Steam Over Scranton: The Locomotives of Steamtown (American Steam Locomotives)

In October 1942, a young Ohio railroad enthusiast named Robert Richardson, who had been drafted into the United States Army, returned from furlough at his home in Akron by way of the Southern Railway to the army's Camp Forest near Tullahoma, Tennessee. Seated next to Richardson in the coach, as it turned out, was a professor of history from the University of Kentucky at Lexington. In casual conversation, the professor learned that young Richardson had an abiding interest in railroads and railroad history.

The professor had been researching the life of a man who had died of alcoholism in a log cabin in Kentucky in 1799, he told Richardson. This man had invented a steam locomotive. Had Richardson ever heard of a John Fitch or of the locomotive he had built, a small working model, the professor inquired?

"YOU KNOW WHERE IT IS?!?!" the professor leaped to his feet and shouted in a voice that turned heads the length of the car.

Yes, Richardson assured him, in the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society Museum in Columbus, a stairway led down to the basement, and on a landing halfway down this stairway rested the little Fitch steam locomotive gathering dust. It had passed down through the family to the hands of a son-in-law of Fitch's who had settled in Worthington, Ohio. Somehow interested parties had learned in the 1850s that he had this historic little working model steam locomotive in his Worthington home and acquired it for the museum.

The professor became so excited he nearly left the train and reversed direction to go to Columbus to see the little engine, but eventually calmed down and continued his trip. Then he became angry because he recalled that he had written that Ohio museum, among many others, inquiring about the Fitch locomotive, and they professed to know nothing about it.

John Fitch invented the steam railroad locomotive during the 1780s and demonstrated his little working model of it before President George Washington and his cabinet in Philadelphia. His idea was to use a full-scale version of his little engine to haul wagons--freight cars, actually--across the Allegheny Mountains where the United States faced an almost insuperable problem of supplying, through a nearly roadless wilderness, Major General Arthur St. Clair's campaign against hostile British-supplied Indians of the Old Northwest.

Fitch's little locomotive operated on track made of wooden beams held in place by wheels with flanges on the outside of the wood rails, rather than inside as later became standard railroad practice. It featured a copper boiler mounted sideways on the frame and employed a sort of grasshopper lever motion to transmit power to the wheels. Fitch also invented a steam pump, a steam dredge for use in and around Philadelphia, and a steamboat that he demonstrated on the Schuykill River. He and a man named Rumsey who had invented a steamboat about the same time argued about who had been first, but both preceded Robert Fulton by many years. Fulton married into a wealthy and powerful family and managed to seize fame as the inventor of the steamboat while the much earlier Fitch and Rumsey had been forgotten.

Only a couple of feet wide and long, John Fitch's steam locomotive is the oldest such machine in the world. The steam railroad locomotive was an American, not a British, invention. But the United States of the 1790s remained primarily an agricultural society unappreciative of machinery and invention. Fitch was a man who lived ahead of his time, and his pioneering locomotive, as well as his pioneering steamboat, led to no further development of the invention. Soon both had been forgotten.

Early in the 19th century, an Englishman named Richard Trevithick also invented a steam locomotive, and within a short time the British invention led to the development of well-engineered railways. Americans, then ignorant of Fitch's pioneering inventions a quarter of a century earlier, began importing English locomotives until American foundries could meet the demand. The Delaware and Hudson Canal Company brought the first four steam locomotives into the United States from England, and it and other companies sent civil engineers abroad to study British railroad lines.

The first railroad locomotive built in the United States that actually served on a railroad was built in 1830 by the West Point Foundry Association of New York City for the South Carolina Railroad at Charleston, South Carolina. It bore the name "Best Friend." In those early years of the industry, almost any small foundry and machine shop had the capability of building a steam locomotive, and many did.

Meanwhile, English precedents did not work well in the United States. Built in well-developed and comparatively densely populated England, the English railways proved not to be well suited for American geography. Americans soon found the track over-engineered and too expensive to construct in the sparsely settled and little-developed American environs. Americans soon would devise their own cheaper systems of track construction. Starting with English prototypes, Americans also modified the locomotives with the addition of pilot trucks to help the locomotives around curves, "cowcatchers"--now known as "pilots"--cabs of different designs, headlights, and other features, so that by the 1850s American locomotives generally appeared distinctly different from English and other European locomotives. That divergence in design would continue.

From the late 1820s through the 1860s, American locomotive design progressed through a sequence of wheel arrangements, expressed by the Whyte system of classification. This system assigns a first number to a nonpowered pair of pilot wheels on a single axle, or four wheels on two axles, followed by a dash, then a figure denoting by the pair the wheels connected to a drive mechanism, followed by a dash, then a figure denoting the wheels supporting the rear end of the locomotive, again paired by the axle and generally two or four. Many locomotives lacked a trailing truck so that figure would be zero, while switch engines characteristically lacked a pilot truck, so that figure likewise would be zero in such instances.

Among the earliest locomotives, the 4-2-0 wheel arrangement proved popular, only one wheel on each side of the locomotive being powered by drive rods. Soon, however, American practice developed the 4-4-0, which became so characteristically an American locomotive type during the mid-19th century that it became known as the "American" type or the "American Standard." However, as the need for more powerful locomotives developed, it was not long before locomotive designers added another axle with a pair of powered drive wheels to create the 4-6-0 and also the 2-6-0. The next step would lead to the 2-8-0. Prior to 1900, as John White pointed out, it was generally possible to increase locomotive capacity satisfactorily simply by increasing boiler and cylinder size or by raising the steam pressure the locomotive used. Thereafter, more complex developments such as superheaters, boosters, mechanical stokers, feedwater heaters, and other appliances became necessary to increase capacity while maintaining weight and other limitations. The 20th century began with the development of myriad additional wheel arrangements of locomotives. From the 4-4-0. the Atlantic type 4-4-2 developed. The "consolidation" or "consolidated" type 2-8-0 freight locomotive in time led to the Mikado type 2-8-2. The old "ten-wheeler" 4-6-0, so readily usable for freight, passenger, or mixed trains, would evolve into a larger 4-6-2. Ultimately locomotive design would embrace huge articulated locomotives as large as a 4-8-8-4 and duplex drive locomotives such as the 4-4-4-4.For the 19th century (at least to 1880), John White's seminal American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1880 provides the best overview, although Gustavus Weissenborn's American Locomotive Engineering published in 1871 also provides some excellent information. Alfred Bruce's The Steam Locomotive in America provides an excellent history of American locomotives after 1900.

The bibliography accompanying this narrative, coupled with the bibliography in White's work, guides the interested reader to the extensive literature on the subject.

The Steamtown NHS collection includes 16 different wheel arrangements of locomotives and one geared locomotive, a Shay. The collection includes two saddle tank engines of the 0-4-OT type, one 0-6-OT, one 0-6-OF or "fireless" locomotive, one 0-6-0 with sloped tender, and one 2-4-2T. These mostly had served as industrial switchers. Of the road locomotives, the collection includes one 4-4-0, the only 19th-century engine in the collection, dating from 1887. Two 2-6-0 locomotives are in the collection, one with an all-weather cab for use along the Canadian border in upstate New York, the other one of only two Delaware, Lackawanna & Western steam locomotives to survive, and thus the only locomotive in Scranton on tracks of what had been its own railroad. The collection has one Prairie type 2-6-2, similar to the two-truck geared Shay from a logging company. Four classic 2-8-0 freight locomotives, each of a different design and different history, are in the Scranton yards. The Steamtown NHS collection of heavier duty, main line 20th-century steam motive power includes one American (and three Canadian) 4-6-2 Pacific types, one 4-8-2 Mountain type, one 2-8-4 fast Berkshire type, a 4-8-4 Northern type, and one massive 4-8-8-4 Union Pacific Big Boy. Four of the wheel types in the park's collection are represented only by Canadian locomotives; two 2-8-2 Mikado types, one 4-4-4 Jubilee type, one 4-6-4 Hudson type, and one 4-6-4T Baltic Tank.

Alexander, Edwin P. Iron Horses: American Locomotives, 1829-1900. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1941.

__________. American Locomotives: A Pictorial Review o Steam Power, 1900-1950. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1950.

Bruce, Alfred W. The Steam Locomotive in America: Its Development in the Twentieth Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1952.

Bryant, H. Stafford, Jr. The Georgian Locomotive; Some Elegant Steam Locomotive Power in the South and Southwest, 1918-1945: An Episode in American Taste. New York: Weathervane Books, 1962.

Collias, Joe G. The Last of Steam. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1960. Includes material on Union Pacific Big Boys, pp. 177-187.

Comstock, Henry B. The Iron Horse; America's Steam Locomotives: A Pictorial History. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971.

Conrad, J. David. The Steam Locomotive Directory of North America. 2 vols. Polo: Transportation Trails, 1988.

Farrell, Jack W. North American Steam Locomotives: The Berkshire and Texas Types. Edmonds: Pacific Fast Mail, 1968.

Farrell, Jack W., and Mike Pearsall. North American Steam Locomotives: The Northerns. Edmonds: Pacific Fast Mail, 1975.

Hauff, Steve, and Jim Gertz. The Williamette Locomotive. Portland: Binford & Mort, 1977. The Heisler Locomotive. Lancaster: Benjamin F.O. Kline, Jr., 1982.Hirsimaki, Eric. Lima, The History. Edmonds: Hundman Publishing, Inc., 1986. 351 pp. [Contains rosters of all Lima Shay & Rod engines]

Howard, F.H. "Pilots . . . The Symbolism of the Art." Trains, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jan. 1956): 38.

Johnson, Ralph. The Steam Locomotive: Its Theory, Operation, and Economics Including Comparisons with Diesel-Electric Locomotives. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1942.

King, E.W. "Concerning Stephenson, Walschaert, Baker, Southern, and Young." Trains, Vol 44, No. 7 (May 1984): 34-41.

Koch, Michael. The Shay Locomotive: Titan of the Timber. Denver: World Press, 1971.

LeMassena, Robert A. Articulated Steam Locomotives in North America, Vol. 1. Silverton: Sundance Books, 1979. [No Vol. 2 has yet been published.]

__________. American Steam, Vol. l. Denver: Sundance Publications, Ltd., 1987, 256 pp.

List of Steam Locomotives in the United States. Denver: Centennial Rail, Ltd., 1986.

Locomotive Dictionary. 1909 edition. New York: The Railroad Age Gazette, 1909.

Locomotive Dictionary and Cyclopedia. 5th ed. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Co., 1919.

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice. 7th ed. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Co., 1925.

Lucas, Walter A. 100 Years of Steam Locomotives. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1957.

_________. Locomotives and Cars Since 1900. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1959.

__________. Locomotives, Limited and Locals. n.p.: Published by the author, 1977, 136 pp.

Pennoyer, A. Sheldon. Locomotives in Our Lives. New York: Hastings House, 1954. [Chapter XII, pp. 99-102, deals with preserving D.L. & W. Camel No. 952.]

Plowden, David. Farewell to Steam. Brattleboro, Vt.: The Stephen Green Press, 1966. [See pp. 114-151. The rest of the book deals with steamships.]

Ranger, Dan, Jr. Pacific Coast Shay: Strong Man of the Woods. San Marino: Golden West Books, 1964.

Ranger, Ralph D., Jr. "Shay: The Folly That Was Worth a Fortune." Trains, Vol. 27, No. 10 (Aug. 1967): 32-49.

Reisdoff, North American Hudsons: The 4-6-4 Steam Locomotive. Henderson: Service Press, 1987.

Sinclair, Angus. Development of the Locomotive Engine. New York: Angus Sinclair, 1907.

Swengel, F.M. The American Steam Locomotive, Vol. 1. The Evolution of the Steam Locomotive. Davenport: Midwest Rail Publications, 1967.

Taber, Thomas, III, and Walter Casler. Climax: An Unusual Steam Locomotive. Rahway: Railroadians of America, 1960.

White, John H. American Locomotives: An Engineering History, 1830-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.

__________. A Short History of American Locomotive Builders in the Steam Era. Washington: Bass, Inc., 1982.

Builder: Baldwin Locomotive Works
Date Built: March 1929
Builder's Number: 60733

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 20 x 24
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 180
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 50
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 29,375

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons):
    Oil (in gallons):
    Water (in gallons):

Remarks: This is a typical switch engine or switcher with a sloped back tender.

History: The only typical switch engine in the Steamtown collection, equipped with the only sloped tender in the collection, Jackson Iron and Steel Company 0-6-0 No. 3 rolled out of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in March 1929, but instead of selling it to some railroad or industry, the Baldwin company retained the locomotive for switching duties at the massive Eddystone Plant. Baldwin had built many locomotives at the Eddystone plant since 1910, but it was not until October 1929 that the company moved all locomotive production there from its cramped Philadelphia shops. One may surmise that the little 0-6-0 was retained by the company for work in enlarging the Eddystone plant for its absorption 7 months later of all of Baldwin's locomotive production.

Ironically October 1929, the month of Eddystone's ascendency, also featured the stock market crash of Black Friday. With the onset of the Great Depression, Eddystone's locomotive-building business nearly vanished overnight.

In 1939, Baldwin offered its first standard line of diesel locomotives, all designed for yard service. Two years later, American entry into World War II destroyed Baldwin's diesel development program when the War Production Board dictated that Alco and Baldwin produce only limited numbers of diesel yard switch engines while the Electro-Motive Division of General Motors Corporation won the assignment to produce road freight diesels, which gave the latter an advantage over its competitors in that line in the years that followed World War II.

Business declined drastically in the postwar years as Alco (American Locomotive Company) and E.M.D. seized the bulk of the diesel market from Baldwin, Lima-Hamilton Corporation, and Fairbanks- Morse. Baldwin also misjudged the market, concentrating on products of little interest to railroads. In July 1948, Westinghouse Electric, which had teamed with Baldwin to build diesel and electric carbodies, purchased 500,000 shares, or 21 percent, of Baldwin stock, becoming the largest shareholder. Baldwin used the money to cover various debts. Westinghouse Vice President Marvin W. Smith became Baldwin's president.

Whether this corporate shuffle had anything to do with it, or whether Baldwin, moving to develop an improved line of diesel locomotives, wanted to project a more modern image, in 1948 the company sold one of its own switch engines, No. 26, to the Jackson Iron and Steel Company of Jackson, Ohio, where the locomotive became the steel company's No. 26.

Jackson Iron and Steel Company was a fairly old firm. In 1906, Moses Morgan, John F. Morgan, David D. Davis, John J. Thomas, and Henry H. Hossman combined their resources to finance construction of a new pig iron furnace in Jackson, Ohio. First they purchased the mine and equipment of the Jackson and Muncie Coal Company and then, on August 6, 1906, incorporated the Jackson Iron and Steel Company.

Baldwin Locomotive Works switch engine No. 26 exhibited its original paint and lettering at the Eddystone Works in Pennsylvania where the company retained the locomotive as its own shop switcher.
Collection of Thomas Lawson, Jr.

Two miles west of Jackson on the banks of a small creek known as Givens Run, near the coal mine, which was known for its production of fine Sharon No. 1 coal, the new company commenced construction of its new furnace. Construction proceeded throughout 1907, but slowed with the impact of the sharp little depression that hit mines and industries especially hard that year, and the furnace was not blown in until October 6, 1908. It was the twenty-third, and probably the last, pig iron furnace to be built in Jackson County. The stack was hand filled and auxiliary equipment included three boilers, three hot blast stoves, and one blowing engine. Furnace capacity was 40 tons per day, all of which was cast in sand beds. The product was known as "JISCO [from the initials of the company] Silvery Pig Iron."

As the years passed the company made many improvements. In 1914 the firm adopted a stock bin system, larry car, and skip hoist and built two more boilers and one more stove. In 1917, with America entering World War I, the firm added a fifth stove and a sixth boiler, but still cast the pig iron in a sand bed. More extensive remodeling took place in 1923, and a larger expansion, in 1928, was just in time for the Depression. However, even in the depths of the Depression the furnace received one more remodeling, with three Cottrell Precipitators being added to clean the furnace gas.

World War II followed, along with yet another remodeling in 1942, which included dismantling the old stack and construction of a new one. The company at that time made many other improvements, including construction of a sixth hot blast stove, remodeling of the engine house, extension of the ore trestle, purchase of two new diesel-electric cranes, installation of Carrier air conditioning to dehumidify the hot blast, construction of another battery of boilers, and purchase of a diesel-electric switch engine.

It remains a mystery why, having used a diesel-electric switcher, in 1948 the Jackson Iron and Steel Company purchased secondhand from Baldwin a recently overhauled coal-burning 0-6-0 steam switch engine with a slope-backed tender. Possibly it was a matter of fuel economy, since the Jackson company owned a coal mine but not oil wells and refinery. Whatever the reasons, the company acquired Locomotive No. 26, which had switched Baldwin's Eddystone plant. Some time between 1945 and its sale in 1948, Baldwin had apparently given the locomotive a thorough overhaul. Eventually, Jackson Iron and Steel Company renumbered the locomotive 3.

While the history of the use of the switcher by Jackson Iron and Steel Company is unknown, presumably it switched empty cars into the plant and loaded cars out to the two railroads that served the plant, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Detroit, Toledo and Ironton Railroad. When it last operated for the steel company is unknown, but it apparently remained there for nearly 31 years. In 1979, Jerry Jacobson purchased the locomotive. It remained in Jackson until June 1983, when it moved to Grand Rapids, Ohio, then in July 1983 to the Mad River and N.K.P. Railroad Museum at Bellevue, Ohio. It remained there until January 1986, when that museum traded the locomotive to the Steamtown Foundation for Canadian National Railways 4-6-0 Locomotive No. 1551. However, the locomotive remained in Ohio while the Steamtown Foundation transferred its collection to the National Park Service and went out of business, and it was not until January 1990 that the locomotive arrived in Scranton.

A total of about 112 0-6-0 type switch engines with tenders survive in the United States. Typically, they have a brakemen's footboard across the front of the locomotive instead of a pilot, and a similar footboard across the rear of the tender. Generally they featured one of three types of tenders: a standard rectangular tender, a slope-backed tender, or a Vanderbilt tender with its cylindrical tank. The 0-6-0 was probably the most typical of all switch engines; the next most typical was the larger 0-8-0 type. Usually, such locomotives switched freight and passenger cars at major terminals and yards.

Condition: While stored in Bellevue, Ohio, and up to the time it moved to Scranton, this locomotive reportedly was serviceable. In January 1990. it entered the shop at Steamtown National Historic Site for minor work preparatory to assigning it to hauling yard tours during the summer season of 1990.

Recommendation: As the only typical switch engine in the Steamtown collection, the locomotive is recommended for restoration to operable condition. As the Steamtown collection has other locomotives that represent trackside industrial concerns such as a steel works, it is desirable to restore this particular locomotive to represent its role as a switch engine at Baldwin's Eddystone Plant, an association that will lead into interpretation of the locomotive-building industry and especially the history of the Baldwin firm, probably for much of its history the most prominent of all American locomotive-building firms.

Ahrens, Chris, Chief Mechanical Officer, Steamtown National Historic Site. Telephone communication with author, Mar. 26, 1990.

The Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia--The Story of Eddystone. Philadelphia: Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1928.

Conrad, J. David. The Steam Locomotive Directory of North America, Vol. 1. Polo: Transportation Trails, 1988: 107.

Directory, Iron and Steel Plants. Pittsburgh: The Andreson Company, 1925. [See entry for Jackson Iron and Steel Co.]

Directory, Iron and Steel Plants. Pittsburgh: Steel Publications, Inc., 1935: 50.

Directory, Iron and Steel Plants. Pittsburgh: Steel Publications, Inc., 1948: 59.

Dolzall, Gary W., and Stephen F. Dolzall. Diesels from Eddystone: The Story of Baldwin Diesel Locomotives. Milwaukee: Kalmbach Books, 1984.

The Story of Eddystone: A Pictorial Account of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1928. Felton: Glenwood Publishers, 1974. [This is a reprint, with added material, of a 1928 publication by the Baldwin Locomotive Works.]

A Story of SPEED in Blast Furnace Construction. Jackson, Ohio: Jackson Iron and Steel Company, 1942: 3.

Westing, Fred. The Locomotives that Baldwin Built. Seattle: Superior Publishing Company, 1966.

Builder: Vulcan Iron Works, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Builder's Number: 1679
Date Built: January 1911

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 17 x 24
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 140
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 44 (possibly reduced to 38)
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 21,720

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 2
    Oil (in gallons): not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 1,500

History: Railroads played an important role in opening up to industry and development not only the Western frontier but also the more remote areas of long-established states. Berlin Falls, New Hampshire, is an example. Thomas Green had attempted to use this obvious source of water power on the Androscoggin River as early as 1826, but without success because his location was too far from market in an era of animal-powered transportation. Such development had to wait until groups of businessmen in Montreal, Canada, and Portland, Maine, organized to bring the new form of transportation to Berlin Falls.

After many trials and tribulations, Maine governor Hugh Anderson signed a charter of the Atlantic & St. Lawrence Railroad on February 10, 1845. Cooperating Montreal businessmen obtained a charter for the St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad on March 17, 1845. Together, the two companies proposed to construct a railroad between Montreal and Portland across the province of Quebec and the states of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Of course, the companies now had to sell stock, send out surveyors and civil engineers, select routes, hire construction forces, arrange to have cross-ties cut, order and purchase rail, locomotives and cars, and perform all the other myriad tasks necessary to turn a railroad from a creation on paper to a functioning system of wood and iron, steel and steam.

Directors of the Atlantic & St. Lawrence Railroad broke ground in Portland on July 4, 1846. It took until July 22, 1851, for construction to allow the first train to enter Gorhan, New Hampshire--over 91 miles of track. Construction resumed and reached Northumberland (today's Groveton) on July 12, 1852, passing through Berlin Station en route. Meanwhile, the St. Lawrence & Atlantic built southeastward from Montreal, and the two companies had agreed on August 4, 1851, to join at the town of Island Pond, Vermont. The first regularly scheduled through train between Montreal and Portland operated on April 4, 1853. Meanwhile, the directors had negotiated the joining of the two railroads between Portland and Montreal into the Grand Trunk Railway Company of Canada, which they accomplished through a 999-year lease dated August 5, 1853, but retroactive to July 1, 1853, roughly three months after completion of the through railway. Thus Berlin, New Hampshire, took its place on the map of railroad stations in the United States, for the first several months as part of the Atlantic & St. Lawrence and thereafter as a stop on the Grand Trunk Railway.

While all this occurred, a group of Portland businessmen formed a partnership under the name H. Winslow & Company in 1852 to purchase land on the west bank of the Androscoggin River at Berlin, New Hampshire, where they built a dam and erected a saw mill containing a gang saw and two single saws with a total daily capacity of 25,000 board feet of lumber. In 1853 the company built a store and a large boarding house for loggers and mill workers. Most significant, in 1854, with business booming, the company extended a short rail branch from the Grand Trunk to the sawmill plant. Apparently the lumber firm relied on the Grand Trunk's locomotives to switch cars in and out of the new industrial spur, but when Grand Trunk engines were unavailable, the firm employed oxen to move empty and loaded cars on the spur to the Grand Trunk. Later the company built its own private railway around the plant consisting of wooden rails covered with iron straps, with timber cars powered by horses and mules. This primitive little plant railway proved dangerous to operate, regularly sending employees to the company hospital, until the company replaced it with an ordinary railroad.

Eventually Nathan and Hezekial Winslow, who had lent his name to the enterprise, sold their interests to J.B. Brown, and Josiah Little died, leaving of the original partners only J.B. Brown and Little's widow. They took in men named Clemens, Bingham, and Warren in 1866 to form a new partnership--the Berlin Mills Company. Whether formally or informally, the railroad spur came to be called the Berlin Mills Railway, and eventually the plant trackage also came under that name. In 1868, William Wentworth Brown and Lewis T. Brown bought out not only J.B. Brown but also Clemens, Bingham, and Warren, establishing a family-owned firm that would survive for over a century.

Harvey Brown of the Brown Company, owner and operator of paper mills at Berlin, New Hampshire, personally took the throttle of Berlin Mills Railway Engine No. 7, a 2-4-2T Vulcan, hauling several flatcars with the "BCX" reporting marks of the Brown Company, converted temporarily into excursion cars for a chemical conference whose members were visiting the plant on June 22, 1926. The photographer caught the locomotive between Berlin and Cascade from a highway overpass. Trainmen wore borrowed Boston & Maine Railrod uniforms for the occasion, since the Berlin Mills Railway normally hauled no passengers.
Collection of Otis J. Bartlett.

By 1875 the Berlin Mills Company alone was daily sending a special lumber train of 22 cars to Portland, Maine. In 1888 the firm added a kyanizing plant to treat spruce lumber. By that time, in March 1888, the partnership arrangement that operated the company could no longer keep up with its growth, and the partners found it necessary to incorporate the Berlin Mills Company under the laws of Maine. That year the company also built the Riverside Groundwood Mill, whose 18 grinders rapidly ground wood into pulp. In 1891, downriver and across the stream, the company built the Riverside Paper Mill equipped with two machines that could produce 42 tons of newsprint daily. At the same time the Brown-family-controlled Burgess Sulphite Fiber Company built a plant on the east bank of the river to turn out wood fiber. In 1892 the Berlin Mills Company produced its first newsprint from pulp from the pulp mill.

Sometime amid all this progress, the Berlin Mills Railway acquired its first small steam locomotive, a switcher the company referred to as a "shifter" locomotive. The exact identity of what must have been the Berlin Mills Railway's first Locomotive No. 1 has become lost in the slash piles of the past, but in October 1891, the railway purchased its Locomotive No. 2, a Baldwin 0-4-0T with 44-inch drivers. The company added No. 3, another Baldwin 0-4-0T, in June 1893, this one about half the size of No. 2.

