Brody, I got a big kick out of your map of Fort Wayne's Lawton Park/ Fourth Street / Clinton Street area. You show the route how the NKP 767 was moved across the street and onto live rail. It is a pretty good representation of how that happened. As a surveyor (then) and one of the original board members of the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, Inc., it fell to me to figure out how to get the locomotive across the street. Fourth Street was a minor street so it was no big deal to close it for about 8 hours. Lost in the reporting is the fact that the return to service of NKP 759 in 1968-1973 was the inspiration that it was indeed possible to bring a mainline steam locomotive back from "the dead". Up until that time, all mainline steam was still an "extension" of locomotives that were never really retired, like the CN 6218, UP 8444, RDG 4-8-4's, Burlington steam, and even Southern 4501- out of service for two years between the K&T and Paul Merriman. NKP 759 was out of service from 1958-1968, a full decade. So it was the first one to be brought back from the grave and the second one was the Daylight 4449 in 1975 after nearly twenty years. The 765/767 was brought back from the grave after 21 years. It is hard to believe that it is now 38 years since the 765 began her second career.
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