Well this has been really bugging me.

I called a friend who is another son of a PRR railroader who collects old stuff from the Pennsy, C&O,B&O, and Nickel Plate, like timetables and freight schedules from the past hundred years. He's looking but it may take awhile. He too thinks (after some quick checking) that the number 1262 was on an aging Atlantic type or possibly a B6 Switcher on the Eastern Division at that time. He also has some material on the wreck and I linked him this thread to look at as well. Its hard to find all of that type of info frankly.

Here's the problem. The Pennsy was a monstrous railroad that not so humbly called themselves the "Standard Railroad of the World." They had some justification for this, but in one area they were anything but standard.....and that was, sadly, in engine numbering. Where other lines used blocks of numbers for build runs of specific types, for reasons known only to god, the PRR used random numbers! Even worse? Yeah, it gets worse. After an engine was scrapped, the number was often reused by another entirely different type.

What I AM absolutely sure of is that the never was a Mikado numbered 1262 and that the probability of it being another type would be remote. The only other candidate at the time for a possible type would have been a Pacific K class which was eventually used in freight as well as passenger service and in its various classes from K2 to K5 (mainly K4) was one of the Pennsys most famed engines. HOWEVER....I can't find a that number anywhere in the Pacific class info I have and neither could Jimmy Blundo.

I'm willing to bet this is what happened:

Most of the wreck stories were taken from one story called into the times much like they are today. Notes taken etc., then relayed in. Others copied them. If a local paper had it first, they also had it "lifted" by others for the next edition. Note how hard it is to read numbers on freight steamers in service and then think how easily you could mistakenly see an 8 as a 6. The report was a different story but for a news piece the error was probably never caught and if it was......did it really matter?

I'll hear back from Jimmy in a few days I figure. I hadn't talked to him in a long time so we had a nice visit. His Dad was also an Engineer with mine on the Pennsy Panhandle Division but Carl was killed in a wreck in the fog over around the Ohio River when his freight, CP6, out of Columbus bound for Conway yards in PA., rear ended a switcher swapping cars on a siding, a signal malfunction.

Spaw