At a full gallop, Great Western #90 charges through the Carpenters Crossing at Black Horse Road in Paradise Township, with Strasburg Engineer Brendan Ziegler at the throttle. The powerful decapod is just completing a run-by with a Lerro Productions photo freight and Engineer Ziegler is literally closing the throttle just as I click the shutter to grab this image. This view of Number 90 illustrates very graphically the high center of gravity of this locomotive. You can see the significant daylight gap between her chassis and the bottom of her boiler barrel. Also notable is the size of her firebox. The 90 is not only one of the larger steam locomotives you'll find in tourist service in the US, she's also one of the most traveled. Four or five years ago, the Strasburg folks revealed that the 90 had run over 300,000 miles since making the journey from Colorado to Pennsylvania. That's further than the distance from the earth to the moon....or well over 33,000 trips to Paradise and back!
Images of surviving Great Western Railway locomotives, painted in the liveries of their original owner, operating on photo charters on tourist railways today.
