LB2016.15.2

LB2016.15.2

Taken from a height, this wonderfully composed image shows a well attended celebration* held next to the hand-powered "Armstrong" turntable (installed in 1870) in the Belfast train yard at which the mortgage notes of $104,000 for their two new diesel engines (Nos. 50 and 51) were ceremonially burned on a pyre of old railroad ties (June, 1950). This made the railroad a fully diesel-powered operation. A large group of well-dressed men watch a pile of carefully stacked railroad ties burning next to the turntable. An observation car and a locomotive, with three guys sitting atop its front end, stand on their angled track sidings in the middle ground, arranged as if for compositional focus. Beyond is a cluster of houses and, higher up the hill, wood frame factory buildings and warehouses. * The new 660 horsepower diesel locomotives not only were able to provide 60 percent more traction power than any of the three 1901 vintage Manchesters still owned by the B&ML, Nos. 19, 20 and 61, but also did so at a savings in fuel and labor costs of up to 80 percent! This new economy of operation turned the B&ML from a money loser into a profitable line almost overnight. The line did so well with its new power, in fact, that it was able to pay off the $104,000 cost of the new engines by June, 1950, which occasioned a well attended celebration held next to the hand-powered "armstrong" turntable in the Belfast train yard at which the mortgages for the two engines were ceremonially burned on a pyre of old railroad ties. This is one of a series of photographs staged to be used for an article in Life Magazine in 1950.