The original lumber mill burned in 1897, but the company replaced it with a mill capable of turning out 200,000 board feet of lumber per day. In 1898 the Berlin Mills Company built an electrochemical plant, as well as the Cascade Mill with four 164-inch paper-rolling machines. In December 1899, its railway division replaced the mysterious Locomotive No. 1 with a second Locomotive No. 1, an 0-4-0T built by the Pittsburg Locomotive Works. Presumably the company retired its original Locomotive No. 1 to the scrap pile upon receiving the new engine of the same number.

The Berlin Mills Railway celebrated the new century by purchasing its Locomotive No. 4, another Baldwin 0-4-0T in 1901. This and the three other locomotives seemed adequate to handle the business until 1904, when the Berlin Mills Company erected a window frame mill capable of turning out 2,000 window frames per day, and enlarged the Cascade Mill in capacity by 200 tons of paper. As a consequence of this expansion, that same year the company purchased second-hand from the Hastings Lumber Company at Bethel, Maine, its first 2-4-2T locomotive, a Baldwin product of February 1900, that became Berlin Mills Railway Locomotive No. 5.

It should be noted that although the Berlin Mills Railway's first 2-4-2T was its sixth locomotive, that particular Whyte system type dominated the logging railroads of the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Maine. C. Francis Belcher, who wrote the history of those railroads, described the 2-4-2T type as "the most popular and durable engine used in the mountains . . ." but was wrong m assuming all were Baldwin products.

Second-hand 2-4-2T No. 5 must have impressed management and employees of the Berlin Mills Railway as a great improvement over the 0-4-0T type, for the company was destined to purchase four more of them. It purchased No. 6, its first newly built 2-4-2T, from the Baldwin Locomotive Works in January 1906. In March 1907 they bought another, the third to be designated No. 1. Upon its delivery the company probably scrapped the 0-4-0T that had been the second No. 1. But for reasons unknown, the Berlin Mills Railway purchased its final three 2-4-2T engines from the Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

An enlargement of Berlin Mills Locomotive No. 7 shows the little locomotive lettered, probably in gold or mustard color on both the cab and the saddle tank, "BERLIN MILLS RAILWAY." The little 2-4-2T looked spic and span, decorated with four American flags.
Collection of Otis J. Bartlett.

Berlin Mills Railway Locomotive No. 7 rolled out of the Vulcan Iron Works' erecting shop in January 1911 with builder's number 1679, featuring cylinders 17 inches in diameter with a 24-inch stroke and 44-inch-diameter drive wheels. (The Steamtown Foundation reported its builder's number was 1500, its cylinders 14 by 20, and its drivers 36 inches; Randolph Kean reported its builder's number to be either 1779 or 1500. All of these figures are believed to be in error.) Photographs made during the 1920s suggest that the company lettering on the sides of the saddle tank and below the cab windows on each side of the cab, which spelled out "BERLIN MILLS RAILWAY," may have been in gold leaf or in a mustard yellow imitating gold leaf. By that date, the locomotive bore no obvious trace of striping. Below the lettering, the sides of the cab also carried the locomotive's road number, apparently in the same color as the lettering.

In 1913, Locomotive No. 7 and its sisters were silent witnesses to the burning of the second sawmill plant at the Berlin Mills. The company chose this time to build as a replacement a "fireproof' plant of concrete with a slightly smaller capacity--150,000 board feet of lumber per day--milled by a single bandsaw instead of the previous pair. Apparently one reason for this retrenchment lay in the decline of the lumber industry, that, as far as the Berlin Mills Company was concerned, was far offset by growth of the paper business. The management of the Berlin Mills Company had gradually adopted a policy of producing itself the secondary raw materials the company needed. It produced not only lumber but the paper pulp needed to make paper. It eventually produced chemical byproducts, built its own plant at the Cascade Mill to produce aluminum sulphate used in sizing paper, built a press plant to make the steel ends for its fiber cores, and generally tried to be as self-sufficient as possible. By 1910 Scandinavian countries were producing kraft paper, and the Berlin Mills Company soon began producing it from pulp that came from a mill the company had built near La Tuque, Quebec, in 1909. In the process, the company gradually shifted away from its original emphasis on producing lumber to producing paper pulp from which it manufactured newsprint. Around 1917 it shifted away from newsprint production in favor of kraft papers and began also producing fine-quality bond papers.

It was during this 1917 expansion that the company purchased its second new 2-4-2T locomotive, its third of the type. It became a second No. 3. At this time the company probably scrapped the original No. 3, an 0-4-0T. That same year, World War I, which had begun in 1914, finally involved the United States. American as well as certain foreign customers of the Berlin Mills Company became increasingly anti-German, and when the United States entered the war, a wave of anti-German hysteria swept the nation. In that frantic atmosphere, self-proclaimed super-patriots attacked anything that seemed Germanic in character. They began to associate the name of the company, Berlin Mills Company, with the capital of Imperial Germany, and began to turn their business away from the company because of the innocent coincidence of the names; after all, the company had taken its name from the railroad station, which in turn was named for the Berlin Falls of the Androscoggin River. In response to this hysteria over anything even remotely Germanic, the directors on November 30, 1917, changed the name of the firm from the Berlin Mills Company to the Brown Company from the name of the family that owned it. The Berlin Mills Railway operated thereafter as a department of the Brown Company but retained its distinctive original name (under which it still operated in 1991). After the war, the Brown Company continued under its new name.

Eventual postwar prosperity led to the Berlin Mills Railway's purchase of its third Vulcan locomotive, 2-4-2T No. 8, built in May 1920. By this time the company produced many chemical products. As a byproduct, the electrolytic plant that produced chlorine used in bleaching papers also produced caustic soda. In 1908 the company ceased dumping waste caustic soda into the river and instead began marketing it as White Mountain Brand Caustic Soda. As another use for chlorine, the company began producing chloroform, much in demand as an anaesthetic in military surgery during World War I, and chlorides used in making military poison gas; vulcanizing rubber by a cold process; making artificial rubber and beginning in 1918, making carbon tetrachloride. In 1921 the company began turning out liquid chlorine, used principally in water purification, bleaching, and sewage disposal. In 1924, it started producing calcium arsenate, used by cotton producers to kill the boll weevil. Until 1914 the company had allowed the byproduct hydrogen to bleed off into the air, but beginning that year the firm used it to hydrogenate vegetable oils into the consistency of lard for use as shortening or as a frying agent in domestic cooking. A competitor halted that marketing with a patent-infringement lawsuit. During the war the company had built a plant to manufacture fiber powder containers for 6-inch guns. After the war the Brown Company used this plant to produce fiber-conduit to wrap underground electric cables. The market for this product spread rapidly throughout the United States and to Europe, and the company soon had to ship a full trainload of fiber conduit to Spain.

The list of new products being introduced seemed endless, and it was these that Berlin Mills Railway Locomotive No. 7 and her sisters switched around the plant trackage and down the spur line for shipment out over the Grand Trunk Railway. The Berlin Mills Railway's roster of motive power reached its peak during the 1920s--Moody's Manual of Investments for 1926 reported nine locomotives on the property to operate 3.75 miles of "main line" track (the spur to the Grand Trunk) and 13.75 miles of plant trackage, for a total track mileage of 17.50. The track consisted of a mixture of 65- and 70-pound (per yard) rail.

By 1929, the Brown Company had so expanded production that the railway division needed more motive power. The 2-4-2T type such as No. 7 finally had outlived its usefulness--the type was simply too small for the work now demanded of a locomotive, and the company sought heavier motive power from the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Locomotive No. 9, purchased in June 1929, and No. 10, bought after the beginning of the Great Depression in July 1930, featured the 2-6-2T wheel arrangement. They were, in effect, saddle tank "Prairie" locomotives. These engines apparently proved too heavy for the track of the Berlin Mills Railway, which as a consequence by 1932 had installed 72-pound rail and by 1933 had replaced it with 80-pound rail. Otherwise the 1930s were a decade of decline: The number of freight cars owned by the line dropped steadily from the 250 in 1932 throughout the rest of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; yard trackage peaked at 16.11 miles in 1932, 1933, and 1934 (for a total mileage of 19.86), but dropped steadily thereafter until the mid-1950s. As a separate division of the Brown Company, the Berlin Mills Railway generally employed between 62 and 77 people during those decades.

Some of the earlier 2-4-2T engines continued to work alongside the heavier 2-6-2Ts, but one by one the company retired or sold them. From a total of nine locomotives on hand in 1926, the number had dropped to seven by 1929, six by 1936, to five in 1942. The time came for Locomotive No. 7 during World War II, for in November 1944, the Brown Company sold this locomotive to the Groveton Papers Company at nearby Groveton, New Hampshire.

The Groveton Papers Company originated as the Odell Manufacturing Company, which built a pulp mill with two digesters in Groveton, New Hampshire, in 1891. The company installed its first paper machine in 1893 (destined to be replaced in 1912), and a second in 1895 (destined to remain in production, incredibly, until 1975).

Groveton Papers Company saddletank 2-4-2T industrial switcher No. 7 had several owners and probably appeared similar originally to the 2-4-2T built by the Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for The Ferguson Contracting Company. If so, later it suffered replacement of her hardwood pilot with a switchman's stepboard, the addition of steps from her pilot deck to her running boards and a lowering of the deck of her cab beneath the engineer's and fireman's seats. The photo above is from a Vulcan catalog.
Above, Colorado Railroad Musuem Library, Below, collection of Gerald Best, California State Railroad Musuem.

By 1901 the Groveton plant had sufficient yard trackage connecting with the Grand Trunk Railway to require a company locomotive, so to switch that yard trackage the Odell Manufacturing Company purchased from the Boston and Maine Railroad, on March 30, 1901, a third-hand 0-4-0 switch engine built in March 1884 as Eastern Railroad No. 15, which in 1890 had become Boston and Maine Railroad No. 115, named Binney. In November 1904, the Odell firm bought two more engines, second hand Boston & Maine No. 83, the Somerville, which became its No. 2; and on November 30, Boston & Maine No. 279, a genuine antique built by Hinkley & Drury in 1847 as Northern Railroad 4-4-0 No. 6, the Shaker, rebuilt in 1880 to an 0-4-0, sold to the Boston & Lowell Railroad in 1884 as No. 124, then sold back to the Northern Railroad in 1887 as No. 6, and later that year to the Boston & Maine as No. 279. This ancient piece of metal became Odell Manufacturing Company Locomotive No. 3.

In 1907 and 1908 Odell added a third paper machine, two more pulp digesters, and Hynie boilers. Paper machine No. 3 ranked at the time as one of the largest in the world. Business expanded accordingly, and in March 1912 the company, having scrapped engines No. 2 and 3 in 1910, purchased thirdhand its first 2-4-2T, a Baldwin product outshopped in January 1893 as Concord & Montreal second No. 25, which in 1895 had become Boston & Maine No. 725. This became Odell No. 4.

In 1913, the company built a bleach plant in order to enter the highly competitive market for white paper and bleached sulphite pulp.

In 1916, Odell company employees went out on a strike against the firm, and by the time the strike ended the company had been crippled and the town had lost most of its labor force; neither were to recover for nearly a quarter of a century. At the end of World War I the company did buy its only new engine, 0-4-0T No. 5, produced by American Locomotive Company at its Cooke Works in August 1918. Apparently management envisioned a postwar recovery which, as events turned out, failed to occur.

Beginning in 1919, the Brompton Pulp and Paper Company managed the Groveton plant, continuing to operate it at a minimal level until 1928. During that period, in 1921, the company scrapped its first locomotive, leaving it with only Nos. 4 and 5.

In 1928, the mill reverted to management of the Odell company, now owned by the Monroe family of Lewiston, Maine. The Monroes reorganized the Groveton plant as the Groveton Papers Company that same year. But the Great Depression began during the following year, and it became difficult to find enough business to keep paper machine No. 3 in service. After a decade of struggle, in 1939 the Monroes sold out to a family named Wemyss. Whether the new owners were merely lucky or prescient is unknown, but they put the long idle paper machine No. 3 back on line in 1940 and began turning out tons of paper products for which no market existed, storing the output in every available building in the town of Groveton. Of course, on December 7, 1941, the United States suddenly entered World War II, which created an instant market for the Groveton Paper Company's stored tons of paper products. Not only did military and government bureaucracy expand geometrically, but wartime priorities shut down much paper production or turned it to other military-related products. In November 1944, the Groveton Papers Company, in need of another 2-4-2T locomotive to replace its worn-out No. 4, built in 1893, purchased the Berlin Mills Railway's 2-4-2T No. 7. The company scrapped No. 4 in 945, which left it with Nos. 5 and 7. Groveton Papers Company did not renumber the No. 7 as its No. 6, so it apparently never had a locomotive No. 6.

After World War II, the Groveton mill experienced a short labor strike in 1946, but soon went back into production. During the early 1950s, while war raged in Korea, the company built a Semi-Chemical Plant that enabled the mill to use hardwood in the manufacture of pulp, which greatly boosted the economy of the area. A fourth paper machine installed in 1948 produced paper that the company converted to facial tissue and toilet tissue, as well as, eventually, napkins and towels. The paper business continued to change and evolve.

Groveton Papers Company retired Locomotive No. 4 on February 19, 1953, which left only No. 7 to switch the yard, and the latter clearly was nearing the end of its useful career. The company finally retired No. 7 on January 25, 1956, replacing it on April 17, with a secondhand 300-horsepower 45-ton General Electric diesel-electric locomotive built in September 1941.

The two surviving engines did not experience the burn of a scrapper's cutting torch. Eventually the company donated No. 5 to the town of Groveton, where it rests today in a small park.

In the summer of 1961, Francis Lamotte of West Lebanon, New Hampshire, organized a small steam tourist railroad called the Woodsville, Blackmount and Haverhill Steam Railroad. With Randolph Perkins and Donald McDonald, he spent two years planning the enterprise and on August 24, 1961, received permission of the New Hampshire State Public Utilities Commission to incorporate. The company issued stock to the amount of $100,000. It acquired abandoned right-of-way from the Boston and Maine Railroad extending from the end of the latter's operation in Blackmount to a place called Haverhill Station. This consisted of a stretch of about three miles of the old Woodsville-to-Plymouth main line of the Boston and Maine, in the heart of the White Mountains.

The Woodsville, Blackmount & Haverhill Steam Railroad then leased Groveton Papers Company No. 7, and by the spring of 1962 the new company had invested $2,000 in overhauling the engine. A retired railroader of Woodsville, Clyde O'Malley, became her engineer. The company also acquired a combination car from the Delaware & Hudson Railroad at Albany, New York, and a caboose from the Rutland Railroad, but due to a labor strike on the latter line, apparently never moved the caboose to the new trackage.

The new railroad was dedicated on Memorial Day, 1962, the featured speaker being F. Nelson Blount from Steamtown USA. That summer the Woodsville, Blackmount and Haverhill Steam Railroad operated its single locomotive and single car in round trips over three-quarters of a mile of track on Saturdays and Sundays during the summer months. The railroad operated again during the summer of 1963, but apparently that was the end of it.

The arched-roof Delaware & Hudson coach ended up on the Conway Scenic Railroad. Locomotive No. 7 remained idle for a number of years, though its owner did not move it back to Groveton. Then in 1969, the Groveton Papers Company delivered Locomotive No. 7 to the Steamtown Foundation at Bellows Falls, Vermont, as a donation to the foundation.

The two major corporations that once owned this locomotive went on to prosper after each had disposed of it. The Brown Company eventually was acquired by the James River Corporation, which continues to operate the paper mills at Berlin, New Hampshire, as of 1988; as one of its departments, the Berlin Mills Railway still functions. In fact, the railway took over additional trackage and acquired a large fleet of freight cars, as well as a number of diesel-electric locomotives. With this equipment, the Berlin Mills Railway reached its centennial year in 1990 (unless one considers 1954 to have been its true centennial).

The Groveton Papers Company also continued to produce paper. In 1968, Diamond International acquired the company and in turn was acquired by Sir James Goldsmith and associates, who sold out to the James River Corporation in 1983. This successor of the Odell Manufacturing Company also approached its centennial year, 1991.

The old 2-4-2T Locomotive No. 7, which served these corporations so well, survives as one of only four standard gauge 2-4-2T locomotives in the United States, a type once common on logging railroads. The National Railway Historical Society chapter in Atlanta, Georgia, owned one such engine that had belonged to a brick manufacturing company; a marine museum at Pensacola, Florida, exhibited another, and East Branch & Lincoln Railroad No. 5 rested in retirement at a ski area at Loon Mountain, New Hampshire.

Condition: Mechanical condition of this locomotive is unknown, but it is believed restorable to operating condition. A group of Steamtown Foundation volunteers cleaned and painted the locomotive in 1987.

Recommendation: Berlin Mills Railway Locomotive No. 7 is a fairly rare survivor of a once common type of locomotive used on logging railroads and industrial plant trackage, and it represents two New Hampshire paper manufacturing companies. The Berlin Mills Railway, still active nearly a hundred years after acquiring its first steam locomotive, and 134 years after its first rail was laid, has a long and unusual history for an industrial plant railroad. Researchers should prepare a report on the locomotive and should thoroughly investigate sources of Brown Company photographs of the engine in service, as well as other steam engines on the railroad. Researchers seek local sources of history to develop a more thorough understanding of the Berlin Mills Railway's history and of the Berlin Mills paper plant's history. The report should include the results of a thorough physical investigation of the engine, as well as of its various layers of paint, striping, lettering, numbers, and other decorations (unless it was stripped to bare metal before its last painting), equivalent to the physical history in a historic structure report. The report should also thoroughly investigate the history of the locomotive while in service for the Groveton Papers Company, and in particular ascertain whether or not the locomotive ever carried lettering of that company. Photographs of the locomotive on the Woodsville, Blackmount and Haverhill Steam Railroad indicate that the locomotive may have been repainted but was not lettered for that operation, and that fact needs to be confirmed, as well as whether or not the engine operated after 1963 on that line, and what happened to it thereafter until the Steamtown Foundation acquired it. The historian assigned to research and write this report should also seek out former engineers of the Berlin Mills Railway and the Groveton Papers Company to obtain oral history regarding operation of the locomotive. Upon completion of this report, the locomotive should be restored as Berlin Mills Railway No. 7, repainted, lettered and numbered in a historically accurate fashion for that railroad, with whatever color lettering and decoration documentary research and physical research determines was in use during the 1920s or earlier on engines of the Berlin Mills Railway.

Armstrong, Jack. Letter to author, June 5, 1988. Supplied partial motive power rosters (mostly diesel-electric) of the Berlin Mills Railway and Groveton Papers Company.

Bartlett, Otis J. Letter to author, April 14, 1988. Loaned photograph of Locomotive No. 7.

Belcher, C. Francis. Logging Railroads of the White Mountains. Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1980.

"Berlin Mills Railway." The Short Line: The Journal of Shortline and Industrial Railroads, Vol. 13, No. 5 (Mar. 1986): 6.

Bolt, Jeff. The Grand Trunk in New England. Toronto: Railfare Enterprises, Ltd., 1986: 8-51, 64, 65, 86, 87.

Fielding, Ed. "Short Line Equipment: Berlin Mills." The Short Line: The Journal of Shortline and Industrial Railroads, Vol. 7, No. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1979): 6.

________. "1979 Freight Car Survey." The Short Line: The Journal of Shortline and Industrial Railroads, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1980): 7.

Frye, Harry. Letters to author, June 1, 1988 and June 26, 1988. Supplied locomotive rosters of the Berlin Mills Railway, the Groveton Papers Company, the Whitefield & Jefferson Railroad, and the Johns River Railroad.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1979), Item No. 7 and locomotive roster entry.

Historical Committee. Berlin, New Hampshire, Centennial, 1829-1929. Berlin: n.p., n.d. [1929]: 40-45.

Kean, Randolph, The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays. Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, Publisher, 1973: 174.

Lewis, Edward A. American Short Line Railway Guide. Strasburg: The Baggage Car, 1975: 56.

MacDow, Shirley, of Groveton Paper Board, Inc. Letter to author enclosing a three-page typescript entitled "The Groveton Mill Location, A Historical Outline."

Mead, Edgar T., Jr. Telephone communication with author, Apr. 12, 1988."A Memory of Years Long Past." Lewiston (Me.) Daily Sun, Aug. 6, 1964.

Moody's Manual of Investments, American and Foreign: Industrial Securities, 1930. New York: Moody's Investors' Services, Inc., 1930.

O'Malley, Frank C. Letter to author, dated Apr. 19, 1988, enclosing copies of three news clippings and two photographs regarding the Woodsville, Blackmount & Haverhill Steam Railroad.

Quinn, Michael. "West Lebanonite Starts Own Steam Railroad Co." Valley News, n.d. [ca. June 1962] (Lebanon, N.H.).

Rice, D.M. Letters to the author, Dec. 20, 1988, Mar. 27, 1989, enclosing photographs, locomotive roster, map under separate cover, and answering many questions and providing much additional information on the Berlin Mills Railway and its parent company.

Smith, Arlie G. Letter to Edgar T. Mead, Jr., Mar. 30, 1970. Letter from vice president, Groveton Papers Company, to Steamtown Foundation, documenting donation of Locomotive No. 7 in December 1969.

Wallin, R.R. "The Shortline Scene." Extra 2200 South, The Locomotive Newsmagazine, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Jan.-Feb. 1972): 30.

Builder: Lima Locomotive Works
Date Built: December 1934
Builder's Number: 7625

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 23 x 28
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 260
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 80
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 40,900; with booster, 52,800

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 18
    Oil (in gallons): not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 12,000

Remarks: After delivery, engine was the subject of a New England wide name contest that resulted in it being named The Constitution. Engine has a superheater and a steam booster on the trailing truck.

History: Created by a consolidation in 1842 of earlier railroads, including one dating back to 1835, the Boston and Maine Railroad by 1920 owned 1,704 miles of track in Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire and leased an additional 527 miles of track of other railroads. As of 1917, it owned 1,131 locomotives, 1,900 passenger cars, and 22,887 freight cars, and would continue to serve as an important regional rail system.

The Baldwin Locomotive Works produced the first 4-6-2 type of locomotive in 1901, allegedly as an improvement on the 4-4-2 or Atlantic type, and because of that, plus the fact that Baldwin's first 4-6-2 was erected for export to New Zealand Railways on an island in the Pacific, the new type of locomotive came to be called a Pacific type. (Another point of view would have the 4-4-2 an improvement over the 4-4-0, and the 4-6-2 an improvement over the "10-wheeler" type 4-6-0.)

The Boston and Maine Railroad purchased its first 4-6-2 type locomotives in 1910, ordering a dozen of these locomotives from Schenectady. The company assigned these to the class P-1. In 1911 the company purchased another 40 of these Schenectady engines with some minor changes that resulted in their being classified as P-2-a types. In 1913 the company purchased another 20, with further variations that led to their being classified as the P-2-b. In 1916 came another 10 of a still different class, the P-2-c. In 1923 the company acquired a final 10 from Schenectady, these classified as the P-3-a, making a total of 92 Pacifics purchased from the American Locomotive Company's Schenectady Works.

On the Boston and Maine, the Pacifics became the mainstay of passenger service from 1910 until dieselization, replacing little 2-6-0 Moguls and 4-6-0 10-wheelers on the main lines and shunting them aside to branch line traffic. Some were modernized over the years with either Elesco or Worthington feedwater heaters and power reverse levers.

Meanwhile, the Lima Locomotive Works was developing a reputation for manufacture of exceptionally powerful main line steam motive power equipped with the latest improvements such as high-pressure boilers, feedwater heaters, and other mechanical innovations that led to their being called "superpower" steam locomotives. In 1934, the Boston and Maine Railroad contracted with Lima for construction of five locomotives of the 4-6-2 Pacific type, to be numbered in the series 3710 through 3714. Lima delivered these locomotives in December 1934. These first five Lima engines, which the Boston and Maine classified as their P-4-a type, worked so well that the company ordered another five from Lima in 1936. These, delivered in March 1937, proved to be the last Pacifics that Lima would ever build. The last five Pacifics acquired by the Boston and Maine varied slightly from the earlier ones and became the P-4-b class, Nos. 3715 through 3719.

The Lima Locomotive Works photographed the engineer's side of Boston & Maine Locomotive No. 3710 as representative of all of the engines in the series 3710-3714. This builder's photograph illustrated the original streamlining features of this class such as the smoke deflectors alongside the smokebox and the casing that concealed the steam and sand domes and whistle. Shortly after its construction, the railroad gave No. 37 13 the name The Constitution, which it carried on a pair of name plates mounted just below the running boards and above the third pair of drive wheels. This beautiful machine, well designed aesthetically as well as mechanically, is shown below, on her home railroad after the railroad had removed the streamlining of engines of this class. In this view the locomotive is temporarily out of service, with her stack sealed to keep out the weather. Above, Steamtown National Historic Site. Below, collection of Gerald Best, California State Railroad Museum.

Locomotive No. 3713 is, of course, one of that first group of Lima Pacifics, a P-4-a that cost the company $100,000. She was inspected by C. W. Bruening at the Lima plant on December 21, 1934. As originally delivered, the locomotive had a metal shroud concealing her sand and steam domes and had smoke deflectors alongside the smokebox (some varieties of which were colloquially referred to as "elephant ears"), and a single, deck-mounted air pump on the pilot deck. As thus delivered, the engine had a semi-streamlined appearance.

Locomotive No. 3713 and her sisters went into service hauling the most important passenger trains on the Boston & Maine, eventually serving between Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangor, Maine; between White River Junction and Troy, New York; between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine; and between Springfield, Massachusetts, and White River Junction, Vermont. She was designed to operate at a normal speed of 70 miles per hour. She carried sufficient coal to pull and heat a 14-car train about 250 miles, and enough water to last about 125 miles.

When the Boston and Maine took delivery of its second order of Lima Pacifics in 1937, it sponsored a contest among New England schoolchildren to name those 10 engines and 10 other passenger engines. The contest was open to any pupil in any community along the railroad and included students from kindergarten to the final year of junior high school. The railroad promised to paint the names on the sides of the locomotive and to attach to the locomotive a plate with the name of the boy or girl who suggested the name, as well as the name of his or her school. The contest elicited more than 10,000 names for the 20 engines. A 14-year-old named J. Schumann Moore of Lynn, Massachusetts, a student at Lynn's Eastern High School, suggested the winning name for No. 3713: The Constitution. Other winning names for the 10 Lima Pacifics were for No. 3710, Peter Cooper No. 3711, Allagash; No. 3712, East Wind; No. 3714, Greylock, No. 3715, Kwasind; No. 3716, Rogers' Rangers; No. 3717, Old North Bridge; No. 3718, Ye Salem Witch; and No. 3719, Camel's Hump.

