Some like models; one bought entire Pullman car
TUCKAHOE — At the Tuckahoe Transportation Heritage Festival a few weeks ago, railroad enthusiasts demonstrated the size of their love for all things-rail related.
For Kenny Kincaid of Upper Deerfield Township, that love was measured in a replica of the Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Line, a G-scale, or Garden-scale, model train on an oval track in the grass.
The bright silver train — three cars in all — went round and round the track playing “On the Way to Cape May.” G-scale trains are replicas from 1/20th to 1/32nd the size of the real trains.
Kincaid’s set ran past a tiny station marked Winslow Junction.
“On the original PRSL, as it was known, these were called Budd cars,” Kincaid explained of his Pennsylvania Reading Seashore Line set. “They ran these back in the 1950s and they ran from Camden down to Ocean City, Cape May and all the other shore points.”
Kincaid, quite obviously, is a train enthusiast.
“I have loved trains since I was a kid,” he said, smiling. “I saw these one time. My brother bought me a set and I went nuts ever since.”
P.J. “Paul” Mulligan of West Cape May stands roughly the same height as Kincaid, but his passion is not scaled down.
He owns an actual Pullman car circa 1927 that sits on the side rails at Tuckahoe Station, about a hundred yards away from where Kincaid set up his model train.
His car is named Mineral Springs.
While the hundreds of spectators who showed up for the train festival could walk by and look down at Kincaid’s hobby, they actually could step inside Mulligan’s.
In the refurbished Pullman car, Mulligan’s wife, Michele, his brother-in-law Steve Bistak and Bistak’s wife, Paula, were talking to and giving tours for all the train buffs and the curious who wandered through the car as part of a tour of a few different rail cars that reside at Tuckahoe Station.
Why would you want to own an old train car? “Me, myself? I don’t,” Michele Mulligan said, smiling. “You’ll have to ask my husband.”
Brother-in-law Steve piped up, “When I first saw this train car, I thought he was out of his mind, and that’s a polite way of stating that.” Pistak conceded, “He has made tremendous progress, unbelievable progress.”
“If you had seen this car three years ago, concrete floors busted up, ceilings falling down, broken glass. He used what, 10,000 pounds of sandblasting material? He hired a guy to do the sandblasting on the interior, but he had to shovel it all out when he was done so he could paint it,” Bistak said.
“The outside he did by hand with sanders and grinders,” Michele added, making sure to point out an additional fact. “It’s not something I would have decided to do,” she said, laughing.
She and Bistak may have been questioning Paul’s sanity in his choice of hobby, but their underlying pride shone through.
Michele said she is proud of the work her husband has done and that she did help, varnishing all the window frames and the tables and some of the painting.
“I do all the brushwork,” she said. “I yell at him a lot, I don’t know for what,” she said, smiling again.
“Every inch of the outside has been ground down so he could paint it,” Bistak said. “The amount of work is absolutely unbelievable. I’m impressed with him, but I would not tell him that to his face.”
“If anyone is interested in having a presentation on the history of trains in this area or on the restoration of trains,” Bistak said, contact Paul Mulligan.
Of course, Michele, Steve and Paula were all there volunteering during the Tuckahoe festival, talking up the work and the history to all the people who stopped in to get a look inside the old and refurbished cars.
And that’s when Paul wandered back into the car.
So, why do you want to own an old train car? “Because I’m cuckoo, I guess,” he said.
“The history of it kind of captured my imagination and the cars were here on the railroad for years and I felt I just wanted to see it pushed along and made into an operating part of the railroad,” he said.
Mulligan wanted to be “able to tell the story of the times it served, the passengers that rode in it, and particularly, I like to say, coupled up here, heavyweight parlor, two P70 coaches, is kind of reminiscent of the first half of the 1950s — named trains that traveled between Atlantic City and Philadelphia.
“They would have had a parlor car on each train, much like this one. I’m trying to somehow find a picture of this car because it was based in Philadelphia. It had Atlantic City assignments. I’m still hunting,” he said.
Mulligan said the named trains, like the Sea Breeze, and several others per day to Philadelphia, as well as the Nellie Bly to New York from Atlantic City, all had cars like his.
“You had premium travel up to 1956 to Atlantic City,” he said.
The railroad used his particular car for roughly 70 years in different capacities.
“This car, amazingly, is in service just short of 40 years. It goes into service in July 1927 and gets pulled out of service — what the railroad calls white-lined — in March 1967. Four decades,” Mulligan said. “Then it spends the next three decades operating as a bunkhouse for maintenance workers.”
“The thing about these Pullman cars, they’re built like battleships. The gauge steel on these things, even after 40 years of use, the railroad is … seeing they’re structurally still good cars. The idea a lot of the railroads came up with was to downgrade them and make them into something that supports maintenance operations. In the case of Mineral Springs, it then spends 30 years with this main room that would have been home to about 16 workers on bunks.”
The other area became the crew chief’s office and living area “so he didn’t have to live with the roughnecks.”
Mulligan explained he has been “involved with the railroad” for some 30 years. When he and his wife were on a vacation in 1991 and out on a ride on Route 9, they saw some train equipment parked along the road on a siding. To say it turned Mulligan’s head would be an understatement.
“It scared the heck out of her, but I spun the car around to check out what it was all about. Thirty years later here I am,” he said.
Aside from the family volunteering some time, he has had a few colleagues help out and that once they got rolling on Mineral Springs, they started doing work to refurbish other cars at Tuckahoe Station.
“We’re trying to bring as many of these artifacts to life,” he said.
He enjoys the annual Tuckahoe Transportation Heritage Festival (canceled last year due to the pandemic.)
“It becomes that little milestone if we compare what the car looked like on tour two years ago, the last time it was open house, versus now. It was pretty spartan in there.”
One more question for the full-scale train lover.
Was it more expensive to buy the car or to refurbish it?
Mulligan laughed out loud.
“As every boat owner says, ‘the cheapest day is buying it.’”
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff