ALL ABOARD: A picture nearly 50 years old of the Kinzua Viaduct
is featured for May 2006 in the calendar published annually by the
Salamanca, N.Y., Rail Museum.

The viaduct is a natural for the calendar, of course, since it
features all things railroad in the southern tier of New York and
the northern tier of Pennsylvania.

The Rail Museum, located at 170 Main St., Salamanca, each year
publishes a calendar featuring antique photographs, as a
fund-raising project for the upkeep of the facility.

The viaduct photo is from May 1958 and shows Andrew Kinzua
Stauffer watching an excursion training crossing the bridge. Yes,
his middle name truly is “Kinzua” – so dubbed because his father
was bridge inspector when the original bridge was built in 1882.
His father, Charles Stauffer, fell to his death one day while
inspecting the bridge.

“Andrew had driven in the last rivet on the structures and had
been asked to remove the first rivet at dismantling of the bridge
scheduled for shortly after this picture was taken. Ironically, the
bridge was spared and became a tourist attraction eventually
carrying the trains of the Knox and Kane Railroad until Mother
Nature stepped in and blew the structure down about three years
ago,” according to the calendar.

The accompanying text adds: “Incidentally Mr. Stauffer went on
to become bridge inspector for the Erie Railroad.”

The calendar, a “must” for every train buff in the region, also
includes other scenes that would be familiar to Pennsylvania
residents.

For August, the photograph is of a train station at Carrollton,
N.Y., a few miles east of Salamanca where the Erie Railroad’s
Bradford branch left the main line of the Erie. One photographs
shows the Erie’s station at Carrollton; the other photo, circa
1920s, is a panoramic view of railroad activity in the area.

One unusual picture from the 1960s shows an Erie-Lackawanna
train which was transporting several hundred patients from a
Gowanda mental health facility to a facility downstate in “near
secrecy.”

The caption continues, “… it was only by chance that Erie alum
Doug Smith, then night city editor at the Buffalo Evening News,
learned of the movement over a police scanner. His shift over at 7
a.m., he sped to Hamburg to shoot this once-in-a-lifetime picture
from the South Park Avenue overpass.”