Certainly The Constitution was among the more dignified names. Moore said he selected the name because it signified "the backbone of our country. Appropriate especially in that the railroads are the backbone of our transportation system." On December 11, 1937, the railroad held a christening ceremony in Boston's North Station. The railroad would hold two more such contests, one in 1940 and one in 1941, to name eight additional engines. For all 31 named engines, the engine name and the name of the contest winner were inscribed on a pair of large name plates mounted on the running boards on both sides of each engine above the drive wheels. Thus engine No. 3713 and her sisters acquired names, a practice more typical of the 19th than the 20th century in railroad operation.

After the country entered World War II in 1941, No. 3713 pulled many a 15- to 20-car troop train during the next four years. It was apparently during these wartime years that, for reasons unknown at present, the Boston and Maine removed both the shroud atop the boiler of these five locomotives, and the smoke deflectors alongside the smokeboxes. They may simply have been removed for routine servicing and, in the press of wartime conditions, were left off to avoid the time and labor of putting them back. About 1944 or 1945, the company added a second air pump on the pilot deck.

It was probably after the war that No. 3713 and her sisters were repainted and relettered in a racy style sometimes referred to as "speed" lettering because its slanted script gave an impression of speed. The "speed" lettering replaced the standard rectangular herald adopted by the Boston & Maine in 1927.

Following the war, No. 3713 and her sisters returned to handling the regular passenger traffic. Among their patrons were young campers headed for an outing in the northern woods. Toward the end of her working life, No. 3713 was equipped with special steam pipes and used to melt snow in the yards of North Station, and still later as a stationary steam power plant. She was last called into service during a flood. Whereas floods shorted out the axle-mounted traction motors of diesel-electric locomotives, the fireboxes of many steam locomotives rode high enough to be above flood waters so that steam locomotives could push through flood waters that diesels dared not enter. No. 3713 made her last run in 1958.

When F. Nelson Blount acquired No. 3713, he exhibited her first at South Carver, then Pleasure Island at Wakefield, Massachusetts, in 1960 and 1961. From 1962 through 1969, the engine rested on exhibit first at North Walpole, New Hampshire, then at Bellows Falls, Vermont, after which Steamtown loaned the engine to Boston's Museum of Science. The Boston and Maine's Billerica Shop overhauled the locomotive in 1969, repainting her in the original 1934 herald (pattern of 1927). Eventually, after some years in Boston, the engine returned to Steamtown during the mid-1970s.

The 4-6-2 Pacific-type locomotive is the type most common in the Steamtown collection, which in addition to this engine included one Canadian National Railways 4-6-2, No. 5288, and two Canadian Pacific Railway Pacifics, Nos. 1293 and 2317.

C. P. Atherton photo, collection of John C. Hutchins, courtesy Boston & Maine Railroad Historical Society

However, Boston and Maine Railroad No. 3713 is the only American-built engine among the Pacifics in the Steamtown collection. It is one of about fifty-six 4-6-2 Pacific-type locomotives preserved in the United States. Although the type is well represented among preserved locomotives in the United States and 12 more are preserved in Canada this particular locomotive is further significant because it is one of only three steam road engines of the Boston and Maine Railroad that have survived, the others being 4-4-0 No. 494, at White River Junction, Vermont, and 2-6-0, No. 1455, at Edaville, Massachusetts. Two Boston and Maine 0-6-0 switch engines, Numbers 410 and 444, also survive.

Condition: In terms of appearance, the locomotive is in reasonably good condition. Mechanically, the locomotive is believed to be nearly operable. It could be made operable with suitable overhaul.

Recommendation: This is exactly the type of heavy-duty, main line motive power, in this instance specifically passenger motive power, that the Steamtown collection should emphasize. The NPS should document in much more detail the operational history of this locomotive, and through photographs and Boston and Maine Mechanical Department records, should thoroughly explore changes made in the locomotive during its history. Extensive search for photographs of this particular locomotive in service should be a part of the study. The study should include a complete assessment by mechanical authorities of the locomotive's mechanical condition. The report should recommend the period to which the locomotive should be restored and repainted, and based on mechanical condition, whether to restore it to operable condition and to operate it for excursion trains or special movements. It should ascertain whether the locomotive ever received the red and mustard/gold striping and speedlining documented on sister locomotives Nos. 3712 and 3714. It should be restored to operation if feasible. When not in service, it should be exhibited indoors, protected from the weather.

The Boston and Maine Railroad published this undated single-sheet flyer during the mid 1930s to announce the contest to select names for its Lima-built 4-6-2 locomotives. The flyer illustrated No. 3711, a sister to Steamtown's No. 3713, which exhibited the smoke deflectors alongside the smokebox and the streamlined casing over the domes, features removed from all locomotives of this class, probably during World War II.
Steamtown Foundation collection.

Armitage, Al. "Boston and Maine Locomotive No. 3710 [measured drawing]." Railroad Model Craftsman, Vol. 25, No. 2 (July 1956): cover, iii.

"Boston and Maine 4-6-2 [measured drawing of No. 3712]." Model Railroader, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Apr. 1946): 266-268.

"Boston and Maine No. 3712 [measured drawing]." Model Railroader, Vol. 17, No. 5 (May 1950): 60.

Boston & Maine Railroad, WANT YOUR NAME ON THIS LOCOMOTIVE? AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE YOUTH OF NEW ENGLAND. (Single-page promotional flyer, published by the Boston and Maine Railroad, ca. 1937.) In the Steamtown Foundation files.

Cook; Richard J. Super Power Steam Locomotives. San Marino: Golden West Books, 1966: 7, 8, 21, 42, 43, 100, 101.

Frye, Harry A. Minuteman Steam: Boston & Maine Steam Locomotives, 1911-1958. Littleton: Boston & Maine Railroad Historical Society, Inc., 1982: 124-142, 158, and especially 125, 140-142. [This excellent motive power history is a principal source on this locomotive.]

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973).

Harlow, Alvin F. Steelways of New England. New York: Creative Age Press, 1946.

Hastings, Philip Ross. The Boston and Maine: A Photographic Essay. n.p.: Locomotive and Railway Preservation, 1989. [Disappointingly, although Hastings photographed No. 3713, not one of his photographs of that locomotive appears in this book.]

"High Green" column, Boston and Maine Railroad Magazine, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May-June-July 1958). [Item on upcoming move of Locomotive No. 3713 to Edaville.]

Jones, Robert Willoughby. Boston and Maine; Three Colorful Decades of New England Railroading. Glendale: Trans-Anglo Books, 1991: No data on Locomotive No. 3713, but on pp. 50 and 86 color photos of No. 3712 and on p. 51 of 3714 all with colorful red and mustard-gold lettering and striping which may have been used on No. 3713 also.

Kyper, Frank. "Yes, It Was 'The Constitution.'" The Railroad Enthusiast (Winter-Spring 1971): 27-28.

________. "The Boston and Maine's Existing Steam Locomotives--Intentional and Otherwise!" B&M Bulletin, Vol. 2 (Mar. 1973): 10-14.

Lima Locomotive Works. Builder's photo card of Locomotive No. 3710, with specifications for series 3710-3714 on reverse. In Steamtown collections.

Lima Locomotive Works. "Specification Card for Locomotive No. 3713." Dec. 21, 1934. In the Steamtown Foundation files.

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice. 12th ed. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1944:171. [Builder's photograph of No. 3710 with specifications.]

McCall. "Pinnacle of the Pacifics--Boston & Maine's P4 Locomotives." B&M Bulletin, Vol. 17, No. 3, n.d. [1990]: 14-35.

Neal, Robert Miller. High Green and the Bark Peelers: The Story of Engineman Henry A. Beaulieu and his Boston and Maine Railroad. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950: 161-165. [A description of a trip on P-4-b No. 3715 in service on a suburban (commuter) train of wooden coaches.]

"Retired Boston and Maine Equipment on Exhibit at 'Pleasure Island.'" Boston and Maine Railroad Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 4 (July-Aug. 1959): 16, 17.

3713, the Pacific Locomotive exhibited at the Museum of Science, Boston. Boston: Museum of Science, n.d. [A six-panel folder about the locomotive.]

Twombly, L. Stewart, and Robert E. Chaffin. "Post-1911 B&M Steam Roster--Part XI." B&M Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 1976): 34.

Builder: Baldwin Locomotive Works
Date Built: August 1914
Builder's Number: 41649

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 16 x 24
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 175
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 42
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 20,800

Remarks: Engine could burn either coal or wood; engine has a second sand dome behind the steam dome, ahead of the cab. This locomotive may have had a Rushton or cabbage stack, especially under its second owner. This is a tired, worn-out locomotive.

History: The 2-6-2 Prairie-type locomotive took its name and initial popularity from its use in relatively fiat prairie country such as the Great Plains in Kansas and surrounding states. About 50 locomotives of this type have survived nationwide, 15 of them veterans of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, a company that made particularly extensive use of the type. But as time passed, Prairie locomotives also developed popularity among lumber companies operating in relatively fiat forest country. The only example in the Steamtown collection of an engine with this wheel arrangement underwent the latter use; it was built for a lumber company's logging railroad and eventually passed through the hands of several Florida lumber firms during its active career. So it was essentially an industrial locomotive, though many engines of this type served on common carrier railroads.

Controlled by the William J. O'Brien family of St. Paul, Minnesota, the Carpenter-O'Brien Lumber Company was incorporated under the laws of Delaware in May 1913 but with operations in Florida, and apparently ordered this locomotive as its No. 1, which Baldwin Locomotive Works outshopped in 1914.

Carpenter-O'Brien built a fine sawmill plant Eastport, Florida, to mill pine logs, and even had a ship built to haul 2 million board feet of lumber per trip to its yard on Staten Island, New York. American entry into World War I in 1917 resulted in the sale of the S.S. William J. O'Brien, which in turn may have triggered sale of the Florida mill plant and timber holdings to the Brooks-Scanlon Corporation.

In 1896 the Brooks and Scanlon families, also of Minnesota, consisting of Dwight F. Brooks, M.D., Lester R. Brooks, Anson S. Brooks, and M.J. Scanlon, went into business together in Minneapolis, operating sawmills first at Nickerson, then at Cass Lake, Minnesota, and incorporating the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company in 1901 to operate a large plant the firm erected in Scanlon, Minnesota, served by the subsidiary Minnesota and North Wisconsin Railroad.

In 1905, the founders of the firm scouted timber in the Pacific Northwest, purchasing two large blocks of Ponderosa pine timberlands in Deschutes County, Oregon. In 1910 the plant at Scanlon, Minnesota, ran out of timber to mill, so the company moved to Oregon, with the headquarters remaining in Minneapolis.

In 1905, the firm also purchased tracts of Southern pine near Kentwood, Louisiana, where it erected another sawmill plant, served by the subsidiary Kentwood and Eastern Railroad.

By 1917 it was apparent to Brooks-Scanlon management that its Louisiana plant eventually would run out of timber (which it did in 1923). The company bought out Carpenter-O'Brien's holdings and its Eastport, Florida, mill, in the process acquiring Locomotive No. 1. Brooks-Scanlon took over at Eastport on December 31, 1917. By 1928 the company owned or controlled approximately 400,000 acres of timberlands located in Lafayette, Taylor, Madison, and Jefferson counties, Florida. At that time the firm had sawmills with a capacity of turning out 100 million board feet of lumber per year, as well as a planing mill, dry kilns, storage sheds, warehouses, and headquarters for a logging railroad at Eastport, 13 miles from Jacksonville on Florida's St. Johns River, with deep-water decking facilities to accommodate ocean going vessels. Officers included M.J. Scanlon, president, with offices in Minneapolis, Minnesota; J.S. Foley, vice president, located at Eastport; A.S. Brooks, treasurer, and P.A. Brooks, secretary, the latter two officers also headquartered in Minneapolis.

Whether Carpenter-O'Brien and Brooks-Scanlon used Locomotive No. 1 to haul logs in to the mill from the woods or used it to switch the yard around the Eastport plant, or both, is unclear. It should be noted that Brooks-Scanlon locomotives characteristically sported Rushton or cabbage cinder-catching stacks, a type of stack used on wood-burning locomotives such as No. 1. It is likely that Brooks-Scanlon No. 1 had that type of stack applied whether or not it had been built with the Rushton stack for Carpenter-O'Brien. If so, a later owner apparently replaced the Rushton stack with the "shotgun" stack now on the locomotive.

Unprecedented increases in freight rates forced Brooks-Scanlon to move to a location more central to their timber supply, causing the closure of the Eastport plant in 1929 and construction of a new plant at Foley, Florida, named for the company's general manager, J.S. Foley. It is possible locomotive No. 1 moved to the new plant. In subsequent years, the little Prairie locomotive passed into the ownership of several other firms, which leads into some rather complex corporate history, although all four or five of her owners were interconnected in one way or another.

The Rushton (cabbage-style) spark-arrester, lettering, and striping patterns exhibited by Brooks-Scanlon Corporation Locomotive No. 5 (above) may reflect the appearance of Locomotive No. 1 when Brooks-Scanlon owned it.
Collection of Dr. Howard t. Letcher

In Louisiana about 1875, Captain William Lafayette Burton operated a floating sawmill on barges on the Mississippi River, a plant that milled logs for plantation owners. Burton eventually bought a plantation of his own in St. James Parish, 50 miles north of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi, whose lands included some ten or twelve thousand acres in the swamp adjoining the river. Burton built a sawmill on land to produce cypress lumber there, hiring Edward G. Swartz, who claimed to be the first white child born in Montana, to manage it. Swartz's father, a Union Army veteran, had migrated to Montana after the Civil War, but the family subsequently moved to Kansas City. Swartz, while still a teenager, had struck out on his own, cutting short-leaf pine timber profitably near Monroe, Louisiana, which led to his acquiring 10 percent interest in Burton's cypress mill, which in turn led to the establishment of the Burton & Swartz Cypress Company.

When they began to run out of Louisiana cypress, Burton & Swartz learned that Carpenter-O'Brien had never cut any of the cypress the firm owned in Taylor and Lafayette counties, Florida, and that the pine lumber manufacturer doubted its own qualifications to handle cypress, its sawmill plant being designed for milling pine. So Burton & Swartz bought the cypress on Carpenter-O'Brien land with a large cash payment, but Carpenter-O'Brien in turn held about 48 percent of the stock in the Burton & Swartz company thereafter, an interest that presumably passed to Brooks-Scanlon in 1917.

Initially, Burton & Swartz milled the cypress from these lands at Perry, Florida, while Carpenter-O'Brien milled the yellow pine at Eastport. Increases in rail freight rates made this arrangement uneconomical, so the firms established a joint logging camp, the largest in Florida, housing a thousand men, 18 miles south of Perry on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. The firms named this town Carbur from the first three letters each of Carpenter and Burton. From Carbur, train loads of pine logs went east to Eastport and cypress logs went north to Perry.

Some years earlier, about 1907 or 1908, a Michigan corporation had bought from men named Butterworth and Kenney about 150,000 acres of virgin cypress timber in a totally inaccessible region known as the Big Cypress Swamp amid the Everglades in Lee County, Florida. The timber was so remote that the company had done nothing with it. J.C. Turner learned of this timber and in 1913 met with Captain Burton in New Orleans, from whom he had in the past purchased much cypress. Both men knew that marketable old-growth stands of cypress were fast vanishing into the hungry sawmills. Turner believed that the Big Cypress Swamp held a resource of great potential profit. Burton agreed, and within 30 days, arranged to buy the Big Cypress Swamp timber from the Michigan firm, Burton & Swartz putting up 60 percent of the purchase price, and J.C. Turner contributing 40 percent.

J.C. Turner was no newcomer to the lumber industry. Born in Albany, New York, shortly after the Civil War, he had moved with his family to Michigan while still a child, eventually graduating from Hillsdale College. Turner then entered the sales department of the firm of Joseph Rathbone, a wholesale white pine distributor with facilities in Chicago. One day while selling in East St. Louis, Turner encountered a barge loaded with cypress shingles, became greatly impressed with the quality of cypress wood, and persuaded Rathbone to send him to Louisiana to investigate further.

Soon he and Rathbone had built a cypress mill at Harvey, across the Mississippi from New Orleans, which eventually became the Louisiana Cypress Lumber Company. Turner pioneered in successfully marketing cypress in northern states. Around 1895, he organized the J.C. Turner Cypress Lumber Company and built a wholesale distributing cypress lumber yard at Irvington on the Hudson River in New York.

At first he shipped cypress up from Louisiana. Then, discovering cheaper schooner rates from Florida ports, Turner began to search out Florida sources of tidewater cypress, and by 1910 bought cypress from about a half dozen or more Florida sawmills. In 1910 he built a double band-saw mill at Centralia, Florida. Thus Turner had considerable lumber, and specifically cypress lumber, business experience before joining Burton & Swartz in buying Big Cypress Swamp timber.

Having bought Big Cypress Swamp timber, the J.C. Turner Lumber Company and the Burton & Swartz Cypress Company formed the Lee Cypress Company, named after Lee County, Florida, to hold the newly acquired timber. Turner died in 1923, Burton in 1926. Meanwhile, the Burton & Swartz Company continued milling out timber in Taylor and Lafayette counties until about 1937 or 1938, thereafter selling off the firm's inventory of milled cypress until it was exhausted about 1941. Their Perry mill continued to operate until 1943 under the Burton & Swartz name, at which time the J.C. Turner Lumber Company bought 54 percent interest from the Burton estate and 6 percent from Swartz, who died a year later. It should be recalled that Turner had always owned 40 percent of the Perry plant, and thus now had complete ownership. That same year, 1943, the J.C. Turner firm started milling cypress from the Big Cypress Swamp. In 1944 the Lee Cypress Company took over operation of the Perry plant, and the firm changed its name in 1947 to Lee Tidewater Cypress Company.

No. 1 resting in the engine shed of the Lee Tidewater Cypress Lumber Company at Live Oak, Florida, on September 4, 1956, featured fancy brass flag stanchions on the headlight platform.
Photo by Malhory Hope Ferrell

Somewhere in this shifting of interconnected lumber interests, ownership of Brooks-Scanlon Corporation Locomotive No. 1 passed to either the Lee Cypress Company or still later to the Lee Tidewater Cypress Company. While the company built a new logging railroad out of Copeland, Florida, and used similar 2-6-2 locomotives there, it apparently retained No. 1 at Perry, Florida, for use in switching at the mill plant.

The logging railroad that had once served the Perry plant may have been torn up for use out of Copeland by the time Lee Cypress or Lee Tidewater Cypress acquired Locomotive No. 1.

Actually, the Big Cypress Swamp, north of Copeland in South Collier County, Florida, was far from Perry, but the company struck a deal with the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad to haul 40 gondola-car trainloads of logs from its logging railroad at Copeland, which extend some 45 miles into the swamp, to the big mill at Perry, so Locomotives Nos. 1 and 2 at Perry had plenty of switching to do, what with 40-car train loads of logs coming in and cypress lumber being loaded to be shipped out. Between 1943 and 1957 the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad hauled 915 40-car trains loaded with cypress logs those 400 miles from Copeland to Perry, 25 million board feet or more per year for 14 years, or roughly 350 million board feet of red cypress, until the Big Cypress Swamp had been logged out. Locomotive No. 1 was last fired up in the fall of 1959, after which she was "stored--serviceable" by the company at Perry. In 1962, probably because the company had run out of timber to mill, the controlling J.C. Turner company dissolved its subsidiary Lee Tidewater Cypress Company and assumed direct ownership of its remaining properties, including Locomotive No. 1. The J.C. Turner company then sold the five surviving locomotives (first No. 2 at Perry having been scrapped in 1955) to F. Nelson Blount's Edaville Railroad, but because the railroad into Copeland had been scrapped, only Locomotive No. 1 at Perry was moved, first to North Walpole, New Hampshire, later to Bellows Falls, Vermont, and finally to Scranton, Pennsylvania. The locomotive thus never operated under the J.C. Turner Lumber Company name.

Thus Brooks-Scanlon Locomotive No. 1 was essentially an industrial locomotive, although many engines of this type served on common carrier railroads. Despite its history of industrial use, it represents a type of locomotive once common on main lines of major railroad systems, and later on their branch lines, as well as on short line railroads.

Condition: Brooks-Scanlon Corporation 2-8-2 Locomotive No. 1 is mechanically a tired, worn-out locomotive, probably suitable only for static exhibit and not for restoration to operable condition.

Recommendations: While a Prairie-type 2-6-2 of a common-carrier railroad might be preferable to represent that type in the Steamtown collection, as this is the only locomotive of the type in the collection, the NPS should restore it "cosmetically" but not mechanically to operable condition, and should exhibit it in a roundhouse. As with each locomotive acquired, a report should be prepared prior to restoration, and that document should include the decision regarding which of three ownerships to restore the locomotive to represent: Carpenter-O'Brien, Brooks-Scanlon, or Lee Tidewater Cypress. That document should include intensive research in Florida and elsewhere as needed to obtain documents and photographs relating to the history of the locomotive and illustrating its appearance while working for its three owning firms. That report, furthermore, should specifically investigate whether the locomotive ever had a Rushton stack and determine whether it is desirable or possible to either obtain and install a genuine Rushton stack or replicate one if the locomotive did once have one. It should also locate for replication brass flag stanchions, visible in various photographs, now missing from the headlight platform of the locomotive.

Baldwin Locomotive Works catalogs featured many locomotives similar to Brooks-Scanlon No. 1, including Waterman Lumber Company No. 3, which operated in Texas.
Colorado Railroad Museum Library

Baldwin Locomotive Works. Logging Locomotives. Record No. 76, 1913. n.p. [Philadelphia]: Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1913. [See pp. 35-41 for builder's photographs and specifications for seven 2-6-2 locomotives similar to Brooks-Scanlon No. 1 built for various lumber companies.]

__________. Catalog of Locomotives. n.p. [Philadelphia]: Baldwin Locomotive Works, n.d. (ca. 1914). [See p. 82, devoted to photograph and specifications of Locomotive No. 101 lettered for the Industrial Lumber Company, and similar to Brooks-Scanlon No. 1.]

Beebe, Lucius. "The Last of the Wood Burners." Trains, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Nov. 1946): 52-55.

_________, and Charles Clegg. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: 8-13, 20, 300.

Ferrell, Mallory. Letters to author. Apr. 16, June 23, Oct. 10, 1988.Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973), Item No. 9 and locomotive roster.

Kean, Randolph. The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays. Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, Publisher, 1973: 173.

Kendrick, Baynard. "Florida's Perpetual Forests." Typescript, Florida Agricultural Museum, Tallahassee, Florida: 57-58, 72-75, 112, 125-161. [This is the principal source of information on the lumber companies that owned the locomotive.]

Koch, Michael. Steam and Thunder in the Timber: Saga of the Forest Railroads. Denver: World Press, 1979: 225, 335, 338, 342, 349, 350, 357.

Moody, John. Moody's Manual of Investments, Industrial Securities, 1928. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1928: 701, 702.

Odegard, Gordon. "Baldwin 2-6-2 Logging Locomotive: An Early 20th Century Prairie-type for the Industrial Lumber Co." Model Railroader, Vol. 54, No. 10 (Oct. 1987): 114-115. [Article accompanied by measured drawings of a 2-6-2 similar to Brooks-Scanlon No. 1, drawn by Ed Gebhardt.]

Pettengill, George W., Jr. "Florida Woodburners." Trains, Vol. 11, No. 5 (Mar. 1951): 12-15.

Steamtown Engine Roster, September 1967." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968): 8.

Building: H.K. Porter
Date Built: October 1937
Builder's Number: 7250

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 9 x 14
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 170
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 26-112
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 6,180

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): Not applicable
    Oil (in gallons):
    Water (in gallons):

History: Incorporated in Connecticut on September 4, 1894, as the Bullard Machine Tool Company, the firm had actually been established in 1880 by a family of the same name. As its initial name suggested, it manufactured machine tools of various kinds. Over the next century it continued to manufacture ever-new generations of machine tools, many of which were intended for use by the railroad industry in manufacturing and repairing locomotives and railroad cars. The company changed its name to the Bullard Company on January 4, 1929. As of 1930, the firm manufactured such machinery as vertical turret lathes, boring mills, and mult-au-matic and contin-u-matic machines used in manufacture of railroad equipment, trucks, automobiles, electrical equipment, etc. The 1941 edition of the Locomotive Cyclopedia carried an advertisement for "The Bullard Cut Master Vertical Turret Lathe," which touted the machine as "a modem tool designed to put shop schedules on par with train schedules." It is interesting to note that a century after its founding, the Bullard Company still listed men of the Bullard family among its officers.

As was the case with many industrial concerns, the Bullard plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, apparently had sufficient sidings and loading tracks for the firm to require its own small switching locomotive to switch cars to and from the loading tracks and line up loaded cars for pickup by a freight train.

