Re: EBT

In Rockhill right now — I'm doing this from memory, so someone else will have to check my work — the railroad has the sole surviving wood boxcar and one of the remaining steel boxcars in service. One other steel boxcar is sitting on the turntable escape track, where FEBT is using it for storage and plans eventually to restore it. I believe two more steel boxcars survive, more or less, in the Mount Union yard. And two steel boxcars have been cut down and converted for passenger service.

Also in service is the EBT tank car (I think there was only ever the one — a tank mounted on a flatcar). And one flatcar remains in its original configuration, although at this exact moment it happens to have a K-4 boiler sitting on it in the car shop. There are, I think, five flats that have been converted for passenger service, and two more rusting in the yard in Mount Union. Also in use in Rockhill are the two homemade cabooses and the scale-test car.

I'm not an expert on what equipment was sold to other railroads. I believe some of the Tweetsie cars started out as EBT flats, others as hoppers. And several cars — flats, one or two boxcars, a hopper or two — are in an odd little tourist attraction in Cool Springs, W.Va., where the owner must once upon a time have entertained notions of creating his own Knotts...

—Lawrence

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Lawrence Biemiller
Washington, D.C.