ARM Trip Report

On the Road with the “JANE MARIE”

  It has been awhile since we did one of these, but the car has been traveling. This year the Private Car Owners Convention was held at the B & O Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. This year was the 25^th anniversary convention and plans were to make it a special event and it certainly was. The idea of parking the Jane Marie at this historic site was too much to pass up, as was the special train that would get us there. Three cars from our museum attended the event. The America, the Promontory Point and the Jane Marie. The America left a week ahead and joined us in Chicago. All three cars traveled the same route going from Tucson to San Antonio via the Sunset Route and then north to Chicago on the Texas Eagle.

All three cars were together in the 19 car special out of Chicago. We traveled on routes not normally used by passenger trains and ran only during the day. The scenery was gorgeous, the fall colors were really great, lots of red, orange and gold in the trees and  there was actually water in the rivers. They do not really have mountains in the east, they call them mountains but they are really just hills. They do however have lots of tunnels, some of which are very narrow. At one point we were concerned about scraping the side view mirrors on one very tight curved tunnel. The route into Baltimore was via Cumberland, Harpers Ferry and Ellicot City.

We spent four days parked at the museum with absolutely premier parking. The three cars from the Arizona Railway Museum were right in front of you as you entered the museum grounds. We got a lot of good press from the folks who visited and passed out a lot of our brochures. Many of the people we talked to say they come to Arizona but had not heard about our museum.

Convention activities included seminars on brake systems, electrical systems, a talk by the President of the AAR and representatives from Amtrak and Via Rail to answer questions. There was also a tour of the Amtrak shops at Wilmington, Delaware.

The special train back to Chicago was via the high speed northeast corridor between Washington and Perryville, then on to some ex-Pennsy and ex-NYC lines which are now operated by the R.J. Corman company with an overnight stop in Clearfield, PA. Next morning we headed for Pittsburgh and followed the route of the B & O Capitol Limited back to Chicago.