In the Steamtown Foundation files rests a 1913 catalog of Steam Locomotive Repair Parts issued by the H.K. Porter Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While it lists and illustrates mostly locomotive components, at the beginning of the catalog are a number of pages of photographs of typical whole locomotives produced by Porter. On page 6 is an illustration of a small 0-4-0T Locomotive No. 118 of The Drake and Stratton Company, Contractors. Added above the locomotive on that page with a fountain pen is the script "Bullard # 1273," and below the illustration of the locomotive, the eight specification figures given for No. 118 have been crossed out, again with a fountain pen. Substitute figures for an even smaller 0-4-0T, though of the same pattern, have been inked in. Where No. 118 had 12- by 16-inch cylinders, those of the Bullard engine were to be 9 by 14. No. 118 carried a saddle tank with a capacity of 700 gallons, whereas the Bullard engine was to carry only 450 gallons. Instead of a 5-foot wheel base, that of the Bullard engine was to be 4 feet, 6 inches. Instead of carrying 600 pounds of coal, the Bullard engine was to be an oil burner with a 100-gallon tank. Instead of 35-inch drive wheels, the Bullard engine was to have 27-inch wheels. Instead of 42,000 pounds, the Bullard engine was to weigh 30,000. Instead of a tractive force of 9,200 pounds, the Bullard locomotive was to feature 6,070. Only one specification of the Bullard engine was to match or exceed those of the Stratton model: It was to have safety valves set to pop at 170 pounds per square inch of boiler pressure, rather than the 155 pounds of the Stratton engine.

On its title page, this Porter catalog had five lines penciled in red: "MT # 1273," a designation whose meaning is unclear at present; "Class B-S-I," apparently a builder's class, since it is doubtful that the Bullard Company had established its own classes of engines, this being only its second locomotive; "Serial No. 7250," which is the H.K. Porter shop number for the locomotive; "P.O. 24547," believed to be the Bullard Company's purchase order to Porter for the locomotive; and "R'C'D.--Oct. 25, 1937," believed to mean that Bullard took delivery of the locomotive on that date. The inference is that the Bullard Company used this very catalog in 1937, perhaps with the assistance either in person or by telephone of an H.K. Porter Company representative, to order its Locomotive No. 2. The changes in specifications entered with a fountain pen probably were written by a Porter sales representative, but the red-penciled notations that included the purchase order number were more likely done by a Bullard employee.

In any event, the H.K. Porter Company turned Out Bullard Company No. 2 in October 1937, a Porter inspector named William F. Lintner filled out the engine's first Annual Locomotive Inspection and Repair Report on October 20, and the Bullard Company took delivery of its extremely small Locomotive No. 2 at Bridgeport on October 27.

The subsequent operational history of Bullard Company Locomotive No. 2 awaits further research. Apparently intended to be operated by a single engineer-fireman, the locomotive undoubtedly switched cars around the Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant for about 15 or 20 years prior to being acquired by Steamtown.

At an unknown date, probably in the late 1950s or early 1960s, the Bullard Company sold Locomotive No. 2 to a used locomotive dealer, the American Machinery Corporation of Bridgeport, Connecticut. F. Nelson Blount's Monadnock, Steamtown and Northern Amusements Corporation at North Walpole, New Hampshire, purchased the engine in June 1963.

Condition: Mechanical condition of this locomotive is unknown; its external appearance is reasonably good although at present it is not lettered for its historic owner.

Recommendations: A researched report should be completed on this locomotive. A particular objective of such research would be to ascertain the historic painting and lettering scheme of this locomotive so that its appearance can be accurately restored. This should involve a thorough search for photographs of the locomotive at work at the Bullard plant. Additionally, an effort should be made to locate, and interview on tape or videotape, employees of the Bullard Company who can provide information about the locomotive and its operation--including, if possible, men who served as an engineer-fireman on the engine. The report should also incorporate information on predecessor and successor locomotives to place Bullard Locomotive No. 2 in context, including photographs of predecessor and successor locomotives. To the extent possible, the report should document any physical changes in the locomotive since its construction and include a thorough assessment of its current condition, after which it should deal with the question of whether this locomotive should be restored to operable condition. The report should also contain a more thorough background history of the Bullard Company and its relation to the railroad industry in general.

A Bullard Company employee, or possibly a representative of the H.K. Porter Company, or both working together, used this page from a 1913 Porter catalog to draw up the order for their 0-4-0T Locomotive No. 2. Changes to the specifications of this Drake & Stratton Co. locomotive, marked in with a fountain pen, resulted in the Bullard locomotive being an even smaller locomotive than the one illustrated here. Only the boiler pressure represented an increase; in every other measurement, the locomotive was smaller. Steamtown Foundation Collection.

"Annual Locomotive Inspection and Repair Report." Form 289, H.K. Porter Company Shop # 7250, Oct. 1937.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls: Steamtown Foundation., n.d. [ca. 1973]: Item 12 and roster entry.

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1941, Section 20: 1117.

Moody's Manual of Investments. New York: Moody's Investors' Service 1930: 258.

"Specification Card for Locomotive Boiler No. 3655." H.K. Porter Company, Shop #7250, Oct. 1937.

Steam Locomotive Repair Parts, H.K. Porter Company. Pittsburgh: H.K. Porter Company, 1913: title page, 6.

"Steamtown Engine Roster, September 1967." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968): 8.

Builder: American Locomotive Company (Schenectady Works)
Date Built: 1908
Builder's Number: 45528

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 20-1/2 x 26
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 200
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 63
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 29,484

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 10
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 6,000

Remarks: Engine has Walschaert valve gear. A tired engine, it is missing its right and left oversheath, ash pan, and some small parts. It is one of only two D.L.&W. engines surviving.

History: For Steamtown NHS, the railroad company of the greatest historical importance is Scranton's home-grown Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Like most sizable railroad systems, its long and complex history involved the absorption of numerous small predecessors. It began in its infancy as the Ligetts Gap Railroad, organized as early as March 19, 1849. That firm changed its name on April 14, 1851, to the Lackawanna & Western Railroad. A little over 2-1/2 years later on December 10, 1853, the Lackawanna & Western consolidated with the Delaware & Cobbs Gap Railroad, a company chartered on December 26, 1850, thus forming the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. The track already extended from Scranton to Great Bend, and on May 27, 1856, the line reached from Scranton to the Delaware River. Lease of the Warren Railroad gave the D.L.&W. a junction with the Central Railroad of New Jersey, which provided a connection to the Hudson River.

In the years that followed, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western leased, bought controlling interest in the stock of, consolidated with, or otherwise acquired a plethora of short lines (some of them the D.L.&W.'s creations), including the Morris & Essex Railroad; the Cayuga and Susquehanna Railroad; the Syracuse & Binghamton Railroad; the Valley Railroad; the Syracuse, Binghamton and New York Railroad; the Bloomsburg Railroad; the Sussex Railroad; the Passaic & Delaware Railroad; the New York, Lackawanna & Western Railway; and others. By January 1, 1883, it operated 930.58 miles of line, had 436 locomotives; 313 passenger, mail, baggage, and express cars; 30,855 freight cars (21,299 of them coal cars); and 821 work cars.

As suggested by the number of coal cars owned that early, coal comprised the bulk of the freight carried by the railroad, which itself owned extensive coal mines, and naturally it used coal-burning locomotives. Furthermore, by the turn of the century, its locomotives came to rely on hard coal--anthracite—for fuel, which burned cleanly, producing no soot, cinders, or ash. Early in 1899, Samuel Langhome Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, wrote the company after a trip to Elmira that he had worn a white duck suit and it was still white when he reached his destination. Advertising agent Wendle P. Colton, general passenger agent Thomas W. Lee, and president Willie Truesdale seized upon the idea of taking advantage of the line's clean-burning coal in advertising for passenger traffic and adopted the slogan for the Lackawanna Road as "The Road of Anthracite." As a symbol, probably for the first time in 1901, the railroad seized upon the image of a demure "Gibson girl" dressed head to toe in sparkling white, and published a seemingly endless series of jingles or poems:

Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Mogul (2-6-0 type) Locomotive No. 565 posed on a turntable at an unidentified location on its home railroad, probably during the 1920s or 1930s.
Collection of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, California State Railroad Museum Library.

If the truth be known, the Lackawanna Road burned hard coal not because of its cleanliness or for passenger convenience, but because its mines yielded an abundant supply of hard coal for which, before the invention of automatic furnace stokers, no market existed. During the 1880s, the Reading Railroad had devised a method of burning this waste coal, technically called culm, by using a firebox that was unusually wide and shallow. Thus the Lackawanna managed to economize by turning a waste product into locomotive fuel, and then further capitalized on the practice by advertising it as a virtue that would benefit the traveling public. Eventually "Phoebe Snow" advertising extended to safety and other aspects of the railroad, and continued well after diesel locomotives began replacing coal-burning locomotives; ultimately the road's chief "name" train in the diesel era would be--one could easily guess--The Phoebe Snow.

Meanwhile, in 1903, the Lackawanna Road purchased the New York and Hoboken Ferry Company and two years later added to its stable the Harlem Transfer Company. It acquired with these purchases a valuable terminal on the Harlem River in New York City as well as ferryboats to serve it. In 1906 the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western bought the Brooklyn Dock and Terminal Company.

Though operating extensive main line trackage, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western also had branch lines. It is believed that it was for service on these that in 1908 the railroad purchased 2-6-0 Locomotive No. 565 from the Schenectady Locomotive Works, equipped by its builder with Walschaert valve gear. Actually, it was part of a series of 2-6-0 locomotives apparently purchased to replace earlier locomotives that the company was scrapping.

By December 31, 1913, No. 565 operated as one of 770 locomotives on the railroad, which had 925 passenger train cars, 28,711 freight cars (a smaller number than the 1883 figure), and 836 work cars, to roll over 985.06 miles of railroad, 542.55 miles of which were double tracked. Therein lies a story of major modernization, work that was then in progress, for early in the 20th century the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad sought efficiency, profitability, and excellence by attempting and achieving 100 percent grade separation--that is, all city and town streets and country roads and highways would cross the railroad by either overpass or underpass totally eliminating grade crossings, costly grade crossing accidents, and many costly train-delaying slow orders.

Additionally, the company improved handling of traffic--principally freight traffic--on heavily traveled portions of the system by double-tracking much of the line, and even triple-tracking or quadruple tracking some portions of it. It also followed the practice common among other railroad companies around the early years of the 20th century of reducing curvature and grades and by building cutoffs where suitable. Then too, the company sought to replace all old frame depots with modern brick, stone, or concrete ones. In Scranton, it enlarged and remodeled its roundhouse into a modern brick structure and erected a vast modern erecting shop complex and a huge new depot and general office building. The work of William Haynes Truesdale (president 1899-1925), this modernization program also expanded the Lackawanna from a coal carrier to a carrier of mixed and diversified commodities. When Truesdale retired in 1925, he left his successor a thoroughly modern, efficient railroad.

At an unknown date, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western shopped Locomotive No. 565 and replaced its slide valves with a piston valve conversion and gave it a superheater. It served the Lackawanna for 28 years. Finally, in 1936, the company sold the locomotive to the Dansville & Mount Morris Railroad, a 9-mile short line railroad operating between Dansville and Groveland in New York State.

Incorporated on January 4, 1868, as the Erie & Genesee Valley Railroad to build a line from Mount Morris to Dansville, the company completed construction in 1871 at a cost of $191,302 and was immediately leased to Jay Gould's Erie Railroad. After about 20 years, the company ended up in bankruptcy, but was reorganized on October 21, 1891 as an independent locally owned road under the names of its termini, Dansville and Mount Morris. The new company was too weak to survive and entered into receivership on June 8, 1894--a receivership that continued for 31 years. The line experienced few profitable years, and in 1912 the surplus at the end of the year amounted to one dollar!

E.M. Harter and Clifford Hubbell became receivers on May 19, 1925, and through their aggressive approach to business sought to end the receivership, which they succeeded in doing on September 30, 1927. Despite the Depression, finances improved, and in 1936, the road cleared $10,632 even though hampered by a heavy snow in January, a damaging flood in March, and the purchase of Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Locomotive No. 565.

The Dansville & Mount Morris Railroad continued to operate its little Mogul from the Lackawanna for nearly a quarter-century. David P. Morgan, writing for Trains in 1956, described the company as having two locomotives, two stockholders, and 15 employees, and entitled his article "A story of small, elderly engines." At that time the D.&M.M. used each of its two engines (the other being No. 304, formerly Nickel Plate Road No. 44) for a single year, repairing and overhauling the one not in use. No. 565 was repaired in 1956, so Morgan did not see it operate, but he reported that both D.&M.M. locomotives had a reputation for steaming well on a very light fire, which accounted for the railroad not yet having acquired a diesel.

By 1961, however, the company had apparently acquired a diesel, and William Whitehead purchased the locomotive for the Black River & Western Railroad, a small tourist railroad operating between Ringoes and Flemington, New Jersey. John Maris bought the locomotive in June 1968 and in July sold it to Tony Citro at Wayne, New Jersey. In 1982 Citro sold it to John Meyers at New Hope, Pennsylvania. In 1983, Don Ball, the railroad photographer and author, bought the locomotive and moved it to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he sold it to Horst Muller. In December 1985, Muller sold No. 565 to the Steamtown Foundation at Scranton.

Ultimately acquired by the Steamtown Foundation, Locomotive No. 565 is the only motive power at Scranton that is on its "home railroad," the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western. It is one of only two D.L.&W. locomotives to survive, the other being "Camelback" 4-4-0C No. 952, now preserved at the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis, Missouri. The only surviving Lackawanna 2-6-0, No. 565 is one of two Moguls in the Steamtown collection, and one of only about 50 specimens of the type that survive nationwide. The 2-6-0 Mogul class of locomotive became popular as freight, and sometimes passenger or mixed train, engines during the late 19th century. Manufacture and use of the type continued well into the 20th century, during which they appeared especially on branch lines and short line railroads. Thousands of locomotives of this type once operated in the United States.

Condition: Locomotive No. 565 is in terrible condition, missing its road number plate, builder's plate, air pump, and many small parts. It has apparently been converted from a coal burner to an oil burner. Mechanically it is a very tired, worn-out engine, not suitable for restoration to operable condition. It is probably suitable only for static exhibit as a museum engine.

Recommendation: This engine is of exceptional importance to Steamtown NHS because it is the only locomotive in the Steamtown collection that is on its home ground--a yard of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.

The NPS should commission a report on this locomotive. This report should recommend a decision on what period prior to 1936 during its career on the Lackawanna the Park Service should restore the locomotive to for indoor and occasional outdoor exhibit. Because of the conversion from Walschaert valve gear to piston valves by the Lackawanna, restoring the engine to its "as built" condition may not be feasible, but it should certainly be possible to restore it to its appearance during the early 1930s after the installation of the piston valves but before its sale to the Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad.

Beebe, Lucius, and Charles Clegg. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: 244, 246, 247, 250, 251, 253, 339.

Casey, Robert J., and W.A.S. Douglas. The Lackawanna Story: The First Hundred Years of The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951.

"Coal Smoke over Scranton: Steamtown Pulls In." Railpace Newsmagazine, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Feb. 1984): 39. Photo of No. 565 newly arrived.

Conrad, J. David. The Steam Locomotive Directory of North America, Vol. 1. Polo: Transportation Trails, 1988.

Cunningham, John T. "Route of the Phoebe Snow." Trains, Vol. 10, No. 8 (June 1950): 18-26.

Graham, F. Stewart. "Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Locomotive Classification." Railway & Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 70, Aug. 1947: 61-69.

________. "Locomotives of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad and its Subsidiary Lines." Railway & Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 72 (July 1948): 5-143. See especially p. 117.

"Interstate Commerce Commission Valuation Docket No. 695, Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad." Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States. Interstate Commerce Commission Reports, Vol. 116. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1927: 274-294.

King, Sheldon S. The Route of the Phoebe Snow: A Story of Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Lyons: Author, 1986.

Krause, John, and Ed Crist. Lackawanna Heritage, 1947-1952. New York: Railroad Heritage Press, 1978.

LeMassena, Robert A. "Steam out of Scranton." Trains, Vol. 25, No. 11 (Sept. 1965): 29.

Locomotives of Four New York State Roads." Railroad Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jan. 1941): 136-137.

Lowenthal, Larry, and William T. Greenberg, Jr. The Lackawanna Railroad in Northwest New Jersey. Morristown: The Tri-State Railway Historical Society, Inc., 1987.

McDonnell, Greg J. "Is There Life After Lackawanna?" Trains, Vol. 45, No. 9 (July 1985): 36-46. "Is There Life After Lackawanna?" Trains, Vol. 45, No. 10 (Aug. 1985): 40-49.

Morgan, David P. "Steam in Indian Summer, 7; A story of small, elderly engines." Trains, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Dec. 1956): 26.

Pennypacker, Bert. "100 Years of Lackawanna Steam." Railroad, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Feb. 1965): 13-28.

Reich, Sy. "U.S. Common Carrier Steam Power." Railroad Magazine, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Feb. 1961): 56, 64.

Scull, Theodore W. Hoboken's Lackawanna Terminal. New York: Quadrant Press, 1987.

"Spotlight on: The Dansville & Mount Morris." Short-Line Railroader, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Nov. 1954): 4-6.

Taber, Thomas T. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in the 19th Century. Muncy: Thomas T. Taber, III, 1977.

Taber, Thomas T., and Thomas T. Taber, III. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in the 20th Century. Muncy: Thomas T. Taber, III, 1980 and 1981, 2 vols. [See p. 611 for roster. The three Taber books are the best published source on this railroad to date.]

White, William. The Lackawanna; "The Route of Phoebe Snow," 1851-1951; A Centenary Address. New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1951.

Wilde, Edwin A. "Ithaca Branch of the Lackawanna." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Second Quarter 1958): 12-16.

Young, William S. "Great White Bridge: The Tunkhannock Viaduct and the Rebuilding of the Lackawanna, 1, 1899-1915." Steam Locomotive & Railroad Tradition, Nos. 19-20 (Aug. 1967), front cover, 8-43.

_________. "Great White Bridge: The Tunkhannock Viaduct and the Rebuilding of the Lackawanna, 2, 1915-1967." Steam Locomotive & Railroad Tradition, Nos. 21-22 (Feb. 1968): 2, 26-45, back cover.

__________. "The Lady and the Train: A Short History of Phoebe Snow." Steam Locomotive & Railroad Tradition, Nos. 21-22 (Feb. 1968): 14-25.

Builder: American Locomotive Company, Schenectady Works
Date Built: April 1927
Builder's Number: 67536

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 16 x 24
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 180
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 44

Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 21,400 (also reported as 21,720)
Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 1
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 1,500

Remarks: Locomotive has Stephenson valve gear, rigid wheel base of 10 feet, 2 inches.

History: Under specifications dated October 28, 1927, the American Locomotive Company outshopped an 0-6-0T industrial switching locomotive with the road number 2 on the sides of its cab, on the rear of the coal bunker, and on the front number plate. The engine featured the builder's standard striping, probably in white, for industrial locomotives, and on each side of its saddle tank appeared the words "Poland Spring." Behind those two words lay 173 years of Maine history.

On April 14, 1761, Jabez Ricker, then 19 years of age, descendent of a family in Saxony that spelled its name Riccar, married 18-year-old Molly Wentworth of Berwick, Maine. His father, Joseph Ricker, gave him roughly 50 acres of land near Great Falls, and after the father's death about 1771, Jabez inherited another 107 acres. In 1775 he sold all this land for $3,000, with which he purchased land in Alfred, Maine, that included a stream that he could harness. There he built a water-powered sawmill and a water-powered grist mill. In 1793, Jabez visited what was to become the Poland area in Maine, and became entranced with a particular hill owned by the religious sect known as the Shakers. In 1794 he traded his land and mills in Alfred to the Shakers for the 300 acres that included that hill and, incidentally, a spring.

When Jabez brought Mary and their 10 children to their new property, it had a single frame house with one chimney and no hearth. No roads reached the vicinity and Jabez had no neighbors. The family arrived at night and the daughters cried out of homesickness. The next morning two strangers appeared and sought to purchase breakfast; Molly served them a hot meal, initiating a Ricker hospitality which in the next century would blossom and become institutionalized.

In 1794, Jabez Ricker and his sons, Wentworth, Samuel, and Joseph, began construction of a large, two-story gable-roofed house with a large attic, two high chimneys laid up of brick made on the shore of a pond or lake a mile away. With two fireplaces per chimney per floor, those on the ground floor were so large they could burn logs six feet long. Completed in 1797, this house, named the "Wentworth Ricker, served as an inn on the stage line between Montreal and Portland, Maine. The Rickers built a 30-by-32-foot, five-stall stable near the house. Their property became a relay station for the stagecoach line and its fame grew. The men added a woodshed and cider house behind the inn. With profits Wentworth earned teaming supplies for the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, Samuel framed a large barn in 1813. In 1825 the Ricker sons erected a much larger stable, said to have been the best hotel stable in the state of Maine. Wentworth retired in 1834 and turned the business over to his 25-year-old son, Hiram. Wentworth died in 1837.

Construction of railroads in the 1840s diverted much patronage away from the inn and slowed its business. Hiram Ricker branched out into buying and selling sheep, making wool cloth, and handling lumber. By this time Hiram suffered from stomach trouble, possibly an ulcer, which physicians pronounced incurable. While haying in 1854, Hiram drank water from the mineral spring Wentworth had once used, which issued from a fissure in a ledge of rock near the summit of the Ricker hill. Usually people drank the water with molasses and ginger to make it more palatable, in view of its mineral content, but Hiram Ricker had no molasses or ginger with him while haying, so drank it pure and unadulterated. After a number of days, his stomach trouble diminished and cleared up, though he did not then associate his cure with the spring. Eventually Hiram remembered Wentworth being cured in 1827, and that even earlier, in 1800, Joseph Ricker had had a fever and asked for water, and the doctor, whose prognosis was that Ricker would be dead by morning, said he could have all he wanted. Of course, by morning, Joseph's fever had dropped, and he was to live another 52 years.

Eventually recalling this earlier family experience with the spring, Hiram began talking about the Ricker' s mineral spring as a medicinal cure. Of course, many scoffed at his claims. In 1859, a skeptical neighbor, William Schellinger, turned a dying ox loose in the field; which included the spring. The poor animal had been failing for some months, and had become so weak that from time to time it would fall over while simply walking. After some time in the pasture, drinking water of the spring, the ox began to gain strength and weight and before summer ended, proved to be heavier and healthier than ever before. When eventually Schellinger slaughtered it, the butcher found evidence that it had had a kidney disease that had been cured.

Schellinger himself had little faith in Hiram Ricker's claims of the spring's medicinal properties until the episode of the ox, but himself suffered from kidney trouble, so he began drinking the mineral water, and soon began to recover.

That same year, 1859, Hiram Ricker built a crude log spring house over the water source, and made his first commercial sale of a container of the water, a 3-gallon demijohn he put on the Portland stage for 15 cents.

Subsequently a father brought his supposedly incurably ill daughter to drink from the spring. Twelve-year-old E.P. Ricker brought her a 3-quart pail of mineral water direct from the spring, and the following day she was well enough to return to Portland. Dr. Elephelet Clark continued having her drink water from the Poland Spring, and the girl was to live more than 40 years longer. The doctor became convinced of the mineral water's medicinal value. In 1860, Hiram set up resident sales agents in Boston, and as the fame of Poland Spring water spread, orders came from as far away as the South and the Pacific Coast.

In two years, sales increased to 1,000 barrels. Hiram turned the property over to his eldest son, Edward P. Ricker, then 22, in 1869, and the latter immediately began to develop it. Many people came to the spring itself for a cure, and in 1869-1870, the Rickers had to enlarge the old inn, adding another nine-room story to the building. In 1870, they shipped 5,000 barrels of Poland Water.

Originally the Rickers had dipped water from a 5- or 6-quart basin carved out of the rock. In 1872, they enlarged the stone basin to a 30-gallon capacity and bailed water out with a pail. In 1872, increasing patronage forced them to demolish the woodshed and cider house behind the old inn and build a seven-room addition to the building in their place. The inn came to be called the Mansion House.

Alvan Ricker, the second son, joined the firm in 1875, and in 1876 a man named Albert Young, of Auburn, became a partner. The firm built at the crest of the hill a large four-story frame hotel called the Poland Spring House, which featured a six-story tower at one corner. The building extended 200 feet wide across the front and had 100 rooms. It superseded the old Mansion House, but the latter continued to operate as an economy hotel compared with the elegant, first-class Poland House. Hiram Wentworth Ricker, a third son, joined the firm in 1880, and in 1881 the Rickers bought out Young, established the firm of Hiram Ricker and Sons, Inc., and spent $20,000 improving both the interior and the exterior of the posh Poland House. Within 3 more years receipts had doubled, and sale of spring water increased about a thousand barrels per year, grossing $3,000 in 1883. In 1883 and 1884 the Rickers enlarged the Poland House by 64 rooms and a music hall, and the Mansion House to a total of 66 rooms. ln 1887, they built an annex to the Poland Spring House featuring a billiard hall and another 24 rooms, made other miscellaneous improvements, and enlarged the stable built in 1825. In 1889 the company added yet another 50 guest rooms to the Poland House, again remodeled the rest of the building, and relandscaped the grounds.

The year 1893 proved a banner year for the Ricker firm--for Poland Water won the Grand Prize for mineral waters at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and in Poland, Maine, the firm added a south wing to the Poland House featuring 20 bathroom suites. In 1894, the firm built a southwest wing that included a photographic studio and darkrooms available to guests who were amateur photographers. More notable, that year the company purchased the Maine State Building from the Chicago Fair for $30,000 and paid $3,000 to have it disassembled, loaded, and moved by a 16-car train to Poland, Maine. There workmen reassembled it in front of an oak grove beside the hotel to serve as a library, museum, and art gallery, where it still stood in 1988.

On the debit side of the ledger, on August 21, 1894, the stable burned to the ground, killing 27 horses and destroying all the harness, robes, coach equipment, and other tack. The Ricker firm scraped together enough equipment to haul 70 people the next day, and in four days had replaced all the horses and equipment lost in the disastrous fire. In 1894 and 1895, the Rickers erected over the site of the burned stable a 152-foot-wide new stable with two wings, a steel roof, and a carriage house with sleeping rooms above.

