Bill Bauer and his recordings.

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Bill and his wife Mary Bill Bauer were rail fans from Louisville, Ky, as was I. I met them circa 1957 when I joined the Ky Railway Museum. Bill had the ham radio hobby and got into tape recording railroad sounds around 1956. As steam faded, he recorded sounds on B&O, ICRR, and N&W. (Too bad he missed L&N steam, especially the M1 2-8-4s). His recordings included both on-train and line side efforts, much like O Winston Link was doing but mostly without the inside connections that Link had.

In those years, the reel to reel recorders had to be powered by either a bank of automobile batteries or from an inverter running off the battery in his automobile. For the on-train efforts, this meant setting up the recorder in the baggage car of a train, lugging in several batteries and boxes of blank tapes. I recall his set-up on L&N’s Centennial Special in 1959 where he had the recorder mounted on a table and the microphone(s) taped to the outside of the baggage car. (He recorded probably 90% of that run from Louisville to Nashville & return.) The L&N Centennial audio is now on a CD with that name.

On N&W, he made a similar effort aboard trains 26 and 25 in May or June, 1958 between Cincinnati and Williamson. However, that was without any official cooperation and the conductor on one of the trains forced him out of the baggage car. The Eastbound run was behind engine 610 but I haven’t found notes to indicate which J was pulling the Westbound train. Those recordings are pretty good but trains 25 & 26 didn’t provide much of a challenge for the J’s so the stack talk is mostly at stops. I haven’t decided if I will release that one yet.

Bill and Mary Bill also did on-train recordings aboard trains 5 & 6 with E2a 578 and those are very good as he captured the train over much of it’s run, including fast running out of Bluefield, VA to Tip Top and beyond and several station stops, up and down grades, over trestles and through tunnels. In short, a typical day on the run to Norton.

But they recorded much more, spending three days on Blue Ridge, station activity at Christiansburg and Williamson, chasing Y6;s on mine runs, riding the Blacksburg Mixed and more. Some of the mine runs are on the CD “Chasing the Pigeon Creek Shifter” which is available from the N&WHS commissary.

On the ICRR, Bill recorded steam power at Louisville, Central City, Paducah and points in between. He also made on train recordings of an excursion from Louisville to Paducah on May 14,1960 with 4-8-2 2613, the same engine L&N had leased in Oct, 1959 for their Centennial Special.

On B&O, they rode a local freight behind a Q4 Mikado and released an LP record titled “Local Freight” that really didn’t sell well. I think they should have done an LP or N&W or IC but I think Bill may have been a bit intimidated by Link at the time. So, the recordings sat in their original boxes for decades.

Bill passed away over 20 years ago but his wife, Mary Bill, still resides in Louisville. Last week, she gave me the tapes and I drove up there to pick them up. 

-Jim Herron
Herron Rail Video