Shortly after Train Festival 2011, WRC made a quick trip to Benton Harbor, MI to visit Eden Springs Park, home of the legendary House of David Amusement Park. WRC delivered two Cagney locomotives, one to Art Sullivan for his railroad in New York, and the other to Carey Williams for use at the new Eden Springs Park.

John Rimmasch talks with both Art and Carey about their respective locomotives, and Carey gives us a brief history about Cagney locomotives as well as the House of David.

WRC had the opportunity to attend Train Festival 2011 in Rock Island, IL. John Rimmasch had an opportunity to meet other show participants, including locomotive crews from Nickel Plate No. 765, Leviathan No. 63, and Flagg Coal No. 75. We are pleased to present this as our first half-hour episode.

You will note that we get a brief view of the Carey Williams Cagney locomotive at the start and end of this episode. Stay tuned for our next episode which will feature more of this Cagney at its new home in Benton Harbor, MI.

Our next show appearance is planned to be at the 2011 Live Steam Regional Convention (Titled: 7½″ Gauge & Beyond) held at the Hesston Steam Museum. The convention is planned for September 23-25, 2011. You can find more details about the convention at DiscoverLiveSteam.com or a special page on the Hesston Steam Museum website.

This is the conclusion to the Steve Lee Interview. Steve has a project he’s working on, and we’d like your help. Watch the video first to find out the details. When you’ve finished that, click on this link here, or find a new option available under the “Contact Us” menu item.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsN_POg3o_A

John E. Rimmasch, WRC Chief Executive Officer, sits down at the Cheyenne Botanical Gardens for a friendly conversation with Steve Lee who recently retired from the Union Pacific Steam program earlier this year. As Steve is now enjoying retired-life, the main topic is history, ranging from Steve’s late father who was a World War II veteran, to railroading history and historic railroad preservation. With the historic ex-Union Pacific No. 1242 nearby, Steve and John talk a little bit about the history of that locomotive, as well as a few memories of sister locomotive No. 1243 before its placement in the Durham Western Heritage Museum in Omaha, NE.

We are very grateful to Steve for taking the time to sit down with us. We hope you enjoy Part 1 of this two-part series.

Although we have drastically changed the appearance, the most significant change is the merger of wrrc.us with projects.wrrc.us. That’s right, there is no more separate “WRC Projects” page. We felt it best to consolidate both sites into a single site as it would be easier to manage and take up a little less server space. (It also helps us count the statistics easier.)

That said, it is important to realize that any bookmarks you had to specific pages on either of the web sites will probably not work correctly anymore. There are two reasons for this: First, the unique identifiers (which are contained in your bookmarked links) for each post/page had to be changed to prevent conflicts with other information during the merge. Second, there are a number of pages and postings that we either have yet to import into the new system, or we feel are too outdated to even include.

From now on, the address “http://projects.wrrc.us/” will now simply redirect to “http://wrrc.us”. Much of the information is now organized into any one of the menu options shown at top. We also have an archive of all of our past postings, however, internal site links contained within those postings have not yet been converted, so please do not expect them to work. The site search tool found at the top right area of every page also works very well to find information.

Additionally, this web site will now detect the use of smart-phones and other mobile devices and automatically change to a mobile-friendly page layout.

There may still be a few bugs here and there to iron out. Please let us know via the contact us page if there are problems outside of what has been discussed here.