However today I'm far away from my photo archive and nothing in my cloud storage seems compelling enough to post. However a trip to a museum yesterday involved something with a surprising relation to trains and in a stretch to the Nickel Plate Road. So for today I'll extend the Wordless Wednesday format a bit.
At the fantastic USS Alabama Battleship Park in Mobile, Alabama is of course the WWII BB-60 USS Alabama but it also contains the WWII submarine USS Drum. On our tour of the sub in the engine room my son quickly recognized the maker of the 1600hp diesel engines, Fairbanks-Morse.
Fairbanks-Morse produced diesel engines for marine use and was a favorite of the US Navy for many years. To railroad historians and modelers Fairbanks-Morse was also a producer of diesel locomotives from the 1940's until the mid 1950's.
The Nickel Plate Road favored their yard diesel model the H-10-44 and H-12-44, rostering a total of 31. These engines were distinctive due having a tall roofline atypical of most switchers, this was a result of the tall and unusual opposed piston design of the engine itself. The NKP FM engines could be found working on the old Wheeling at the Huron docks or Zanesville, but as far as I know none wandered down to the Adena area.
Although the tour did not descend into the lowest deck of the sub where the engines rested, the main deck at the middle top of the engine provided a gap to look down on these huge unique engines.
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