John West is certainly another person who can relate stories of travel on the former IRCA as he & George Werner ran many successful charters down there. I was fortunate to be on one in 1975.
I kept going back after my first trip in Nov., '71 because it was such a friendly place for Yanks. If they saw that you were interested in what they did for a living & were halfway decent around steam, they'd get out of the seat & let you have it for hours.
My favorite locomotive down there was not one of the Baldwins, but a Krupp, number 174. I fired her for miles in '71 on a mixed local and then got to run her between Agua Caliente & Fiscal in March of '74.
I had ridden the daily passenger out of Guatemala City to Rancho, some 60 odd miles. The local was waiting for the passenger to clear so that they could leave town & head up the hill so I lost no time in getting off the coach & into 174's cab. Both the crew were guys that I had ridden with before & the engineer, Roberto Loyo proudly told me that his train was actually over tonnage for the 3.3% grades on the way back to Guatemala City. He got us up the hill easy enough & we stopped for soft drinks @ Progresso while getting orders & then proceeded. I asked Roberto if he'd let me run the engine & instead of replying, he just got off his seat, climbed up on the tender & walked the cartops back to the caboose. leaving me on my own. I couldn't get into too much trouble as it was all uphill to the next waterstop. While the fireman left his seat & squatted low in the doorway when we came to the one tunnel, I felt I had to stick where I was & stay with the engine. I remember how badly my eyes burned from the exhaust until we got out the other end. We ran into serious feedwater trouble later in the day, getting on the time of number 1, the passenger & limped into Guatemala City well after dark. By then, neither Sellers injector would pick up & they actually pulled the fire right about the time we got a green signal to enter the yard. No water in the glass & just a little spit out of the bottom tricock.
174 was still in service when Dave Sell & I visited Guatemal again in Spring of '75. She was the more modern type of Krupp and had a front-end throttle. Her reverse quadrant was mounted up close to the grip of the lever giving the imprssion of being very short, but actually was not. Loved that machine...on the '71 trip while firing her, we ran several miles at over 30 mph, pretty good on 40" drivers.