By the end of the century, the Rickers had added a nine-hole golf course, later extended to 18 holes. Devotees of tennis found a tennis court on which to play. The hotel added one of the first automatic sprinkler systems in a New England summer resort. Soon it featured telephones in every room. Some rooms had bathtubs with three faucets: hot water, cold water, and Poland Spring mineral water, for those who wished to bathe in it. A firing range accommodated guests who liked to shoot. A 500-acre farm and a 125-acre kitchen garden supplied produce to the hotel. Peas alone occupied 5 acres, and the farm and garden also had 3,000 tomato plants and grew cucumbers, cabbage, beets, lettuce, Swiss chard, and radishes by the ton. A hotel dairy farm kept 100 milk cows as well as other herds. Additionally, the hotel purchased produce from Shaker farms in the vicinity. The Shakers kept Rhode Island Red hens, which supplied eggs and poultry, and they also raised 250 hogs for the hotel. At the resort itself, meanwhile, Hiram Ricker and Sons further enlarged the Mansion House and added a bathhouse. In 1912, a stone All-Souls Chapel was erected near the Maine State Building. The resort continued to prosper in the Edwardian Age in America as it had in the Victorian.

Poland Spring and its bottling facilities had experienced a parallel development. In 1862, the Rickers demolished the original log springhouse built in 1859 and replaced it with a larger frame structure. That lasted until 1876 or 1877, when it was necessary to build a special building to house the filling of barrels. This new structure measured 30 by 60 feet and was designed so that water ran directly into the barrel being filled. Soon the firm had to add a cooperage to manufacture barrels, since by 1880 it was selling 5,000 barrels of Poland Water annually. In 1882, the firm enlarged both of the buildings at the spring. In 1883 the firm opened a New York City outlet. By 1885 demand for Poland Water had so increased and technology so advanced that bottling had largely taken the place of barreling, and the firm again enlarged the barreling house and added machinery for bottling and packaging.

A major overhaul of the process for packaging Poland Water took place in 1906 and 1907 when the firm erected a new springhouse and bottling plant. The springhouse, of Spanish design, featured interior walls and columns in Italian Pavonazzo marble and mosaic floors. The company encased the original spring itself in Carrara marble and plate glass with a solid bronze grille. Silver and glass pipes carried the water from the spring into highly polished granite tanks sealed with plate glass. The springhouse featured filtered air.

Near the springhouse was a large building that contained the bottling and labeling and packaging rooms, connected by a conveyor belt. The company bottled Poland Water in bottles reminiscent of those used for champagne, featuring mainly green labels, stopped with branded corks and sealed with a paper tape. Encased in boxes, the Poland Water went into a large storehouse.

Two railroads served the vicinity of Poland Spring by that time, the Maine Central at Danville Junction and the Grand Trunk at Lewiston Junction. Carriages from the hotel met guests, generally at Danville Junction, for the 5-mile ride to the Poland Spring House, or at Lewiston Junction if they came in on the Grand Trunk from northern Vermont or New Hampshire or Canada. Drayage wagons, meanwhile, hauled the barrels and later, boxes of bottles of Poland Water from the warehouse near the spring to Danville Junction for shipment to market. The one further step of modernization was to build a branch railroad from the bottling plant to one of the railroads, but in the majority of promotional literature on the history of the Poland Spring Resort and of Poland Water, this aspect of the operation has been largely ignored. Even the date of construction remains a puzzle. It seems likely that a railroad, whose unknown length has been speculated as ranging from 3 to perhaps 7 miles, was constructed as part of the 1906-1907 modernization of the bottling, packaging, and shipping plant at Poland Spring, in which case the company must have rented or leased a locomotive from the Maine Central or some other nearby railroad. Or the firm may have built the railroad as late as 1910, when the company purchased its first locomotive.

On April 12, 1910, the company purchased a small, coal-burning 0-4-0 locomotive with a sloped tender from the Maine Central Railroad. It was not a new engine, having been outshopped by the Manchester Locomotive Works on May 29, 1893, as Locomotive No. 6 of the Portland and Rumford Falls Railroad. It had become the Maine Central's second No. 12 on April 26, 1907. Almost as soon as the Poland Water company acquired it, the firm converted the locomotive to bum oil on May 25, 1910. A painter lettered its tender "Poland Spring R.R." Thereafter, the little locomotive trundled boxcar loads of shipments of Poland Water from the bottling plant down to a junction with the Maine Central known as Riccars, after the original spelling of the Ricker family name, and brought back empty boxcars to be filled. No evidence has been found that the Poland Spring Railroad ever carried passengers to the resort, though on occasion a child or two managed to wangle a ride in the locomotive cab with an obliging engineer. Evidence as to whether the company owned any of its own cars is conflicting. One man recalled that the company owned some of its own boxcars. Examination of several issues of the Official Railway Equipment Register of different dates revealed no listing of cars owned either by a Poland Spring Railroad or Hiram Ricker and Sons, but the question has not been settled conclusively. A man named Ralph Clark served as engineer on the Poland Spring Railroad for many years.

In 1927, the firm of Hiram Ricker and Sons ordered from the American Locomotive Company a second locomotive for the Poland Spring Railroad, for by that time No. 1 was 34 years old and probably needed work. It is also possible that in the Roaring Twenties, sales of Poland Water had so increased that at times the railroad needed two locomotives to handle switching at both ends of the line and traffic between.

The Poland Spring Company (Hiram Ricker & Sons) purchased its first plant switcher on April 12, 1910, an old 0-6-0 with a sloped tender built by the Manchester Locomotive Works in 1893 for the Portland & Rumford Falls Railroad. The Poland Springs Company bought it from the Maine Central Railroad who had owned it since 1907. It served until 1927, when the company ordered from the American Locomotive Company its second locomotive, 0-6-0T No. 2, which later worked for E.J. Lavino & Co. before ending up at Steamtown.
Top, collection of Catherine Lennihan
Bottom: collection of H.T. Letcher

The American Locomotive Company reportedly outshopped Poland Spring Railroad No. 2 from its works at Schenectady, New York, in August 1927, though the builder's specification sheet No. A-12412 carried the date of October 28, 1927. The new locomotive featured 16-by-24-inch cylinders (16 inches in diameter with a 24-inch stroke) and 44-inch-diameter drive wheels, six coupled. It was, in other words, an 0-6-0T, a switch engine with a saddle tank over the boiler for 1,500 gallons of water and a bunker behind the cab for 1 ton of soft coal. Its firebox measured 62-1/8 inches long by 42-1/4 inches wide. The boiler carried an operating pressure of 180 pounds per square inch and contained 157 seamless steel tubes or flues, each 2 inches in diameter 11 feet long. It had a rigid wheelbase of

10 feet 2 inches. The firebox grate area was 18.2 square feet, and the engine provided a maximum tractive effort of 21,400 pounds. The locomotive weighed 107,000 pounds. It had a straight top boiler and a steel plate cab, and featured Richardson balanced steam chest valves and Stephenson valve motion. A modem triple-feed bullseye lubricator fed oil to its moving parts. Westinghouse-American combined automatic air brakes applied on all driving wheels, and the system served train connections at both ends of the engine; it featured M.C.B. (Master Car Builder's standard) automatic couplers that met Interstate Commerce Commission height requirements. The locomotive's bumpers were painted red and stenciled "Safety First."

After Hiram Ricker and Sons, Inc., ordered this locomotive, there is some doubt that the company ever used it. Whether it ever left the Schenectady Works, whether the firm took delivery in Maine and simply stored it unused for unknown reasons, or whether the firm used it for some years is unclear. Similarly, when either they or the American Locomotive Company sold it to a second owner is unknown at present. What is known is that the second owner of the locomotive was the firm of E.J. Lavino and Company, which operated a manganese blast furnace at Sheridan, Pennsylvania, and needed a locomotive to switch plant trackage.

Edward J. Lavino founded the company named after him in 1887. A native of Holland, he had served in the 1870s and probably early 1880s as Dutch consul in Turkey (and had a brother who served concurrently as Dutch consul in Singapore). While in Turkey, Lavino founded an exporting business that shipped licorice root that was used in the processing of tobacco, and opium that was used in manufacturing pharmaceuticals. Much of this business was with firms in the United States, and after experience in dealing with American firms, he decided to move his family to the United States to take advantage of the economic opportunity he perceived there. He settled in Philadelphia. From being an exporter of licorice root from Turkey, he became an importer of licorice root to the United States.

Soon Lavino had branched out into the importing of manganese ore from Imperial Russia. The young but rapidly growing steel industry in the United States needed raw materials from which to make steel, and Russians had pioneered a process using manganese in the production of steel. The ore first had to be reduced and combined with iron and carbon in a blast furnace to manufacture an alloy called ferromanganese, which was about 85 percent manganese, 15 percent iron, and 5 percent carbon. On the eve of World War I, Lavino acquired four small blast furnaces that his company converted from the manufacture of pig iron to the manufacture of ferromanganese. These operated at Sheridan and Marietta, Pennsylvania; Reusens, near Lynchburg, Virginia; and near Buffalo, New York. The company disposed of the plants at Marietta and near Buffalo after World War I, but continued to operate the Sheridan and Reusens furnaces, both of which had small steam locomotives. Acquired by E.J. Lavino and Company about 1914, the Sheridan, Pennsylvania, plant continued to operate until about 1970, when due to its obsolescence, the company shut it down and sold it for scrap.

Just when the Lavino company acquired the Poland Spring Railroad engine that became their No. 3 at the Sheridan, Pennsylvania, plant, is unknown. It may have been as early as 1927 or 1928 or as late as 1949, but by the latter date it clearly was at work at the Sheridan plant. At this time a Lavino inspector remarked that "the above locomotive is in good operating condition."

The Lavino company had other locomotives, but a complete roster of its motive power remains to be researched. By the 1950s it had an 0-6-0T side-tank switcher used to switch and dump cars of incandescent molten waste slag at its plant at Reusens, Virginia. The Lavino company painted that locomotive royal blue with yellow trim, and it carried the number 34. The Sheridan plant is known to have had another 0-6-0T with a saddle tank, No. 10, one that had only a single sand dome rather than the two on Lavino No. 3, and with wider spacing between the first two sets of drivers than between the second and third axles. The two surviving Sheridan plant locomotives featured black paint with white lettering and symbol, and today Lavino No. 3 at Steamtown may have the same paint and lettering it had when acquired by Steamtown in May 1966, though the lettering on Locomotive No. 10 was in yellow, not white. Lavino Locomotives Nos. 3 and 34 carried a script "L" in a circle supposedly inspired by the similar symbol used by Lionel, the manufacturer of electric toy trains that reached the height of their popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, the symbol is remarkably similar, though not absolutely identical, to two slightly different versions of the Lionel symbol found in toy train catalogs published by that firm.

With the phasing down of its ferromanganese furnaces, the Lavino company shipped its Locomotive No. 3 to Bellows Falls, Vermont, on May 18, 1966. At that time, from its offices at Three Penn Center Plaza in Philadelphia, the Lavino company still constituted a family-owned concern dealing in ores, minerals, and ferroalloys, and presided over subsidiaries as far flung as London, England, and Johannesburg, South Africa, and an affiliate in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

With the decline of the steel industry, the Lavino firm began to diversify into other areas of enterprise. As already mentioned, the firm dismantled and scrapped the Sheridan plant about 1970, and the Reusens plant at about the same time. During the 1970s the firm acquired the old Baldwin Lima-Hamilton Corporation, the locomotive firm that had grown out of the old Baldwin Locomotive Works and out of the Lima Locomotive Works when the two major locomotive builders merged. By the 1970s, Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton participated only in the locomotive replacement parts business. Still later, the Lavino company disposed of its interest in Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton to the firm's employees in a leveraged buy-out, after which Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton acquired Joy Manufacturing, a huge enterprise that manufactured underground coal-mining machinery. It reorganized as Joy Technologies of Pittsburgh, which today has the remnant of Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton's replacement part business.

As for E.J. Lavino and Company, it remained a family-owned business that celebrated its centennial in 1987 under the management of Edward J. Lavino, II. In 1988 the firm controlled Geothermal Resources, International, which operated the geothermal wells that produced steam power in Sonoma County, California. The firm also had investments in an equipment leasing firm and in a fiber optic telecommunication system in Philadelphia.

In Maine, the Poland Spring Resort fell on hard times during the Depression. In 1938, Hiram Ricker and Sons, Inc., sold the hotel business to a consortium that included a man named Lane associated with American Firearms, a Daniel Needham of Boston, and the Babbitt Steam Supply Company of New Bedford. The resort struggled on. In 1962 a man named Sol Feldman of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bought the hotels. He donated the Maine State Building and the All Souls Chapel to the Poland Preservation Society in 1976. In 1966 he leased the Poland Spring House and some of the other buildings to the federal government, which contracted with the Avco Corporation to rehabilitate them for use as a Job Corps training center. On July 4, 1975, the Poland Spring House caught fire and burned to the ground. The Mansion House was gutted by fire in 1978, and the ruins then demolished.

Poland Water continued to be a popular mineral water, especially in the eastern part of the United States, and Hiram Ricker and Sons continued to bottle and ship it. The author of this study found it for sale in a small-town grocery in Colorado about 1970. He tried a bottle of it because it had once been carried in the narrow gauge buffet diners of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, which at that time he was studying. In 1973, the Perrier Company bought the spring and the bottling plant and in 1977 sold it to a son-in-law of the firm's owner, Paul de Haeue. As of 1988, the bottling plant still bottled and shipped Poland Water, which at that time ranked fifth in mineral water sales in the United States. The firm no longer shipped by its own railroad; however, when it tore out the tracks is unknown.

It is a commentary on the nature of American business that neither the Poland Water firm nor E.J. Lavino and Company seemed to retain records documenting much of their history. As family-owned firms, they did not receive the regular attention of the investment manuals published under the names Poor's and Moody's, which usually provide a rich source of information on American corporate and business history, and in whose annual volumes a historian can trace a company's history from one year to another and obtain year-by-year history of a firm's corporate development, growth, decline, and profits.

Fortunately Edward J. Lavino, II, could recall some of the history of his family's firm, even though the company today cannot provide a roster of all the locomotives it had owned at one time or another. Scattered descendants of Hiram Ricker could recall 20th-century aspects of that firm's history, though no one now associated with the company bottling Poland Water seems to know any of the history of their firm or even to be aware that it once operated its own small railroad. Similarly, no one associated with the Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, knows any of that firm's long history of locomotive building. It professes to retain no records of that activity, and the same was true for employees of the H.K. Porter Company, who knew nothing of their firm's locomotive-building past. One may suspect that present-day employees of Joy Technologies have little awareness that their company grew, in part, out of two of the greatest locomotive-building firms in the western hemisphere.

As for E.J. Lavino & Company Locomotive No. 3, it is one of about 19 0-6-0T locomotives that survive in the United States in museums, parks, or fairgrounds, including E.J. Lavino & Company 0-6-0T No. 10 (which the company shipped to the Orange Empire Railroad Museum in Perris, California, but which later moved to a railroad museum at Campo, California, in San Diego County) and E.J. Lavino No. 34, the 0-6-0 side-tank engine from Reusens, Virginia, now in a railroad museum at Roanoke, Virginia.

Condition: E.J. Lavino and Company Locomotive No. 3 is in reasonably good condition on the exterior, probably with the same paint and lettering it had when it left the Sheridan plant in 1966. Its mechanical condition is unknown.

Recommendation: As a technological representative of the 0-6-0T type and because of its historical associations, E.J. Lavino and Company Locomotive No. 3 should be preserved by the National Park Service. Its historical associations with firms established by emigrants from Saxony and Holland (via Turkey) or their descendants provide a tie with the interpretation of the history of immigrants in America. Not all immigrants were Irish or Greek section hands or Chinese or Irish track builders or Japanese railroad laborers. Some, indeed, founded and presided over major companies, as did Hiram Ricker and his sons of Saxon extraction, though it was Hiram's great-great-grandfather who had emigrated from Saxony. Each of these families came to own industrial or plant railroads. The National Park Service should commission a report comparable to a historic structure report on the subject of this engine, with effort directed especially toward obtaining photographs and reminiscences of the locomotive's service at Sheridan, Pennsylvania, and more information regarding the Poland Spring Railroad and whether or not this locomotive ever actually operated on that line. The report should include the results of a thorough mechanical inspection and evaluation of the locomotive; should recommend which period it should be restored to represent; should document various color and lettering schemes the locomotive had; and should recommend whether or not to restore the locomotive to operable condition and whether or not to operate it for interpretive purposes on occasion. If in fact the locomotive never operated on the Poland Spring Railroad, it should probably be preserved as E.J. Lavino No. 3. Furthermore, because the locomotive appears to have its last paint and lettering scheme for E.J. Lavino and Company preserved intact, this study leans toward carefully cleaning the locomotive and stripping any rust, but otherwise not repainting the locomotive unless that is required for preservation, and instead preserving its existing paint scheme. However, companion Locomotive No. 10 had yellow rather than white lettering, and research is needed to determine which color is correct for No. 3. It is not desirable that every locomotive in the Steamtown collection appear to have been freshly painted and outshopped. This locomotive may offer an opportunity to preserve a locomotive as it was at the time it left the railroad industry rather than applying fresh new paint and lettering, however accurately. In other words, it may be possible to preserve its historic paint job rather than to repaint it, if in fact the white lettering is a historic lettering.

Barley, Bob, Poland Spring Water Company. Telephone communication with author, June 14, 1988.

Bennett, Mary E. Poland, Past & Present, 1795-1970. Poland, Me.: 175th Anniversary Committee, 1970: 45, 71-75.

Frye, Harry. Letter to author, 1988. [Supplied roster data on the Poland Spring Railroad.]

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973). [See item No. 3 and roster entry.]

Johns, Neils S. Letter to author, April 21, 1988.Johnson, Ron. The Best of Maine Railroads. South Portland, Me.: Author, 1985.

Kean, Randolph. The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays. Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, 1973:173.

Krause, John, with H. Reid. Rails Through Dixie. San Marino, Calif.: Golden West Books, 1965: 12.

__________. Letter to author, Apr. 12, 1988. [Supplied two color photographs and a photocopy of a news clipping from San Diego, California.]

Lennihan, Francis. Letter to author, July 5, 1988.Poland Spring Centennial: A Souvenir. South Poland, Me.: Hiram Ricker & Sons, 1895.

Poland Spring, Maine. America's Leading Spa. South Poland, Me.: Hiram Ricker & Sons, 1904.

Poland Spring, Poland Water. n.p. [South Poland: Hiram Ricker & Sons], n.d. (ca. 1918).

Poland Water.Ricker, George, and Rose Ricker, eds. Poland Spring Remembered: Recollections of Catharine Lewis Lennihan. Poland Spring, Me.: Poland Spring Preservation Society, 1988.

"Specification No. A 12412 for Hiram Ricker & Sons, 16" x 24" 0-6-0T-107 Saddle Tank Locomotive, Oct. 28, 1927." New York: American Locomotive Company, 1927.

"Steam News Photos." Trains, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Dec. 1964): 13. [Builder's photograph of Poland Spring No. 2, caption regarding its acquisition by Steamtown, though it was not shipped until 1966.]

"Steam News Photos." Trains, Vol. 27, No. 10 (Aug. 1967): 9. [Photo of E.J.L. & Co. No. 10 at Orange Empire Trolley Museum, Perris, Calif.]

"Steamtown Engine Roster, September 1967." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968): 8.

File on E.J. Lavino & Company Locomotive No. 3, Steamtown Foundation files, Scranton, Pa. [Files include correspondence regarding shipment of the locomotive in 1966 and shipping notice.]

Builder: Baldwin Locomotive Works
Date Built: June 1925
Builder's Number: 58463

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 26 x 30
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 210
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 73
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 65,000 (also reported as 49,590)

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 18
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 13,575

Remarks: Engine has duplex mechanical stoker, vanadium steel main frames, boxpok drive wheels, and a Vanderbilt tender. It has bad cylinder castings.

History: Incorporated in 1900 in Indiana and Michigan and controlled by the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada, by 1920 the Grand Trunk Western Railway owned 331 miles of track in Michigan and Illinois and was in its later years the only railroad that provided commuter rail service in and around Detroit. The Grand Trunk Railroad, of course, subsequently was absorbed into the government-owned Canadian National Railways, which thereafter controlled the Grand Trunk Western Railway in the United States. Thus commuters riding to their jobs in Detroit on Grand Trunk Western trains were in fact being hauled by an American railroad owned by the government of Canada.

Three factors influenced the Grand Trunk Western Railway to acquire heavy passenger (and freight) locomotives of the 4-8-2 Mountain type during the 1920s. First, the type became popular in the United States as a result of the great success of an engine of that class designed by the U.S. Railroad Administration in its short-lived attempt to standardize designs of all American steam locomotives when the railroads were briefly nationalized during and just after World War I. Second, the parent Canadian National Railways had purchased 16 of this type of locomotive in 1923 that had also proved to be very successful, to the extent that Canadian National bought another 21 in 1924. Third, during the Roaring Twenties passenger traffic on the Grand Trunk Western, especially on its Chicago Division, had increased to the extent that the company's 4-6-2 Pacifics increasingly had to be double- headed to abide by the timetables, a costly practice that required an extra engine crew, not to mention the additional engine, so that a heavier engine was essential to eliminate the practice.

Accordingly, in 1925 that the Grand Trunk Western Railway took delivery from the Baldwin Locomotive Works on five 4-8-2 locomotives, numbered 6037 through 6041, which it assigned to Class U-1-c. Mechanical Engineer Thomas H. Walker signed the Specification Card on No. 6039 at the Baldwin Locomotive Works on June 26, 1925. These locomotives featured feedwater heaters, power reverse gear, and automatic or mechanical stokers, and they were the first locomotives on the Grand Trunk Western to feature both Vanderbilt tenders and enclosed, vestibuled or all-weather cabs. Although they were purchased for passenger service, the Grand Trunk Western soon learned how successfully they could move hotshot fast freight trains, so that by the early 1930s they could be found, in the words of the railroad's historian, "as often ripping the quiet Michigan and Indiana countrysides apart with fast freight as they could heading up the Maple Leaf or the International."

In January 1929, the Grand Trunk Western Railroad succeeded the Grand Trunk Western Railway.

During their careers, these engines received a number of modifications. They were manufactured with friction bearings on all tender and engine axles, but during the mid-1930s the Grand Trunk Western equipped them all with more modern and efficient roller bearings on leading and trailing trucks on the locomotive itself. In 1940 and 1941, the railroad installed cowls or smoke deflectors of various designs around the stacks of these engines, following the popularity of the practice on the Canadian National in an attempt to keep the smoke from dropping down and obscuring the vision of the engineer and fireman. The smoke deflectors failed to accomplish much, so the railroad removed all of them in the late 1940s.

The Grand Trunk Western made two other notable modifications of these locomotives. During the 1940s, No. 6039 was reported to have received vanadium steel main frames and "boxpok" drive wheels. Technically called "box-spoke," these drivers had fewer spokes and were of box-section type, like the wheel rim, a design that provided greatly improved lateral strength and rim stiffness. Viewed from the side, the opening between the spokes was circular, rather than wedge-shaped.

The boxpok drivers proved an important modification in high-speed service. Oddly, these modern drive wheels were not all applied at the same time even to a single locomotive. A photographer named Eilenberger recorded Engine No. 6039 at Elsdon engine terminal in March 1939 with boxpok drivers only on the second driver axle, while on September 21, 1941, it had the boxpok drivers on at least the second and third axles (and possibly the first, which is obscured in the photograph), but not on the fourth. By that date, the engine had acquired a rather ugly shielding around the stack which, fortunately, the railroad later removed.

Although engine crews reportedly liked these 4-8-2s, acquisition of still heavier steam power, and later, diesel locomotives, resulted in the railroad downgrading use of the "Mountains," and they served on passenger runs between Detroit and Muskegon.

At the end of its career in the 1950s, the Grand Trunk Western Railway leased No. 6039 to the Central Vermont Railway, and it proved to be one of the last steam locomotives in normal common carrier service in the state of Vermont, and the last to survive.

F. Nelson Blount purchased Grand Trunk Western Railroad No. 6039 from the Canadian National Railway Company for his Edaville Railroad at South Carver, Massachusetts, on Sales Order No. S-19802 from the railway's Purchasing Department in Montreal, Quebec, on June 17, 1959, undoubtedly with plans to use it elsewhere than at South Carver. Initially, it was to be shipped to Wakefield, Massachusetts, for exhibit at the Pleasure Island amusement park. Blount paid $7,425 for the engine, which at the time was stored in St. Albans, Vermont. Subsequently the engine was exhibited at Blount's Steamtown located at Riverside, Vermont, just north of Bellows Falls.

With a full load of coal in her Vanderbilt tender, Grand Trunk Western No. 6039 awaited a call at Detroit, Michigan, on July 11, 1953.
Photo by Peter Cox, Steamtown Foundation Collection

Locomotive No. 6039 is one of about 17 Grand Trunk Western Railroad engines that have survived in the United States, of which 10 are 0-8-0 switch engines, so that No. 6039 is one of only seven Grand Trunk Western road engines, and the only 4-8-2 of the railroad to survive. No. 6039 is the only 4-8-2 Mountain-type engine in the Steamtown collection, and one of only 14 "Mountains" preserved in the United States, six of which were engines of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway.

Condition: Although ostensibly in good condition, this engine reportedly has bad cylinder castings, which means that its restoration for operation may not be fiscally within reason, although enough money will buy any type of repair. As with many locomotives in the collection, this engine had its drive rods removed for the move from Bellows Falls to Scranton, and those need to be reinstalled.

Recommendation: This engine is exactly the kind of modem, heavy-duty, main line motive power that should become the primary focus of the Steamtown collection. NPS should commission a report to document the use and physical history of the locomotive. At the very least, it should be restored for use as a static exhibit; however, before undertaking such restoration, the locomotive's mechanical condition should be thoroughly assessed and a decision made regarding whether it can be reasonably restored to operability. If it can be restored to run, it should be so restored for interpretive use and special excursions; if it cannot be restored mechanically, it should be restored cosmetically to serve as a static exhibit engine in the roundhouse.

