Port Jervis Gets Big Holiday Gift
Operation Toy Train will bring Port Jervis a large gift when it stops in the city for the first time on Dec. 12, at 3 p. m., says Rudy Garbely, an organizer of OTT. The program uses old train equipment to collect and distribute toy donations for Toys for Tots, a U.S. Marines program serving disadvantaged children in southern New York and northern New Jersey on the holidays. Along with collecting donated toys, the train will bring five of 15 historic train cars that will soon be added to the Port Jervis Transportation History Center planned to open next spring.
PJTHC is a collaborative venture involving OTT, the Outdoor Club of Port Jervis, Friends of Port Jervis Art & History, and the Tri-States Railway Preservation Society. The Outdoor Club has been preparing the designated site by Pike Plaza around the Erie Railroad turntable for displays and events. PJTHC will offer transportation displays, live events and films, all making use of railroad equipment.
The five cars that will arrive on Dec. 12 include four boxcars and a caboose, all of which are well traveled for a variety of purposes. One of the four boxcars that will arrive on Dec. 12 will be Boxcar No. 1775, built in 1965 by the Pennsylvania Railroad and named for the year the U.S. Marine Corps was founded. It was insulated to carry any climate sensitive cargo but frequently carried bottled beer, Garbely said.
“It was rebuilt as Conrail No. 368191 in August of 1992 and became Conrail’s ‘Safety on Rails Theater’ (S.O.R.T.), touring the Conrail system in support of Operation Lifesaver,” he said. “The interior of the car was remodeled as a theater, complete with a movie projector to show railroad safety films to everyone from schoolchildren to first responders. During its life as the S.O.R.T. theater car, this specific boxcar appeared in Port Jervis in the 1990s during the much-publicized steam locomotive trips in the area.”
Later donated to the Military Transport Association, it was painted in a camouflage pattern for OTT.
“The car retains its original 1990s theater configuration, and will be used to show movies and historic films once it arrives in Port Jervis,” Garbely said.
Another of the four boxcars was originally built in 1972 in Berwick, PA, to carry auto parts, such as doors and panels, between auto assembly plants, said Garbely. CSX Transportation donated the car, with its original Conrail paint job to the PJTHC in 2020 for interactive displays.
“Once in Port Jervis, it will be restored to Conrail colors, representing the thousands of similar boxcars that traveled through Port Jervis regularly from the 1970s through 1990s,” Garbely said.
Another boxcar that will arrive for the PJTHC will be the 50-foot XAF10X boxcar that was built in Milton, PA, in 1974, as one of thousands of bright yellow cars produced to remedy the nationwide boxcar shortage. It was designed to run on all sorts of tracks, including tracks running through Port Jervis, where its kind was likely a common sight, according to Garbely. Its successful special features were later added to gondolas, flatcars, and other railroad equipment needed in the industry.
Boxcar No. 1947 is numbered for the year that the Toys for Tots Foundation was founded, although it was built in 1979 in Springfield, Oregon, said Garbely. The 50-foot long, 5,277-cubic-foot capacity boxcar was originally assigned to haul rolls of paper throughout the northwestern United States. It landed in storage in Michigan in 2015, and Wells Fargo Rail, which then owned it, donated it to Operation Toy Train in 2018. Donations provided mechanical refurbishment and winter camouflage paint, Garbely said.
The B&O bay window caboose (pictured on top) was built by the Fruit Growers Express in Alexandria, VA, in 1980, and donated to OTT by CSX Transportation in 2018 to expand volunteer capacity. Its original paint will be restored by PJTHC.
For more information about PJTHC, see www.OperationToyTrain.org.
For the OTT train schedule, see www.OperationToyTrain.org/schedule.
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