.

Also, engine #1102 was salvaged, repaired, and served Southern for 27 more years, before it was scrapped.

The circumstances that caused the wreck would be a whole another story.

The contract with the government that Southern ran train #97 for expired in 1907, so Southern discontinued running this train.

Jim KB4XK

Linksof interest

Blue Ridge Institute Balland of the Old 97

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