The distinctive cylindrical tank of a Vanderbilt tender graced Grand Trunk Western Locomotive No. 6039, the only tender of this type in the Steamtown Foundation collection.
Photo by Gordon Chappell

A Canadian National Railways folio locomotive diagram sheet documented the vital statistics of Grand Trunk Western Locomotive No. 6039, which operated on Canadian National's American subsidiary in Michigan.
Canadian National Railways

Baldwin Locomotive Works. "Specification Card for Locomotive No. 6039," June 26, 1925. In the Steamtown Foundation files.

Beaudette, Edward H. Central Vermont Railway: Operations in the Mid-Twentieth Century. Newton: Carstens Publications, 1982: 85.

Canadian National Railway Company. "Purchasing Department Sales Order No. S-19802, Montreal, Quebec, June 17, 1959."

Dorm, Patrick C. The Grand Trunk Western Railroad: A Canadian National Railway. Seattle: Superior Publishing Co., 1977.

Farrell, Jack W., and Mike Pearsall. North American Steam Locomotives: The Mountains. Edmunds: Pacific Fast Mail, 1977: 4-9, 230-239, 381.

Foss, Charles R. Evening Before the Diesel: A Pictorial History of Steam and First Generation Diesel Motive Power on the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, 1938-1961. Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Publishing, 1980: 342-344. [This fine book is a principal source on No. 6039.]

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973). [See Item 45.]

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, 8th ed. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Co., 1927. [See p. 198, fig. 159. Drawing of elevations and cross sections, locomotive only, no tender; p. 200, fig. 163, builder's photographs of No. 6038 and specifications.]

National Railway Historical Society Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1967): 36. [Photograph of No. 6039 at Steamtown, Bellows Falls, Vermont.]

Scribbins, Jim. "Grand Trunk Western Keeps its Word." Trains, Vol. 16 (Dec. 1955): 18-20. [Article includes photograph of sister Locomotive No. 6038 in commuter service.]

Builder: American Locomotive Company
Date Built: November 1903; rebuilt: 1918
Builder's Number: 28686

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 22 x 26
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 190
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 44
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 42,000

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 8
    Water (in gallons): 6,500
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable

Remarks: Engine is manually fired, has superheater and Baker valve gear. Locomotive is in fair condition; some work on its machinery is needed to make it operable.

History: Locomotive No. 790 steamed for most of its career on rails of the Illinois Central, but began life with a very brief period of work for another carrier. Chartered on October 31, 1888, by 1900 the Chicago Union Transfer Railway Company had 5.35 miles of line, but with second, third, and fourth tracks counted, as well as 25 miles of sidings, the company reported a total of 34.39 miles of track. In the next 2 years, the company nearly tripled its trackage to 100 miles. It was probably this phenomenal growth that spurred the Chicago Union Transfer Railway to order a group of new 2-8-0 locomotives, among them No. 100, outshopped by the American Locomotive Company in September 1903 at its Cooke Works in Paterson, New Jersey.

The Chicago Union Transfer Railway served as a switching line connecting the trackage of various trunk lines that entered Chicago, and served a number of industries as well. It is likely that a majority of its stock was in the hands of the various major railroads with which it connected. Among its directors, for example, were E.P. Ripley, then president of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway System, and J.T. Harahan, a second vice president of the Illinois Central; a perusal of the biographies of the other directors probably would identify corporate officers of other major Chicago-area railroads.

For reasons unknown, in 1904 the Chicago Union Transfer Railway sold four of its new Consolidations to the Illinois Central Railroad Company, which renumbered them 641 through 644, C.U.T.Ry. No. 100 now becoming Illinois Central No. 641.

As of 1900, the Illinois Central Railroad extended 912 miles from Chicago via Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana, but if one added in the other main, branch, and leased lines, as of 1902 the company operated 4,265-1/2 miles of track. A comparatively old railroad, chartered February 10, 1851, the Illinois Central had built first to Dubuque, Iowa, which it reached on June 11, 1855, then to Cairo, which it reached on September 27, 1856. It reached New Orleans from Cairo by controlling the Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans Railroad, whose 547.79 miles of main line between those two points, and 117.2 miles of branch line, comprised a major part of the Illinois Central System.

This was the company that now operated 2-8-0 No. 641, probably principally for freight service, the typical use of Consolidation-type locomotives. The engine reportedly hauled freight trains in Tennessee for many years. The engine must have seen hard service, for reportedly the Illinois Central rebuilt it in 1918, modernizing it with a superheater, and possibly replacing the boiler and firebox. The engine then continued in heavy freight service. In January 1943 the Illinois Central renumbered the four engines in this series 790 through 793, and thus No. 641 became No. 790. The Consolidation remained on the company's roster until virtually the end of steam power on the Illinois Central. Near the end of her use, when she was virtually retired to storage by diesel-electric locomotives, the railroad nevertheless had to fire No. 790 up in the spring to assist Illinois Central trains through track inundated by flood waters near Cedar Rapids, because diesel-electric locomotives with their electric motors shorted out in any water, whereas even the bottom of the firebox in a steam locomotive was much higher above the rail, hence above flood waters. Finally in May 1959, the Illinois Central sold No. 790 to Louis S. Keller of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Illinois Central Railroad Consolidation No. 790 showed a "well-groomed" appearance in this photograph from the collection of Gerald M. Best.
California State Railroad Museum Library

Keller had hoped to run Illinois Central No. 790 on railfan excursions between Cedar Rapids and Manchester, Iowa, a round trip of some 84 miles. Whether he succeeded in running any trips at all is not known. In April 1965, Keller apparently sold or leased the locomotive for more flood duty, and the Chicago & North Western towed the engine to Clinton, Iowa, where it plowed through overflow from the Mississippi River for the Clinton Corn Processing Company. Later, in September 1965, the locomotive was sold to David de Camp of New York State, who hoped to operate it near Lake Placid. He moved No. 790 to Lake Placid but never operated it. F. Nelson Blount purchased the locomotive in January 1966. Eventually the Steamtown Foundation acquired the locomotive from Blount's estate in August 1967.

Locomotive No. 790 is the only surviving locomotive of the Chicago Union Transfer Railway, and one of about nine Illinois Central Railroad steam locomotives to survive scrapping. Of those nine engines, one other, No. 764, is a 2-8-0 Consolidation type, though of a different class and series than No. 790. About 146 standard gauge 2-8-0s survive in the United States, including Illinois Central No. 790.

Condition: Locomotive No. 790 is believed to be in reasonably good condition, and with some work could be restored mechanically to operable condition.

Recommendations: While the Steamtown collection has other Consolidations, none are duplicates in aspects other than wheel arrangement, and No. 790, with its Baker valve gear and its unusual sand dome, is a good example of a heavy-duty 2-8-0 of the early years of the 20th century. The National Park Service should commission a report, equivalent to a historic structure report, that should include intensive research into photographic history, particularly attempting to find photographs of this engine or engines of its class on the Chicago Union Transfer Railway and under its first number on the Illinois Central prior to the remodeling of 1918. The report should also supply more detail than presently available on the operating history of this engine and engines of its class. The report should make recommendations on which period the locomotive should be restored to represent--at present, it seems preferable for the locomotive to be restored to represent the final era in its common carrier history, from 1941 to 1959, though it may also be possible to restore it to the 1918 to 1941 period. It is not believed at present feasible or desirable to restore the locomotive to appearance prior to the 1918 rebuilding. The report should explore fully the history of paint, lettering, and numbering schemes applied to this locomotive. If it is feasible to restore No. 790 to operable condition, it should be so restored, and used for interpretation, special occasions, and special excursions.

Anderson, Willard V. "Main Line of Mid-America." Trains, Vol. 8, No. 12 (Oct. 1948): XX.

Beebe, Lucius, and Clegg, Charles. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: 89, 98, 327.

Corliss, Carlton. Main Line of Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central. New York: Creative Age Press, 1950.

Edson, William D. "Illinois Central Predecessor Lines." Railroad History, No. 140 (Spring 1979): 5-9.

__________ et al. "Locomotive Rosters, Illinois Central Railroad & Predecessor Lines," Railroad History, No. 140 (Spring 1979): 10-114; see especially p. 38.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973), Item No. 27 and roster.

Kean, Randolph. The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays, Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, Publisher, 1973: 175. [This roster erroneously, it is believed, identifies the original owner as the Chicago Junction Railway.]

Poor, H.V., and H.W. Poor. Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States, 1900. New York: H.V. & H.W. Poor, 1900: 1438.

_________. Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States, 1902. New York: H.V. & H.W. Poor, 1902: 364-371, 419.

Stover, John. History of the Illinois Central Railroad. New York: Macmillan, 1975.

Builder: American Locomotive Company. Cooke Works, Patersen, New Jersey
Date Built: October 1920, resold March 1923
Builder's Number: 62623

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 18 x 22
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 178
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 50
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 23,800 (also reported as 28,400)

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): Not applicable
    Oil (in gallons): 1,800
    Water (in gallons): 5,000

History: American railroad locomotive builders had by the turn of the century obtained a sizable share of the export market for locomotives in certain parts of the world, although they faced stiff competition from various English, French, and German firms. American locomotives dominated Latin America, with notable exceptions of Argentina, Brazil, and to some extent Chile, and went to locations as diverse as Japan, Formosa, China, Manchuria, Russia, and Australia.

On October 5, 1920, the American Locomotive Company prepared a set of specifications for a 2-8-0 Consolidation-type Locomotive No. 8 for a Cuban sugar plantation railroad, that of the Compañía Azucarera Central Reforma. It was a pretty little engine with clean lines equipped with a Pyle-National headlight, a steel, horizontal slat pilot, a steel cab, and a second sand dome behind the steam dome to feed sand to the rear drivers. The little standard gauge engine had piston valves and Walschaert valve motion. Unfortunately, after the company had completed the locomotive and photographed it in its new builder's paint job, the deal fell through. Failure to ship the locomotive to Cuba has been attributed to a Cuban revolution. Perhaps. But the February Revolution in which the Liberal Party tried to overthrow President Mario Garcia Menocal had occurred in 1917, and all that took place in 1920 was a disputed election from which the Liberal candidate, Jose Miguel Gomez, withdrew, prematurely, some thought. The period following World War I in fact encompassed prosperity and rapid growth in the Cuban sugar industry. So the reasons that Locomotive No. 8 never went to Cuba to roll over the rails of the Compañía Azucarera Central Reforma remain far from clear. Nevertheless, the little engine intended for Cuba gathered dust for the next two and a half years awaiting a home.

Home for the orphan turned out to be only one state away from her place of birth at the Cooke Works in Paterson, New Jersey. In 1923, the Lowville and Beaver River Railroad, a short line in New York State's North Country just west of the Adirondacks, from which the Beaver River drained, sought a new locomotive as a result of the same postwar economic boom that made the failure of the Cuban company to complete purchase of its locomotive so inexplicable. American Locomotive had to remove the oil burner from the firebox and the oil tank from the tender and convert the grates to bum coal fuel, but once the company had completed that work the New York short line had adopted a spiffy little engine that would serve until the end of steam.

There seemed little rhyme or reason to the railroad's numbering of its first three engines, Nos. 10, 12, and 51, which were all second hand; the Lowville and Beaver River may simply have continued to use the numbers the engines had acquired while operating for previous owners. In 1912, however, the Lowville and Beaver River ordered its first brand new locomotive, a 4-6-0, from the American Locomotive Company's works in Schenectady, New York, and at this time management made a decision that the year of purchase would henceforth be the locomotive's road number, so the new 4-6-0 became Locomotive No. 1912. In 1923, when the company decided to purchase the orphaned Compañía Azucarera Central Reforma Locomotive No. 8, management decided it would become Lowville and Beaver River Locomotive No. 1923. The company would subsequently follow the same practice with its two 44-ton General Electric diesel-electric locomotives in 1947 and 1950. (The latter, though built in 1950, was not actually acquired until 1963.)

Compaña Azucarera Central Reforma ordered its Consolidation No. 8 from the American Locomotive Company, which was prepared to deliver it at the time it made the above photograph in 1920. For reasons unknown, the Cuban sugar plantation that had ordered it either failed to pay for the locomotive, or for other reasons failed to accept it. Three years later, the Lowville & Beaver River Railroad, a short line in the Adirondack region of upper New York State, purchased the locomotive, and as the company had done in 1912 with an earlier engine, gave its new motive power as a road number the number of the year they had acquired it—No. 1923. Note the spoked wheels that the new owner eventually substituted in the view below.
Steamtown Foundation Collection

Locomotive No. 1923 would have few more miles over which to operate in New York than on a Cuban plantation, perhaps less, for its new owner possessed only 10.44 miles of main track, plus the usual proportion of sidings, in this case 3.19 miles in the aggregate. Supposedly the idea for the railroad occurred in the local businessmen's club, the Lowville Club, either over a card game in the back room or simply in a discussion. Some unknown gentleman raised the issue of a railroad to connect Lowville with Croghan, New York, where it would connect with the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. One thing led to another, and soon all present agreed that a railroad was just the ticket. Most prominent among them, coal dealer G.A. Blackmon, who incidentally had built the Lowville Club in which they were meeting, took the business in hand and on August 3, 1903, formed the Lowville and Beaver River Railroad Company.

First he collected an investment of $11,000 from a few friends and business colleagues. Then he went out by horse and buggy into the farm country north of the Black River, where he told farmers that the railroad would make shipping milk to New York City easier and increase their milk receipts. "Why, it'll haul all your produce and cattle out, and any goods you buy practically to your doorstep. The price is $100 per share. How much shall I put you down for?" After several weeks of this, Blackmon had $60,000 in subscriptions to stock. Then he went after and obtained another $50,000 from businessmen and townspeople in Lowville and vicinity. By February 24, 1924, the initial offer of capital stock had all been taken, though the company would later have to increase the capitalization to cover construction costs.

That spring, C.E. Brownell surveyed two routes and that summer James T. Campbell won the contract for construction of the line. Despite labor troubles, the need to construct a long trestle over the Black River flats, and the subsequent death of Campbell, the building of the railroad continued through 1904 and 1905 until the construction crews completed it in January 1906. The railroad had the usual ups and downs, but began paying dividends on common stock in 1925 and supposedly continued with a lapse of but one year until the late 1950s. A possibly apocryphal tale has it that during one of the years of the Great Depression, the Lowville and Beaver River was the only railroad in the country to pay a dividend. That meant that except during her first two years of service on the road, and one year during the Depression, Locomotive No. 1923 had the pleasure of working for a profitable little company.

It was not a company without misfortune, however, and the Lowville and Beaver River suffered its share of derailments and accidents. More serious, around 1938 during a bitter cold North Country winter, the railroad's engine house burned down with No. 1923 in it, the fire undoubtedly melting babbitt metal and possibly some of the brass and other parts. With much welding, sheet metal work, and new brass, the company was able to reclaim the scorched locomotive, though four years later a visitor would remark about the Consolidation "still bearing heat marks on her tender-plate from a fire which nearly destroyed her years."

No. 1923 continued to haul passengers until January 10, 1947, when the railroad discontinued the service, but the locomotive continued to haul freight for farmers, and to serve paper mills and a block factory at Croghan.

A locomotive inspector certified Lowville and Beaver River Railroad No. 1923 as operable in October 1955.
Steamtown Foundation Collection

In May 1947 the railroad took delivery of a maroon and yellow center-cab 44-ton diesel-electric locomotive built in the General Electric Company's shops in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in tried and true Lowville and Beaver River tradition, given the road number 1947. The arrival of the diesel meant the sale for scrap of Locomotive No. 1912 and the retiring of 2-8-0 No. 1923 to standby service. For four months in 1954 the new diesel received a major overhaul, during which time No. 1923 again hauled freight trains up and down the Lowville and Beaver River Railroad on a daily basis. The railroad's historian, Keith F. Maloney, reminisced about that summer interlude:

After being rebuilt by General Electric, Diesel No. 1947 resumed handling the Lowville and Beaver River's freight business, and Steam Locomotive No. 1923 returned to the engine house, stored serviceable again until further need.

That was the steam locomotive's last appearance on this New York State short line. Retired again to standby service, in June 1964 the locomotive was sold to F. Nelson Blount for his Steamtown Foundation for the Preservation of Steam and Railroad Americana for $2,000 f.o.b. Lowville, New York, plus $250 for a number of spare parts and $12.00 for the rental of a scoop to load the parts in the tender. The locomotive apparently moved to Bellows Falls, Vermont, in October of that year.

This little postwar Consolidation represents a fairly common wheel arrangement of freight locomotive during the latter decades of the 19th century and down to the end of the era of steam locomotives in the 20th century. Nearly 150 of them survive in the United States (not counting narrow gauge variations), far more than any other single type of locomotive. It is, in that sense, the most common wheel type of locomotive to survive. Appropriately and proportionately, Steamtown has several of this type in its collection, including Illinois Central Locomotive No. 790, Maine Central Locomotive No. 519, Rahway Valley No. 15, and Lowville and Beaver River Railroad No. 1923. None of these four locomotives is a duplicate of the others except in terms of wheel arrangement, for each has unique and distinctive features. Technologically, Lowville and Beaver River Railroad No. 1923 is probably the least interesting; however, its unique history provides an opening to interpret the export trade in American-built locomotives, so the locomotive is not without importance to the Steamtown collection.

Condition: Lowville and Beaver River Railroad Locomotive No. 1923 reportedly is a worn-out locomotive not suitable for restoration to operable condition. It is, however, appropriate for "cosmetic" restoration to its historic appearance.

Recommendations: A small report should be completed on the locomotive. The report should attempt to ascertain the history of the Compañía Azucarera Central Reforma, a little bit about its railroad, and why it failed to complete purchase of the locomotive. The rest of the report should deal with the history and physical history of Locomotive No. 1923, including an attempt to find a contemporary account of the roundhouse fire, circa 1938, that damaged the engine. The report should then recommend steps needed to restore the locomotive as an exhibit engine. The engine should in part be interpreted to represent the export trade in locomotives practiced by major American locomotive-building firms.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973). [See Item 35.]

Lewis, Edward A. American Short Line Railway Guide. Strasburg: The Baggage Car, 1975: 64, 199.

Lowville & Beaver River Railroad." The Short Line, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1977): 9.

Lowville & Beaver River Railroad." The Short Line, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1990): 9.

Maloney, Keith F. "Lowville & Beaver River Railroad; Survival of a Shortline . . . 65 years of North Country Railroading on the Lowville & Beaver River." Chapter 4 in Rails in the North Woods by Richard S. Allen, William Gove, Keith F. Maloney, and Richard F. Palmer. Sylvan Beach: North Country Books, 1978: 111-148, 201, 202.

Poor's Manual of Railroads, 1920. New York: Poor's Publishing Company, 1920: 628, 629.

Steamtown Foundation files. Correspondence regarding sale of locomotive to F. Nelson Blount, Annual Locomotive Inspection and Repair Reports, Specifications for Locomotive No. 1923.

Wallin, R.R. "The Shortline Scene. Lowville & Beaver River Roster." Extra 2200 South, The Locomotive Newsmagazine, Vol. 7, No. 10 (May 1969): 29.

Builder: American Locomotive Company (Schenectady Works)
Date Built: February 1913
Builder's Number: 52991

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 22 x 28 (23 x 28?)
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 185
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 63
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 37,000

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 11
    Water (in gallons): 7,000
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable

Weight on Drivers (in lbs.): "engine weight": 171,600; also reported as 172,500

Remarks: Engine is a manually fired coal burner, one of the last two steam locomotives on the Maine Central. It is not in bad condition and could be made operable.

History: Like many other regional railroad systems, the Maine Central grew by accretion and consolidation with numerous smaller roads. The Maine Central Railroad itself appeared on October 28, 1862, out of consolidation of the earlier Androscoggin and Kennebec Railroad and the Penobscot and Kennebec Railroad. In 1874 the company went on to absorb the Leeds and Farmington Railroad, the Portland and Kennebec Railroad, and the Somerset and Kennebec Railroad. In 1888 it took over the Maine Shore Line Railroad. In 1901 it swallowed the Knox and Lincoln Railway. In 1911 it gobbled the Washington County Railway, the Somerset Railway, the Sebasticook and Moosehead Railroad, and the Androscoggin Railroad.

By October 1, 1882, the Maine Central operated 126.6 miles of track from Portland to Bangor, Maine, plus four branches totalling 155.5 miles of track and four leased companies that operated another 161.30 miles, for a total of 464.5 miles of railroad. It had 59 locomotives; 94 passenger, baggage, mail, and express cars; 1,140 freight cars; 36 work cars, 17 snowplows; and 10 flangers.

The American Locomotive Company builder's photo of Maine Central Railroad Locomotive No. 517 represented all in the series 517 through 524 and showed the initial appearance of No. 519.
The 470 Railroad Club

Maine Central Railroad Locomotive No. 519 appears in this view under steam on her home railroad.
Collection of Gerald Best, California State Railroad Museum Library

In 1910, the Maine Central began purchasing a series of new high-boilered, low-tender 2-8-0 freight Consolidations, acquiring nine that year, Nos. 501 through 509; seven more in 1912, Nos. 510 through 516, and eight in 1913, Nos. 517 through 524: The railroad called these Class W, and acquired more later. The American Locomotive Company's Schenectady Works photographed No. 517 for a builder's photo representing Nos. 517 through 524. This photo, nevertheless, depicts the appearance of No. 519 "as built."

By June 30, 1914, not long after this Consolidation went into service, the company owned 221 locomotives, 311 passenger train cars, 9,640 freight cars, 660 work cars, as well as two ferryboats and seven steamboats. By December 31, 1919, the company and its leased lines operated 1,201.58 miles of track, reaching principally north, northwest, and northeast from Portland, Maine, throughout the states of Maine and New Hampshire, stretching as far east as Eastport, Maine, as far north as Kineo Station on Moosehead Lake, and as far west as St. Johnsbury, Vermont, with a network of branches covering much of the intervening country.

The operational history of Maine Central Railroad Locomotive No. 519 awaits research in local sources, but it is known to have taken a freight out of Portland on August 16, 1937, and appeared in Rigby on June 2, 1950.

Maine Central No. 519 is the second most powerful 2-8-0 among the four locomotives of that type in the Steamtown Foundation collection and is a good example of a high-boilered, main line 2-8-0. In appearance, it differs from Illinois Central Engine No. 790 in having larger drive wheels, a more typical sand dome, and a much lower tender with a longer wheelbase.

On June 1, 1950, sporting a later lettering and numbering style, Maine Central No. 519 was in service under steam with a full load of coal in her tender, top. On June 3, she appeared out of service, on a storage track in Rigby, Maine, with the drive rod on her fireman's side removed.
Both, The 470 Railroad Club

Condition: This locomotive reportedly is not in bad condition and could be made operable with some overhaul. It was a hand-fired coal burner, which meant that a fireman shoveled coal from tender into firebox as needed; it had no mechanical stoker.

Recommendation: The National Park Service should commission a report on the engine. The history section of the report should fully explore the engine's operational history, based on research in local archives and sources in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Upon completion of this research, the locomotive should be restored "cosmetically" to its appearance as a freight locomotive of the Maine Central, and the report should recommend the period to which it should be restored, as the engine has had at least two distinctly different lettering schemes in its history. The mechanical condition of the locomotive should be carefully assessed, and if feasible, the locomotive should be restored to operable condition to be used in interpretation and for special events. The locomotive is probably not appropriate for use on a regular excursion train, and should be used for other, less demanding interpretive purposes, but this does not rule out some operation.

Otto Perry photographed Maine Central No. 419 in Portland, Maine, on August 16, 1937.
Denver Public Library Western History Department

Allen, C.F.H. "The End of Steam on the Maine Central." Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 108 (Apr. 1963): 39-48.

Baker, P.E., Vice President, Maine Central Railroad. Letter dated Nov. 12, 1963, to Robert W. Adams, Superintendent, Monadnock Northern Railroad. Steamtown Foundation files, Scranton, Pa.

Beebe, Lucius, and Charles Clegg. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: 268, 300.

Boyd, Jim. "Maine Central Steam Locomotives." Railfan, Vol. 2, No. 6 (Sept. 1978): 37-43.

Edson, William D. "The Maine Central Railroad: Predecessor Lines and Locomotives." Railroad History, Bulletin No. 152 (Spring 1985): 48-83. [See especially p. 78.]

Givens, Charles S. "Early Locomotive[s] of the Maine Central Railroad." Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Bulletin No. 12 (1926): 34-48.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973). [See roster and Item 24. This source claims the engine was built in 1910, not 1913.]

Harlow, Alvin F. Steelways of New England. New York: Creative Age Press Inc., 1946.

Hastings, Philip R. "Mountain Subdivision." Trains, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Jan. 1950): 10-15.

__________. "When Steam Ruled June 13." Trains, Vol. 14, No. 11 (Sept. 1954): 35-40.

_________. "Maine Central History Highlights." Railfan. Vol. 2, No. 6 (Sept. 1978): 44-48.

__________. Maine Central Railroad Mountain Division. South Portland, Me.: The 470 Railroad Club, n.d.

Kean, Randolph. The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays. Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, Publisher, 1973: 174.

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, Eighth Edition, 1927. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1927: 179.

"Locomotives of the Maine Central." Railroad, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1953): 104.

Poor's Manual of Railroads, 1920. New York: Poor's Publishing Company, 1920: 632-646. [Excellent map between pp. 632 and 633.]

Robertson, Edwin B. Maine Central Steam Locomotives: A Roster of Motive Power from 1923 to the end of the Steam Era. Westbrook: Author, 1977: 44-47. [On p. 44 is a locomotive folio diagram for Class W locomotives of this type.]

"Steamtown Engine Roster, September 1967" Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968): 8.

Thomsen, John S. "The Maine Central." National Railway Historical Society Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 3 (3rd Quarter 1946): 4-11.

Builder: Lima Locomotive Works, Lima, Ohio
Date Built: May 1910
Builder's Number: 2317

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 10 x 12
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 180
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 29.5
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 16,900

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons):
    Water (in gallons):
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable

Remarks: Collapse of a building on this engine at Bellows Falls, Vermont, destroyed its cab and did other damage. This is a tired, worn-out engine.

