Invitation to the Coming Out Party for the NS Heritage Locomotives
on Evening of July 2, 2012 at the Historic Salisbury, NC Depot
Eastern Railroad News Online Magazine (ERN), Progress Rail Services(PRS), and M.T.H. Electric Trains invites you to a special reception on July 2, 2012, from 5 till 11 PM at the Historic Salisbury Depot in Salisbury, North Carolina, and to celebrate this occasion as a kick off for two days of commemorating the spectacular 20 Norfolk Southern Heritage Locomotives.
The Reception is intended to provide an evening of relaxation, entertainment, dinner, and good old railroad times for guests arriving for the July 3 and July 4 Heritage Locomotive Family Portrait at the North Carolina Transportation Museum (NCTM). The Reception will provide guests with a location that is trackside to the Norfolk Southern mainline and North Carolina DOT passenger train operations, while facilitating socializing among friends, industry representatives, staff from Eastern Railroad News Online Magazine, as well as officials from MTH,Progress Rail Services and Norfolk Southern.
The Norfolk Southern Lawmen band will be on hand and begin playing at 5 PM, with food service available on sitebeginning soon thereafter (for a separate fee) and ending at 10 PM. At 6:30 PM ERN, Progress Rail and MTH will provide short presentations that will precede a production by Norfolk Southern’s J. Allen Rider, Manager Locomotive Engineering. Rider isTHE MAN behind the Heritage Locomotive project and he oversaw the heritage railroad selection process and the paint designs for each engine. Mr. Rider will offer a presentation about the Heritage Locomotive project from inception through the final unit’s release. The Lawmen willplay off and on throughout the rest ofthe evening.
Guests will have ample opportunity to “mingle” and “graze” with heritage designers, the painters, and others involved in this outstanding project. Also, model railroaders will have an opportunity to discuss the potential for model railroad replicas of these Heritage locomotives with Mike Wolf, the president of MTH.
NCTM will have representatives on hand to provide information and site maps, register guests for the following days’ events and to hand out event lanyards for those guests who have pre-paid. Signing in at the reception will be easy and most likely will save lots of time spent in line the next morning with hundreds of other guests waiting to sign in and see those spectacular locomotives.
The reception is open to everyone and is family-friendly. A $5.00 fee gains entry to the reception or for $15.00, you gain entry and are treated to a menu of Southern fair from Green’s Catering, including: Hand-Pulled Pit-Cooked Barbequed Pork with our special sauce; Southern-Style Deep-Fried Chicken Pieces; Molasses Baked Beans; Hot and Crispy French Fries (cooked freshly on demand!); Homemade Marinated Slaw; Buttery Corn and Fresh Dinner Rolls. Drinks will include: Freshly Brewed Southern Sweet and Unsweetened Iced Tea; Iced Water and Fresh Lemonade and Cheerwine, one of Salisbury’s hometown favorites.
Artist, Andy Fletcher, whose drawings were the inspiration for the Norfolk Southern Heritage Program, will also be on hand to distribute signed copies of posters containing all twenty of the locomotives.
All of the evening’s events will take place at the Salisbury Depot, located at 215 Depot Street in Salisbury, NC. Built in 1908, restored to its original grandeur, and re-opened in May 1993, the Station offers a beautiful complex in which to hold a variety of events. From the forty foot cathedral ceilings with arched wooden beams, to the original mosaic tile floor, you will be in awe of the magnificent architectural details of the Depot it is right on the busy NS mainline!!!
Please RSVP and purchase tickets for the event and meal orders from the NCTM web site, at http://www.nctrans.org Tickets will also be available the night of the event on site for cash only purchase.
Eastern Railroad News Online Magazine is a Steel Wheels Publishing, a digital only publication covering railroad news and features in Eastern North America. The publication is available at http://easternrailroadnews.com and provides readers with Daily News content as well as monthly features and columns.
Progress Rail Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc., is a leading supplier of remanufactured locomotive and railcar products and services to the railroad industry, operating one of the most extensive rail service and supply networks in North America. Progress serves customers through a network of more than 150 locations across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, with more than 5,500 employees. Progress Rail Services is headquartered in Albertville, Alabama, though constructed and painted all the NS EMD SD70ACe Heritage Locomotives at its Muncie, IN plant.
M.T.H. Electric Trains, founded in 1980 by Mike Wolf, has become one of the largest and most diverse manufacturers of model trains in the United States. The company originally began as a mail order toy train retailer before establishing itself as a model railroad manufacturer of classic tin-plate reproductions from the first half of the Twentieth Century. You can count on MTH to produce models of the Heritage Locomotives in at least two or three scales.
The N.C. Transportation Museum, located in historic Spencer Shops, the former Southern Railway repair facility, is located just five minutes off I-85 at Exit 79 in Spencer, N.C., and about an hour from Charlotte, Greensboro or Winston-Salem. The museum is part of the Division of Historic Sites and the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources.