The Complete 2101 36 Mins #SRP-2101 $29.95 The year after the nation’s bi-centennial, The Chessie System leased 2101, painted over the Freedom Trail colors with bright yellow and set in motion a publicity campaign to promote better highway crossing safety practices. The show starts in Baltimore and traces 2102’s run west along the Potomac. Leaving Cumberland the Chessie faces two of the steepest and most challenging main line railroad grades in Eastern America: the 1.74% to Sand Patch and the 2.18% 17-mile grade to Terra Alta. In this tape, Sunday River captures 2101 on each of them with her complete train of 19 heavyweight cars without helpers of any kind. This is one rip-snorter of a steam railroad film. Sunday River cameras were staring down the stack from helicopters and pacing beside the engine less than three feet from the drivers. An inky column of smoke shot hundreds of feet in the air, joined almost the whole way by a screaming exhaust of dead white from the safety valves. The engine speed dropped to a walk but the pace never faltered on either grade. This film represents one of only two such demonstrations of raw unassisted railway power in the Sunday River library. (The other is “Thunder In The Alleghennies”.) The Terra Alta line is used now only rarely. Safety and management caution would make it impossible to duplicate either of these incredible displays today. 2101 was created almost overnight from a derelict in a Baltimore scrap yard. The operators of The American Freedom Train had contracted to use Southern Pacific engine 4449 for most of their nationwide tour on the nation’s 200th birthday celebration. It was found, however, that 4449’s clearances were too wide and high for some tunnels and bridges in the eastern U.S. and the initial decision was to use diesels in the East. At the last minute a group of volunteers offered to make 2101 whole again and donate their time to the project. You’ll see the fruits of their labor in the second part of this tape. It shows the maiden runs of 2101 following reconstruction. It starts in Birmingham as 4449 draws alongside and the flags are passed to 2101. On her first day with the Freedom train we see her rolling north along the west bank of the Hudson river through the dramatic Storm King Narrows, out of the famed Hoosac Tunnel and along the Connecticut and White Rivers of Vermont. Superb pacing thru the snow. Engine and train are followed across New Hampshire and into coastal New England. Pacing continues as winter gradually dissolves into spring. back