History: Meadow River Lumber Company Locomotive No. 1 is a two-truck Shay-patent geared locomotive typical of engines used by many lumber, mining, and quarry company railroads, other industrial railroads, and a few common carrier short lines and major railroad systems. About 77 Shays survive in the United States, 12 in Canada, and 17 overseas.

An Ohioan named John Raine was ultimately responsible for founding the Meadow River Lumber Company. Born in Ironton, Ohio, in 1863, he went to work at the age of 13 as a choreboy in a lumber camp. Later he entered the grocery business in Ironton, but at the age of 30, impelled by his experience in the lumber industry while a teenager, he joined his brother T.W. Raine to form the lumber firm of Raine and Raine in Empire, Pennsylvania. Around the turn of the century, when this firm exhausted its holdings of timber, the brothers began searching for new stands to cut in West Virginia, and in 1903 John became vice president of the Raine-Andrews Lumber Company at Evenwood in Randolph County. Subsequently the Raine-Andrews firm purchased in 1906 three tracts of timber on the Meadow River in Greenbrier County. Further purchases expanded their holdings to more than 75,000 acres.

As there was no access for transportation of this timber, on November 22, 1907, management of the firm incorporated the Sewell Valley Railroad, which was to build 20 miles of standard gauge track from the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad at Meadow Creek to the site of a new lumber mill at the mouth of Sewell Creek. The Raine brothers then organized the Meadow River Lumber Company to construct the mill. By the time construction crews completed the railroad, the mill was ready to go to work, and sawed the first board in September 1910.

Meadow River Lumber Company Shay-geared Locomotive No. 1, under steam, rested at the mill plant at East Rainelle, West Virginia, near the end of its career as a coat-burning logging and lumber company locomotive. This view of the less-often photographed left side of the Shay emphasizes its huge Radley and Hunter patent balloon stack, designed to catch sparks and cinders, and shows some parts that have since been removed as well as the cab, which was later destroyed by the collapse of a building on it at Bellows Falls, Vermont. Collection of Gerald Best, California State Railroad Museum Library.

Meanwhile, to operate the railroad, the company had purchased its first new locomotive from the Lima Locomotive Works, in Lima, Ohio, a two-truck Class B Shay locomotive that became Sewell Valley Railroad No. 1, replacing an earlier No. 1 which was probably a secondhand engine. By June 30, 1912, the Sewell Valley Railroad had three locomotives, a combination baggage/coach, a box car, and four flat cars.

The mill served by the Sewell Valley Railroad developed into the largest strictly hardwood manufacturing plant in the world. A triple band mill, it was capable of cutting an average of 110,000 board feet of lumber in a 10-hour day, with a recorded maximum of 205,666 board feet in a single day. During its first year of operation, the Meadow River Lumber Company mill turned out about 3 million feet of lumber, and the company later increased annual production to over 30 million feet, requiring the cutting of almost 3,000 acres of virgin timber a year.

On April 25, 1913, the town of Rainelle, named for the Raine brothers, was established near the mill, housing the employees of the company. It gained the reputation of being one of the best hardwood sawmill towns in the country. The firm erected frame houses, plastered and papered inside and painted white outside, designed for comfort and sanitation. They featured running water, modern bathroom facilities, and electricity, and each was surrounded by its own lawn and garden.

A head-on view of Meadow River Lumber Company Locomotive No. 1 under steam at Rainelle, West Virginia, illustrated the offset boiler characteristic of Shay locomotives, which gave them an ungainly, unbalanced appearance from this perspective.
Steamtown Foundation Collection

The mill plant included a planing mill with a capacity of turning out over a million feet of flooring, ceiling, siding, and trim lumber, and six large dry kilns to dry lumber for processing in the planers. Ten lumber docks, each 1,300 feet long, provided space for nearly three miles of lumber piles, some of which grew to nearly 40 feet high. Railroad spurs passed between each dock for ease in loading cars.

It was common at that time for lumber companies to incorporate their wholly owned railroad subsidiaries separately from the lumber firm. As a common carrier railroad, a lumber line offered its owners the prestige of serving as railroad officers, as well as the very practical benefit of exchanging annual passes with major systems. As the 20th century progressed, however, common carrier equipment was sometimes taxed at higher rates than industrial railroad equipment, the practice became less common and abuse of free passes came increasingly under restrictive regulations. So it was common for many lumber companies eventually to take over their once-common carrier railroads and operate them wholly as industrial or lumber/logging railroads. Eventually the Sewell Valley Railroad locomotives became Meadow River Lumber Company railroad locomotives. Meadow River Lumber Company No. 1, therefore, spent her entire career as the property of this single lumber enterprise at East Rainelle, West Virginia, even though she operated there under two different names.

Outshopped by the Lima Locomotive Works on May 13, 1910, Meadow River Lumber Company Shay No. 1 subsequently was sold to Steamtown and moved to Bellows Falls, Vermont, where on February 4, 1982, at 7:45 a.m., the building in which it was stored collapsed on it due to excessive snow load on the roof, causing considerable damage to the locomotive.

Meadow River Lumber Company's Shaw Locomotive No. 1 posed on the Steamtown turntable at Bellows Falls, Vermont, exhibiting its original wooden cab, heavily patched and reinforced with steel plates, prior to the disastrous collapse of the building in which it was stored. The collapse destroyed the Shay's wooden cab, though most of its components were saved. In this photo, the engine lacks its boiler jacket, bell, whistle, and other features, missing before the building collapse damaged the locomotive.
Steamtown Foundation Collection

Condition: Mechanically, Meadow River Lumber Company Shay No. 1 is a tired, worn-out engine. The building collapse destroyed the locomotive's wooden cab and did some other damage. The engine is missing its sand dome, its headlight, its front number plate, its bell and bell hanger, whistle, and other components, though some of them may be stored at Steamtown. The pilot beam is entirely rotten, and the front draft gear has torn loose. The engine is in terrible condition.

Recommendation: As the only Shay-geared locomotive, or geared locomotive of any kind, in the Steamtown collection, this locomotive is recommended for static exhibit indoors. The NPS should commission a report on the subject of this engine, which should, in addition to researching its history thoroughly, recommend whether to restore this locomotive as Sewell Valley Railroad No. 1 or the later Meadow River Lumber Company No. 1. In view of the main thrust of Steamtown's recommended Scope of Collection for locomotives, it makes sense to incline toward restoring it as the locomotive of a common carrier, the Sewell Valley Railroad. Restoration should include replacing all missing parts and rebuilding from scratch the wooden cab of the locomotive. The pilot beam, and perhaps also the tender beam, should be replaced in kind. The engine is important for what it represents in railroad technology, and because it features an apparently original cinder-catching Radley and Hunter balloon stack, the only one of that type in the collection. The balloon stack indicates, furthermore, that this locomotive was a wood burner, an additional useful facet of its contribution to the Steamtown collection.

Operating at Rainelle, West Virginia, on May 26, 1956, Meadow River Lumber Company Shay Locomotive No. 1 no longer even had lettering visible on her tender.
Collection of Malcolm D. McCarter

Clarkson, Roy. Tumult on the Mountains: Lumbering in West Virginia--1770-1920. Parsons: McClain Printing, 1964: 30, 33, 92, 93, Figs. 139, 140.

Koch, Michael. The Shay Locomotive: Titan of the Timber. Denver: The World Press, 1971: pp. 306, 434.

__________. Steam and Thunder in the Timber: Saga of the Forest Railroads. Denver: The World Press, 1979: 56, 258-296.

Krause, John, with H. Reid. Rails Through Dixie. San Marino: Golden West Books, 1965: 78, 79.

Poor's Manual of Railroads, 1913. New York: Poor's Railroad Manual Co., 1913: 466-467.

"Steamtown Engine Roster, September 1967." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968): 8.

White, John. A History of the American Locomotive, Its Development: 1830-1880. New York: Dover, 1979: 120-123 (with reference to Radley & Hunter stacks).

Builder: Vulcan Iron Works, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Date Built: December 1919
Builder's Number: 2888

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 14 x 20
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 150
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 37
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 13,450

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons):
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 1,250

History: Employees of the New Haven Trap Rock Company and its Branford Steam Railroad like to say that the story of their operation began about 200,000,000 years ago when a volcanic extrusion of hot basalt created what the local Indians would eventually call Totoket Mountain. But that is a matter more of geology than of history.

There seem instead to have been several over threads of history which, once interwoven, created the Branford Steam Railroad. An entrepreneur named Louis Fisk had built, probably in the 1890s, a trotting park for horses called the Branford Driving Park in Branford, Connecticut. To connect it with the tracks of the Shore Line Division of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, Fisk built the three-mile-long Damascus Railway. Meanwhile, creation of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission of New York and New Jersey forced the closing of basalt quarries along the Hudson River, creating an increased market from Connecticut quarries. This same Louis Fisk decided to get into the quarrying business by opening a quarry on Totoket Mountain in North Branford.

On March 19, 1903, Fisk got the Connecticut State House of Representatives to authorize incorporation of the Branford Steam Railroad to take over the property of and succeed the Damascus Railway. In the 1980s the name "Branford Steam Railroad" suggested some short tourist-carrying railroad featuring the use of an antique steam engine, because the use of the term "steam" in a railroad's corporate title generally appears in that context, but this railroad's owners' inclusion of the term steam in 1903 allowed them to use the name Branford and yet distinguish their firm from the Branford Electric Railway, a streetcar system operating in that vicinity.

Fisk, meanwhile, began acquiring what would add up to 319.5 acres of Totoket Mountain and capital with which to establish his quarry. On April 29, 1909, he secured authority from the Connecticut House for the Branford Steam Railroad to construct trackage southward to a dock he owned at Juniper Point on Long Island Sound, where his railroad would also reach the tracks of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad over the three miles of track built by the Damascus Railway.

It would also be necessary to build a rock crusher plant at the quarry and a quarry railroad, and for these purposes Fisk obtained financial backing for further development from Hayden and Stone of Boston. To build the rock crusher plant, Fisk apparently obtained the services of a well-established New Haven construction firm, C.W. Blakeslee and Sons, and the Blakeslee firm seems to have become a virtual partner of Fisk's in the development of the quarry.

Charles Wells Blakeslee reportedly established a construction business in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1844. In 1872, he took one son into the firm as a partner, renaming the company C.W. Blakeslee and Son, and in 1890, when another son, Dwight W. Blakeslee, became a partner, the firm became C.W. Blakeslee and Sons, a name it would retain until it was taken over by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1969.

C.W. Blakeslee and Sons operated a heavy construction and general contracting business throughout southern New England, but it grew out of origins in New Haven, Connecticut. The firm built railroads, bridges, dams, foundations, highways, conduits, sewers, docks, and tunnels, and paved city streets. It also took on projects in other states such as Pennsylvania and Indiana. In 1873 the firm opened a basalt quarry at West Rock in Westville, Connecticut, where it built the first rock crusher in the country, producing paving rock. Later, New Haven municipal officials wanted the quarry site and what remained of West Rock for a park, and C.W. Blakeslee and Sons began to quarry at Pine Rock, where they produced hand-cut stone blocks for foundations and buildings as well as crushed rock for paving.

Exactly how the Blakeslee firm came to displace Louis Fisk is not known at present; possibly Fisk defaulted on payments to the construction firm and it took over the quarry property. But it is clear that C.W. Blakeslee and Sons constructed the crushing house and screen house at the North Branford quarry, as well as the railroad and yards, the storage trestles, and dock and terminal at Pine Orchard, and the harbor and channel in Long Island Sound. In 1914, owners of the property incorporated the New Haven Trap Rock Company and opened the quarry for business. As of April 1917, officers of the company included D.A. Blakeslee, president; Clarence Blakeslee, treasurer, T.R. Blakeslee, first vice president; George E. Hall, secretary, and W. Scott Eames, general manager. Louis Fisk no longer appeared in any obvious capacity among them.

Edgar T. Mead's photo of No. 43 illustrated its "New Haven Trap Rock Co." lettering and the number on the side of the cab (top). New Haven Trap Rock Company 0-4-0T Locomotive No. 43 (bottom).
Top, Steamtown Foundation Collection. Bottom, Railway & Locomotive Historical Society collection, California State Railroad Museum

The firm of C.W. Blakeslee and Sons used small industrial railroads in various capacities over the years, and the two surviving locomotives of the New Haven Trap Rock Company both were ordered by and built for C.W. Blakeslee and Sons, rather than for the New Haven Trap Rock Company. Whether these locomotives served the Blakeslee firm in its own Pine Rock quarry, or in some other capacity, or whether the Blakeslee firm simply was acting as agent for the New Haven Trap Rock Company in acquiring these locomotives remains unclear.

At this point it should be explained that the product carried by the railroad, "trap rock," obtained its name from German quarry workers because it broke into steplike blocks, the German word for step being treppen, which became corrupted to "trap." Trap rock, a dark steel-gray in color and very dense and fine grained, featured a peculiar interlocking crystalline structure that caused it to fracture in a manner which created an angular gravel that, when used for paving purposes, tended to interlock in such a way that it made an exceptionally stable paving material. It also proved to be a very tough rock, not easily pulverized, and its strength also made it an outstanding material for use in foundation blocks for buildings.

When the North Branford Quarry first opened in 1914, it produced 2,000 tons of crushed trap rock daily, and the quarry face rapidly lengthened until it extended over a mile. There, railroad steam shovels operating over the quarry trackage loaded rock into side-dub gondola cars with arch bar brucks which had a capacity of five cubic yards of stone each. Small 15-ton 0-4-0T saddletank locomotives switched the gondolas around the quarry trackage, supplying the steam shovels with empty cars and moving loaded ones to the crusher into which the rock was dumped. The company used a pair of heavier 40-ton 0-4-0T saddletank locomotives to move the loads of crushed rock down the 6.2 miles of railroad to Juniper Point for loading into barges.

The firm of C.W. Blakeslee and Sons ordered in 1918 from the Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, 0-4-0T saddle-tank switch Locomotive No. 43. The road numbers of this locomotive may have represented a Blakeslee roster number rather than a New Haven Trap Rock Company (or Branford Steam Railroad) roster number. The little saddle-tanker has cylinders 14 inches in diameter with a 20-inch stroke, with 37-inch drivers.

In addition to this locomotive, at one time or another the New Haven Trap Rock Company operated 0-4-0T engines numbered 5, 27, 32, 35, 36, 37, and 38, probably all originally as quarry locomotives.

To operate the Branford Steam Railroad from quarry to interchange, the company acquired as Branford Steam Railroad No. 1 a 4-6-0 built originally for the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, and later sold to the parent New York Central to become No. 5120 before coming to Branford, and No. 2, a Mogul-type 2-6-0 with small drive wheels and a high boiler manufactured by H.K. Porter in 1927. The firm retired No. 1 in the early 1930s, but No. 2 lasted until the 1950s, apparently until the company purchased its first diesel in 1951--No. 3, a 44-ton centercab General Electric locomotive--secondhand from the Winona Railroad of Warsaw, Indiana. Saddle tanker No. 43, a 40-ton locomotive much heavier than the 15-ton 0-4-0Ts used originally in the quarry, seem to have served in later years on the Branford Steam Railroad to Juniper Point as needed. The fact that No. 43 clearly carried on its saddle tank the name of the New Haven Trap Rock Company seemingly lacks significance in terms of any distinction between quarry locomotives and those used on the Branford Steam Railroad, for old 4-6-0 No. 1 carried New Haven Trap Rock Company lettering on its tender as well.

Members of the Blakeslee family still controlled the New Haven Trap Rock Company when in 1935 it merged with the Connecticut Quarries Company, and in February of that year the management reincorporated the company under the same name, New Haven Trap Rock Company. As a result of that merger, the company operated not one but six Connecticut quarries, located in Cheshire, Granby, Middlefield, New Britain, and Rocky Hill, as well as at North Branford. At North Branford, meanwhile, the company removed its quarry trackage and replaced the railroad steam shovels used to load rock into gondolas for movement to the crusher with fully revolving electric shovels mounted on caterpillar tracks. It was probably about this time that the company disposed of its small 15-ton quarry locomotives.

Over the years the uses of trap rock evolved. The industry grew up with modernization of railroads and the construction of the highway system in New England, with much of the crushed trap rock going into paving of roads and ballasting of railroad roadbeds. Even the ways roads were paved evolved, and trap rock could be used both in asphalt paving and as an aggregate in concrete. In 1940 the company developed asphaltic concrete plants and commenced manufacturing a paving material known as Blue Diamond Mix, which in turn became a whole variety of mixes. By 1952 the company was producing more than a million tons of crushed stone per year, and it was Locomotives Nos. 38 and 43 that handled the traffic from the North Branford crusher down to the Pine Orchard loading terminal near Juniper Point. By 1960, the North Branford Quarry alone had turned out 28 million tons of trap rock, and the company estimated that it contained sufficient trap rock for another 250 years of operation.

In 1956, the New Haven Trap Rock Company purchased two General Electric center-cab diesel switchers, which replaced the steam locomotives on the run from the crusher at North Branford to the Pine Orchard terminal. The company apparently kept Locomotive No. 43 around as switch engine at the crusher and the terminal for several more years, until it retired the old steam engine in 1959. Another source reported the New Haven Trap Rock Company retired Locomotives Nos. 38 and 43 in January 1960 upon arrival of the company's third diesel, No. 5, a 44-tonner that was originally New York, New Haven & Hartford No. 0813. Just as steam locomotives gave way to diesel motive power on the Branford Steam Railroad, the side-dump gondola cars gave way to triple-bay hopper cars lettered for the New Haven Trap Rock Company. Whereas the steam locomotives had been lettered for the same company (No. 43, at least, carried the words "N.H. Trap Rock Co." on her saddle tank), some of the new diesels ironically carried the lettering of "The Branford Steam Railroad," despite the fact that it no longer was a steam railroad. As for the steam locomotives, Nos. 38 and 43 apparently rested in retirement in North Branford until 1962, when the Steamtown Foundation acquired them.

As for the New Haven Trap Rock Company, in 1971 it merged with the firm of Angelo Tomasso, Inc., losing its historic name in the process. The Tomasso firm was a more recent company, founded during the 1930s, but that did not prevent the older name from being scrapped, and eventually the firm adopted the name of Tilcon Tomasso Inc., when it became a subsidiary of Tilcon, Inc. Thus the Branford Steam Railroad, which antedated the creation of the New Haven Trap Rock Company, also outlived the quarrying firm, continuing to operate under a name now meaningless in the era of the diesel locomotive.

About 48 0-4-0T locomotives survive in the United States, including the New Haven Trap Rock Company engine No. 43. They are scattered rather widely around the country in railroad museums and on tourist railroads and are also exhibited in small parks. Typically they served industries as plant switchers, or in a few instances operated on an industry-associated railroad as at North Branford, and a few served as shop switchers at the railroad shops of major railroad companies. Wherever they worked, the little 0-4-0T saddle tankers made a small contribution to the operation of the railroad industry in the United States, as well as to other industries that shipped by rail, and are a part of its overall history.

Condition: Mechanical condition of the locomotive is unknown, although No. 43 is known to have operated at Bellows Falls, Vermont, after being acquired by the Steamtown Foundation.

Recommendation: The National Park Service should preserve New Haven Trap Rock Company Locomotive No. 43, which was built in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, near Scranton. The NPS should commission a historic railroad locomotive report on No. 43, during the preparation of which its mechanical condition should be investigated and evaluated. The report should include a complete history and physical history of the locomotive, and ascertain whether it was ever lettered for either the Branford Steam Railroad, C.W. Blakeslee & Sons, or both, and what color(s) the locomotive was painted and lettered during its history. The report should also settle the question of how and why Louis Fisk dropped out of the company and the Blakeslees got in. Intensive research into these matters in the New Haven, Connecticut, area is necessary to answer these questions. A thorough photographic history of the locomotive should be included as a part of the report, including acquisition of all historic photographs of this particular locomotive that can be obtained, as well as some that illustrate the general history of the Branford Steam Railroad and its terminals and the New Haven Trap Rock Company and its North Branford quarry.

"At Age Of 122, Blakeslee Thrives On Young Ideas." The New Haven Register, Sept. 14, 1966, p. 54.

"At C.W. Blakeslee Ideas Get Younger As The Firm Gets Older." Engineering News-Record, Sept. 8, 1966, pp. 46, 47, 50, 52.

"Blakeslee Co. Has Compiled Fine Record." New Haven Journal-Courier, Jan. 18, 1955.

"Blakeslee Construction Here Near Mark of Billion Dollars." New Haven Journal-Courier, July 27, 1958.

Dudar, Walter, "Blakeslee to Bloom under Westinghouse." New Haven Register, Dec. 15, 1969.

"Famous Yankee Trademarks: C.W. Blakeslee & Sons, Inc." New Haven Register, July 10, 1955.

French, Jeff. "Short Line to the Sea." Model Railroader, Vol. 31 (Aug. 1964): 46-51.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation for the Preservation of Steam and Railroad Americana, n.d. (ca. 1973). [See Items Nos. 17 and 18 and roster entries.]

McBride, Bill. "The Branford Steam Railroad, the Good Neighbor Railroad." Unpublished manuscript (company press handout?), n.d. (Supplied by Joseph A. Abate.)

________. "Steam in Name Only." Railfan & Railroad, Vol. 9 (Apr. 1990): pp. 54-60.

"New Haven Industry on Parade; C.W. Blakeslee & Sons, Inc." (four-panel folder) New Haven Chamber of Commerce, March 1953.

"New Haven Industry on Parade; The New Haven Trap Rock Co." (four-panel folder) New Haven Chamber of Commerce, May 1952.

"New Haven Industry on Parade; The New Haven Trap Rock Co." (four-panel folder) New Haven Chamber of Commerce, n.d. (ca. 1959-60).

"New Haven Trap Rock Co." Saturday Chronicle [New Haven, Conn.], Apr. 14, 1917, p. 15.

"Now Showing CWB Blakeslee Prestress, Div. of C.W. Blakeslee & Sons, Inc." (four-panel folder) New Haven Chamber of Commerce, Mar. 1960.

"Photo Line: Branford in Steam." Railfan & Railroad, Vol. 9 (May 1990): 51-54.

"Pine Rock—Going . . . Going . . ." New Haven Register, July 24, 1966, p. 14.

Turner, Gregg M., and Melancthon W. Jacobs. Connecticut Railroads; An Illustrated History. Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1986. [See p. 299.]

Wallin, R.R. "The Shortline Scene." Extra 2200 South, The Locomotive Newsmagazine, Vol. 6 (July Aug. 1972): 15.

______. "The Shortline Scene." Extra 2200 South, The Locomotive Newsmagazine, Vol. 10 (Mar. Apr. 1975): 27.

Some of the newspaper and magazine items cited above are in the Steamtown locomotive files under "New Haven Trap Rock Co. Locomotive No. 43." They were originally collected in the New Haven Public Library, under "New Haven Industries" in that library's vertical files.

NICKEL PLATE ROAD (NEW YORK, CHICAGO AND ST. LOUIS) NO. 44

Builder: American Locomotive Company, Brooks Works
Date Built: December 1905
Builder's Number: 38831

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 21 x 24 (also reported as 19 x 24)
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 180
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 62 (other sources say 63)
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 21,040

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons):
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons):

Remarks: Mechanically, locomotive is reportedly in very poor condition, and probably suitable only for exhibit purposes.

Nickel Plate Road (New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad) 4-6-0 Locomotive No. 44

History: As of 1900, the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, which came to be known by the nickname the "Nickel Plate Road," owned 494.72 miles of main track, leased two short line railroads which owned 17.8 miles, and had 10.5 miles of trackage rights on other systems, for a total length of lines operated, as of January 1, 1900, of 523.02 miles, extending basically between Chicago, Illinois, and Buffalo, New York.

At that same time, the Nickel Plate was controlled by the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway Company, which also operated trackage between Buffalo, New York, and Chicago, Illinois, essentially in duplication of the Nickel Plate. But to get to the icing on the cake, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern was in turn controlled by the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, eventually to be known as the New York Central System.

Actually, the history of the line began with organization in New York State on April 13, 1881, of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, which completed construction and opened for traffic on October 23, 1882. But that company had soon entered bankruptcy and was sold at a foreclosure sale in May 1887, and its new owners reorganized it in September 1887 as the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad.

It was this company which in December 1905, took delivery from the Brooks Locomotive Works in Dunkirk, New York, of 10 new 4-6-0 "ten-wheeler" type locomotives numbered 40 through 49 and given the railroad class of P. In October 1906, Brooks delivered another five, numbered 50 through 54. At that time the railroad had not yet become as widely known by its nickname, "Nickel Plate Road," as would later become the case, so these locomotives, No. 44 among them, received the initials of the railroad on the flange of their tenders: N.Y.,C. & ST.L. Centered in the panel below the windows on each side of the cab was the number of the engine, which did not appear on the sand dome. Intended for fast freight duty, these engines had 62-inch drive wheels, Richardson balanced steam chest valves, and Stephenson link motion. Their tenders carried 14 tons of coal and 5,500 gallons of water. The locomotives had wooden pilots, a semi-rectangular number plate with rounded ends centered on the smokebox front, and a box headlight. The new ten-wheelers must have performed well, for in 1908 and 1909, the railroad purchased from the Brooks Works 20 similar but slightly heavier versions of the same locomotives, classed P-l. In 1910, in a general reorganization of motive power typical of major railroads, the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad renumbered the Class P 4-6-0s from 40 through 54 to 300 through 315; No. 44 became No. 304.

Meanwhile, the railroad itself was about to experience some momentous changes. As already mentioned, this component of the New York Central System essentially duplicated another component of that system geographically. Perhaps for this reason, although probably for fiscal reasons as well, the New York Central System, on July 6, 1916, unloaded its controlling interest in the New York, Chicago & St. Louis for what in retrospect seems to have been a song. The New York Central sold a controlling interest consisting of $6,240,000 shares of common stock, $6,275,000 of second preferred stock, and $2,503,000 shares of first preferred stock to Cleveland financial interests headed by the brothers O.P. and M.J. Van Sweringen for a mere $8,500,000, of which the Van Sweringen interests paid $2,000,000 in cash and $6,500,000 in notes secured by a pledge of the stock. The Van Sweringens and their associates hoped to build a railroad system of their own, and acquisition of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad proved a large step in that direction. However, World War I had already been in progress in Europe for two years, and in 1917, the United States was dragged into the war. In 1918 the United States government took over most of the nation's railroads--an unprecedented wartime measure--operating them under the U.S. Railroad Administration throughout 1919 and the first two months of 1920. It was not until March 1920 that the Van Sweringens regained control of the railroad they had so recently bought.

Two steps the Van Sweringens undertook in 1920 were to affect the Class P 4-6-0 locomotives. First, to expand their railroad system, the Van Sweringens acquired control of the Lake Erie and Western. But in order to do so they had to agree to the Lake Erie and Western selling off a subsidiary of its own, the Northern Ohio Railway, the Lake Erie and Western selling the latter to a small, local 9.57-mile-long Akron, Ohio, switching railroad known as the Akron, Canton and Youngstown Railway. As the principal motive power of the Northern Ohio, the A.C.& Y. thus acquired a number of small, worn-out Brooks Moguls and obviously needed more powerful motive power. At the same time, the prosperity of the postwar decade of the 1920s brought with it a need on the part of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis for heavier motive power. Accordingly, on May 19, 1920, the New York, Chicago & St. Louis unloaded some of its earlier, smaller power by selling 12 of its 15 Class P 4-6-0s to the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railway, retaining only Nos. 302, 306, and 311. The Akron, Canton & Youngstown reportedly paid $10,250 per locomotive. The A.C.& Y. retained the same engine numbers for these locomotives.

A latecomer to the Ohio railway scene, the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railway was incorporated by a number of Akron businessmen on June 17, 1907, and completed its 9.57 miles from Akron to Mogadore in 1913. It was the type of railroad that the rest of the industry referred to as a "traffic thief." Instead of being built into a region devoid of railroads and creating industries that could grow only with rail transportation, while taking existing traffic away from teamsters, drayage firms, and river or canal boats, the A.C.& Y. built through a territory already well served by existing railroads. It was routed in such a way as to cross them at key points and divert traffic from them. It could acquire traffic only at the cost of other railroads in its region. It was a cannibal of railroads.

On March 1, 1920, fortune smiled on the A.C.& Y., and it was able to acquire the 152.33 miles of the Northern Ohio Railway extending from Delphos to Copley, Ohio, and aside from controlling that line, purchased from it and transferred into the A.C.& Y. itself the 9.41 miles from Akron to Copley Junction. By this time the A.C.& Y. operated a total of 171 miles of track, and from a traffic thief of a switching road, had become a respectable short line railroad, "Akron's own railroad" as it called itself. With the growth of the automobile industry, Akron prospered, for its burgeoning rubber industry supplied many of the tires for America's automobiles, and the A.C.& Y. carried them. But the original 9.57-mile A.C.& Y. operated with five 0-6-0 switchers, and acquisition of the Northern Ohio Railway brought only "ten elderly and worn-out Brooks Moguls." The Northern Ohio also featured two light bridges built probably in the 1890s, and its new A.C.& Y. owner had to replace them with new, heavier duty bridges. Meanwhile, it purchased the dozen New York, Chicago & St. Louis ten-wheelers, which soon took over most of the A.C.& Y. operations, including the six day per week mixed train to Delphos and extra freights. By the end of 1922, the A.C.& Y. had sold off the ten old Brooks moguls, either to industry or to scrap dealers.

Built in December 1905, Nickel Plate Road Locomotive No. 44 later became Akron, Canton and Youngstown Locomotive No. 304, and is the only surviving locomotive of those that operated on that Ohio carrier, even if only a secondhand engine there. Subsequently, it went to a third owner, the Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad in New York. The view above shows the locomotive early in its career, still equipped with a box headlight, still featuring a hardwood pilot, and lettered with the full initials of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad, without the slogan "Nickel Plate Road" (a nickname that only later came into wide use) emblazoned on its tender.
Collection of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, California State Railroad Museum Library.

In Akron during the 1920s, two small kids about knee-high to a grasshopper in size would watch the A.C.& Y. 4-6-0s, including No. 304, as they worked freight trains through town. One of them, Bob Richardson, recalled:

At this point the engineer would have left some freight cars between Main and High streets while he moved part of his train up the hill to the freight yard. Then he would have to return for the freight cars left behind on the first hill climb, as well as the passenger equipment.

Some years later a friend introduced Richardson to a retiring A.C.& Y. engineer who peered intently at him and then exclaimed, "Say, you look very much like one of those kids who used to watch us try to get the mixed up the hill from Main Street." Richardson admitted that indeed he had been one of the two kids who used to watch. The engineer said something, unsmilingly, to the effect that they were the only ones enjoying it. Richardson and other young railroad buffs had a hobby of recording the numbers of engines they watched, just as birdwatchers collect species of birds, and he knew that No. 304 was one of the engines he had seen climbing the hill above Main Street in Akron during the 1920s.

By the end of the 1920s, the A.C.& Y. had acquired heavier engines, and the little 300-series 4-6-0s vanished from the roster in 1929 and 1930, sold to other railroads, to industries, or to scrap dealers. The A.C.& Y. sold No. 304 to a New York State short line, the Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad, on July 6,1929.

The Dansville and Mount Morris had a long history for a short line. Incorporated less than three years after the Civil War, on January 4, 1868, as the Erie and Genesee Valley Railroad, the company completed construction between Mount Morris and Dansville, 15.5 miles, at a cost of $191,302, in 1871, and the Erie Railroad, which had encouraged construction of the short line, immediately leased it. As the Erie at that time had a broad gauge of 6 feet between rails, it is likely the Erie and Genesee Valley also featured that gauge; if so, when in June 1880, the Erie narrowed its tracks to the standard gauge of 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches, the Erie & Genesee Valley must also have done so. The terms of the lease Jay Gould had established proved very adverse to the Erie & Genesee Valley, and on October 21, 1891, the Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad was incorporated as a reorganization of the Erie and Genesee Valley. But the new company, independent at last of the Erie, proved too weak financially to meet interest payments, and on June 8, 1894, the company entered a receivership that was to last until September 30, 1927. The initial receiver, Ambrose S. Murray, Jr., who held the post for 31 years, failed to revive the line to the point of terminating the receivership, but on May 19, 1925, E.M. Harter and Clifford Hubbell became receivers and had begun to pull the railroad out of its financial cesspool by the end of that same year. Their aggressive management terminated the receivership in less than three years, and less than two years after that, on July 6, 1929, they bought from the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad its Locomotive No. 304, whose number they retained. In early years, the railroad connected with the Erie, but during its later years, it connected with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad at Groveland, New York.

Views of No. 304 on the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad have yet to be located, but the locomotive was well-photographed on trackage of its subsequent owner, the Dansville & Mount Morris Railroad. In a summertime view, the angle bar rather than boiler tube pilot, which replaced the locomotive's original hardwood pilot, is evident, the flanges on the sides of the tender have been reduced in height, the headlight lowered to center on the smokebox front, and the old Nickel Plate Road front number plate mounted just beneath the headlight.
Medefoto, Steamtown Foundation Collection.

The Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad operated Locomotive No. 304 intermittently for another quarter-century. The company also acquired a Lackawanna Mogul, No. 565. and to gain time on compulsory renewal of boiler tubes, adopted the unusual policy of laying one engine up for an entire year while the other worked steadily, borrowing an Erie locomotive if their one "in-service" locomotive broke down. For repairs, the railroad relied on a boilermaker from the Erie's nearby Hornell Shops. In later years, the road operated only the 7.8 miles from Dansville to the Lackawanna connection at Groveland. Both of the later engines, Nos. 304 and 565, reportedly steamed freely on a very light fire, and thus kept fuel costs extraordinarily low, which in later years deterred Diesel salesmen. The line hauled feed, fuel, and light manufactures, its principal shipper being the Foster-Wheeler plant at Dansville that manufactured marine boilers and allied equipment. It was a mystery to many how so small a railroad could survive after nearly a century; David P. Morgan, editor of Trains magazine, visited the line in 1956 and characterized it as follows:

Nevertheless, he pointed out, from 1937 until 1956 it had paid yearly dividends! He subtitled his article on the Dansville and Mount Morris and several other short line railroads in the twilight of steam locomotives in America, "A story of small, elderly engines."

But even small, elderly engines finally come to the end of track. It was in the year after Morgan's visit, 1957, that the Dansville and Mount Morris Railroad finally retired No. 304, selling it on June 25, 1957, to Myers Steel and Supply Company, a scrap dealer. However, the Myers firm never removed the engine from the Dansville and Mount Morris property, and in 1963, F. Nelson Blount learned of it and arranged to purchase it for $1,256 f.o.b. Dansville, New York. Dansville and Mount Morris General Manager F.A. Hart wanted Blount to be clear on the condition of the engine, and wrote him on November 18, 1963, after receiving Blount's $500 down payment:

Whether the repairs took longer than anticipated or other delays occurred is not clear, but it was not until March 17, 1964, that the Dansville and Mount Morris shipped Engine 304 out on the Erie-Lackawanna via Binghamton and Mechanicville and the destination was to be Bellows Falls, Vermont, where Blount had moved from North Walpole, New Hampshire.

The only American-built ten-wheeler type in the Steamtown collection, No. 44 (No. 304) may be the oldest New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad engine surviving, of which there are 12, half of which are Berkshires and a quarter of which are Mikados, the others being a Hudson and a six-coupled switcher, and, of course, No. 44. Furthermore, No. 44 is the only surviving steam locomotive of the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad, no other locomotive of its eventually sizable roster of steam power having been preserved. No. 304 is one of two Dansville and Mount Morris locomotives to survive, the other one, Lackawanna No. 565, also in the Steamtown collection.

The most notable changes in the appearance of this locomotive were replacement of its wooden pilot with a steel pilot, replacement of its box headlight with a Pyle headlight relocated from the top of the smokebox ahead of the stack to the center of the smokebox front, and cutting down of the flange at the top of the tender sides. On the A.C.& Y. the headlight had been moved already to the center of the smokebox front, with the original Nickel Plate number plate hanging from the headlight platform's front edge, and this configuration continued on the Dansville and Mount Morris. If Steamtown has the headlight bracket and Pyle headlight stored in the collection, it may also have the original Nickel Plate smokebox-front number plate. It is not known whether it was the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad itself which relocated the headlight and number plate, or whether that was done on the Akron, Canton & Youngstown in the 1920s. The engine has a steel cab which dates from before 1910 and appears to be the engine's original cab.

Condition: Mechanically, this locomotive is in very poor condition and probably cannot be made operable without great cost and at the expense of much of its original fabric. As an exhibit specimen, this locomotive has comparatively more integrity dating from its original construction than do most locomotives of comparable age. Restoration to its early appearance as Nickel Plate No. 44 of the 1905- 1910 period appears feasible.

Recommendation: This excellent example of a Nickel Plate 4-6-0 should be preserved by the National Park Service, which should commission an in-depth report, to document and describe the history and physical history of the locomotive. Unless the locomotive appears under close examination to be in much better mechanical condition than assumed, it should be considered an exhibit locomotive not to be fired up and not to be restored to operable condition. It should be accurately restored to reflect one of the three major periods in its history. This special history study leans toward restoring the locomotive to its Brooks "as built" appearance as New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad No. 44, of the 1905-1910 period, a recommendation made after serious and thoughtful consideration. Locomotives of comparable age in the Steamtown collection generally have been so altered over the years that restoration to their earliest appearance is not feasible without unacceptable cost to original fabric of a later era. The changes to this particular locomotive, however, appear to have been so minimal that it may be possible at comparatively little cost to historic fabric to restore the locomotive to its earliest appearance. if, after the more thorough examination of a historic railroad locomotive report, that proves to be the case, then such restoration should be done so that at least one locomotive in the Steamtown collection will represent its appearance during the first decade of the 20th century, since the 20th century in steam railroading is a recommended focus of this collection. If the locomotive is restored to its pre-1910 appearance, removal of the later Pyle headlight and the steel pilot would be necessary; these and any other components removed should then be cataloged into, and stored as a part of, the museum collection and their association with this locomotive documented. In the process of preparing the report, physical analysis of paint on the locomotive should be carefully carried out, to document the colors of boiler and cylinder jackets, domes, smokebox, driver centers, and tender, and to document placement, shape, color and size of any early letters and numbers that survive under later paint. The documentary research for the report should especially focus on obtaining early photographs of this class of 4-6-0 on the New York, Chicago, & St. Louis and later on the Akron, Canton & Youngstown.

In a view during winter, Dansville & Mount Morris Railroad No. 304 carried a wedge snowplow bolted to her angle-bar pilot or "cow-catcher". The arched side windows of her cab bespoke her Nickel Plate Road origin.
Universal Slide Company, Steamtown Foundation Collection

Beebe, Lucius, and Charles Clegg. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: xiv, 5, 256-259, 276, 280, 339.

Connor, M.J. "A Brief History of the Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad." National Railway Bulletin, Vol. 47, No. 5 (1982): 36-38.

Correspondence, invoices, telegrams, bills of lading, relating to movement of No. 304 from Dansville, New York, to Bellows Falls, Vermont, in 1963-1964. Steamtown Foundation files.

Hampton, Taylor. The Nickel Plate Road: The History of a Great Railroad. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1947. Copyright was held by the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad, so this was a company-sponsored history.

Lewis, Edward A. American Short Line Railway Guide. Strasburg: The Baggage Car, 1975. See pp. 62, 114.

"Locomotives of Four New York State Roads." Railroad Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jan. 1941): 136-137.

Moody's Transportation Manual, 1962. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1962: 65-82, 394-400, 530.

Morgan, David P. "Steam in Indian Summer, 7; A story of small, elderly engines." Trains, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Dec. 1956): 26-27.

Poor, Henry V. Manual of the Railroads of the United States for 1883. New York: H.V. & H.W. Poor, 1883: 591, 592.

Poor, H.V., and H.W. Poor. Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States, 1900. New York: H.V. & H.W. Poor, 1900: 142-144.

Poor's Manual of Railroads, 1920. New York: Poor's Publishing, 1920: 901-907, 1482-1484, 1670.

Rehor, John A. The Nickel Plate Story. Milwaukee: Kalmbach Publishing, 1965: 389-391.

_________. "Reminiscences of Akron, Canton & Youngstown Ten-Wheelers during the 1920s. Unpublished manuscript, n.d. Steamtown NHS collection.

"Spotlight on: The Dansville & Mount Morris." Short-Line Railroader, Vol. 1, No. 6 (Nov. 1954): 4-6.

NICKEL PLATE ROAD (NEW YORK, CHICAGO, AND ST. LOUIS) NO. 759

Builder: Lima Locomotive Works, Lima, Ohio
Date Built: August 1944
Builder's Number: 8667

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 25 x 34
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 245
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 69
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 64,100

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 22
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 22,000

Remarks: Engine is not in bad condition, but needs tubes and flues, new superheater units, and valve packing and bull rings. It has Baker valve gear and piston valves. It was overhauled by N.K. Porter in 1958, and received minor work in 1969 for High Iron excursions.

History: One of a class of modem, heavy-duty, main line engines, a type first developed in 1925 and dubbed Berkshires by the Boston & Albany Railroad for the mountains over which they first ran, Locomotive No. 759 was one of 80 Berkshires purchased by the Nickel Plate Road (formally the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad) between 1934 and 1949. The American Locomotive Company won the low bid for the Nickel Plate Road's first 15 2-8-4s in 1934. but the Lima Locomotive Works in Lima, Ohio, built the remaining 65 in a series of subsequent orders.

The 2-8-4 or Berkshire type of railroad engine, according to steam locomotive historian Eugene Huddleston, originated in an effort of the Lima Locomotive Works and its designer Will Woodard to improve on the speed and horsepower of the Mikado 2-8-2 locomotive designed as a standard for the nation's railroads by the World War I federal transportation agency, the United States Railroad Administration, which advanced some admirable standard locomotive designs. Woodard's and Lima's first effort was simply a bigger and better 2-8-2, with the same cylinder and firebox dimensions as the "U.S.R.A." engine design, but with larger boiler, front end throttle, Baker valve gear, the recently developed Type E superheater, and a feedwater heater. This effort, in engines sold to the New York Central, proved successful, but the new Mikados still exhibited some limitations such as wheel slippage and inability to keep up steam at speed over a long period.

Woodard sought to improve on his "super Mikado" by solving these problems too, which led him to expand from a "super" 2-8-2 to a wholly new wheel arrangement, a 2-8-4, designed to accommodate an even larger boiler and firebox to ensure an engine that could produce sufficient steam at speed over long distances. Turned out by Lima in February 1925 for a New York Central System subsidiary, the Boston and Albany, in tests between Albany, New York and West Springfield, Massachusetts, the new 2-8-4 successfully hauled 2,500 tons unassisted by helper engines across the Taconic Mountains of western Massachusetts, known regionally as the Berkshire Hills. Soon the new class of engine, the 2-8-4, was dubbed "the Berkshire," and the New York Central bought 55 of them, while other railroads purchased still more.

A variant, improved series of Berkshire locomotives originated two years later on the group of railroads controlled by the brothers Oris P. and Mantis J. Van Sweringen. These bachelor Cleveland, Ohio, financiers had purchased control of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad, better known as the Nickel Plate Road, by 1916, and when the Interstate Commerce Commission began developing a scheme of railroad consolidation after World War I, the Van Sweringens undertook their own private strategy of consolidation, determined to control one of the major groupings or railroad systems that would emerge. To their ownership of the Nickel Plate they added other carriers, including notably by 1922, the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Hocking Valley, and by 1927, the Pere Marquette, the Wheeling and Lake Erie, and the Erie Railroad. The Van Sweringens' talented subordinate, President John Bernet of the Nickel Plate, moved to the Erie Railroad to revitalize that newly acquired carrier, and took with him Nickel Plate Superintendent of Motive Power William Black. While working for the Erie, Black designed a high-powered Berkshire 2-8-4 with 70-inch drivers, wheels 7 inches larger in diameter than those of the conventional Lima Berkshires. The Erie bought 105 of these.

The Interstate Commerce Commission refused to allow the Van Sweringen consolidation scheme, so the brothers lost interest in the Erie Railroad. Consequently, Black moved to the Van Sweringen-owned Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad. For that line he designed a larger variant of the Berkshire, a 2-10-4.

Meanwhile, headquartered in Cleveland, Black also led an Advisory Mechanical Committee that served the four principal remaining Van Sweringen-owned roads, the Nickel Plate, the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Pere Marquette, and the Hocking Valley, a committee that continued to function even after both Van Sweringens had passed from the scene. This committee designed five eminently successful classes of modem high-powered steam locomotives, one of which proved to be the finest class of Berkshires ever made and among the finest steam locomotives ever built.

As a set of builder's photographs representative of the series of Nickel Plate Road Locomotives No. 755 through 769, the Lima Locomotive Works chose to photograph right and left sides (top and bottom, respectively) of Locomotive No. 757 on August 18, 1944. Locomotive No. 759, now at Steamtown, looked identical except for the last digit in its number.
Allen County Historical Society

First produced in 1934 for the Nickel Plate Road, this new design of engine was not merely a copy of Black's Erie Railroad Berkshire, but a mathematically scaled-down version of the C & 0's 2-10-4, which had derived from the Erie Berkshire.

Both Chief Mechanical Officer William Black and his mentor, President John Bernet, soon died, but their Advisory Mechanical Committee survived them, and in 1937 the Pere Marquette ordered another group of the Berkshires designed by the committee.

George D. Brooke had succeeded Bernet as president of the Pere Marquette, the Nickel Plate and the C & O, and the C & O soon purchased a similar class of engines. When Brooke later left the C & O to head the Virginian, that railroad too would soon acquire similar Berkshire locomotives. Two other railroads not controlled by the Van Sweringens and their successors acquired Berkshires of essentially the Nickel Plate design: the Louisville and Nashville and the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac. Other railroads, such as the Missouri Pacific and the Wheeling & Lake Erie, obtained Berkshires whose design derived either from the Boston & Albany Berkshires or from independent design.

Of all of the Berkshires, those of the Nickel Plate Road became probably the most famous, perhaps more famous even than those of the Boston & Albany Railroad from which the type derived its name.

To return to the story of the Nickel Plate Berkshires, historian Huddleston observed that in 1934, the Advisory Mechanical Committee

This led to that initial purchase from the American Locomotive Company of 15 2-8-4s for service on the Nickel Plate, which designated them as Class S engines.

But it was the Lima Locomotive Works, noted especially as a builder of Shay patent-geared locomotives used primarily by logging and mining railroads, that had built the first Berkshires, and it was Lima, now builder of many fine main line steam locomotives, that won subsequent orders for Berkshire-type locomotives from the Nickel Plate. The Nickel Plate bought eight of these in June 1942, Nos. 715 through 722, designated as Class S-1, and in 1943 bought seven more from Lima, these in a new Class S-2, Nos. 730 through 734 being delivered in March and Nos. 735 and 736 in June. The difference between the S-1 and S-2 classes appears to have been principally in the weight on drivers, 258,000 lbs. for the S-1 and 264,000 for the S-2, and the total weight of engine and tender, 421,000 pounds compared with 440,800 pounds. The other vital statistics of the two classes of Nickel Plate Berkshires were the same: 25-inch diameter cylinders with 34-inch stroke, 69-inch diameter drive wheels, 245 pounds per square inch boiler pressure, 90.3 square feet of grate area, and tractive effort of 64,000 pounds. Because of its greater weight, the S-2 had a slightly greater adhesion factor.

The S-2 in the Steamtown collection, No. 759, came with the Nickel Plate's third order of Berkshires from Lima, order No. 1184, placed on June 25, 1943, in the middle of World War II. The order called for 15 identical locomotives, and these the builder delivered in two increments: Lima outshopped Nos. 755 through 762 in August, 1944, and the remaining seven, Nos. 763 through 769, in September 1944. The company photographer made builder's photographs of No. 757 as representative of each of these 15 locomotives on August 18 and 19, 1944.

After World War II, the able management of Nickel Plate President John Davin made the old New York, Chicago & St. Louis a highly efficient freight carrier, characterized by heavy traffic density, sustained fast speeds, and specialized consists. It handled "bridge" traffic between East St. Louis, Peoria, and Chicago as its three western termini, and Buffalo, its eastern terminus. The Nickel Plate offered the shortest, fastest route between Chicago and Buffalo. The line primarily traversed flat land and featured many long tangents or stretches of straight track on which a capable locomotive could really step out.

In 1949, the railroad bought another 10 Berkshires from Lima, these classed as S-3, being still heavier engines. . No. 779, turned out in 1949, proved to be the last steam locomotive produced by the Lima Locomotive Works.

In later years, the Nickel Plate made a number of modifications to the locomotives, such as the illuminated number plates slanted at a 45-degree angle on each side of the feedwater heater pre-heater unit. The most striking change came in the early 1950s, when the Nickel Plate equipped these engines with large Mars safety lamps whose penetrating beam oscillated in a figure eight pattern, mounting this second headlight above the fixed headlight. This, and other modifications such as installation of radios in the cabs of some of the Berkshires between 1953 and 1957, called for an increased number of generators, until some Nickel Plate Berkshires had four.

The 80 Nickel Plate Berkshires became famous as locomotives due to their fine performance and efficient design, but also perhaps due to the fact that they were well-proportioned, handsome machines. Trains Magazine said in March 1969 that they

These 2-8-4s, as mentioned, served the Nickel Plate principally as freight locomotives, rolling across the hills and plains of Ohio and Indiana at speeds of 50 to 70 miles per hour. Locomotive historian Richard Cook said that they "must be ranked among the most successful steam locomotives ever built."

Another Nickel Plate engineer, E.A. Donovan, recalled at the request of historian Cook:

Thus the Nickel Plate Berkshires, along with a handful of other locomotive types on other railroads, represented the apotheosis of locomotive development on the eve of the diesel locomotive.

Front and rear views of newly built Locomotive No. 757, photographs of which the Lima Locomotive Works intended to represent the entire lot of locomotives, Nos. 755-769, including Steamtown's 759.
Allen County Historical Society

In May 1958, the Nickel Plate thoroughly overhauled No. 759 in the company's great shop at Conneaut, Ohio. As it turned out, No. 759 was the last steam locomotive the Nickel Plate overhauled. By then rapidly converting to diesel power, the company scrapped other steam locomotives where they stood in the Conneaut shop at that same time.

But Nickel Plate Road No. 759 was not finished. On October 16, 1962, F. Nelson Blount added her to his collection of engines at Steamtown USA at Bellows Falls, Vermont, though without restoring her to operation. That was left to Ross Rowland, Jr., a Wall Street commodity futures broker who on the side founded and served as president of the High Iron Company in the mid-1960s. Rowland's purpose was to restore main line steam excursions using heavy-duty motive power. After some trial efforts, in 1967 he incorporated the High Iron Company and operated still more excursions. He had his eye on 1969, the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, which he planned to commemorate by operating a heavy-duty steam-powered Golden Spike excursion from the East to the Missouri. Steamtown agreed to make No. 759 available in exchange for excursion profits to complete a roundhouse for its engine collection. Norfolk and Western (which by then had absorbed the Nickel Plate in a merger) leased to High Iron the former Nickel Plate roundhouse in Conneaut, Ohio, for purposes of restoration. After limited repairs, No. 759 steamed up on August 17, 1968, made several trial runs, and on August 30 was christened with champagne and took off for Buffalo with a 15-car excursion run. Subsequently No. 759 handled other excursions.

On May 3, 1969, Nickel Plate No. 759, painted black with yellow lettering and with white driver tires departed New York City for Kansas City with the Gold Spike Special, which Union Pacific locomotives handled from there to Promontory Summit. Subsequently returned to Bellows Falls, Vermont, the engine operated twice in excursion service for Steamtown USA. Leased to others for excursion use, the locomotive apparently operated into Scranton, Pennsylvania, on August 15, 1971, and on July 22, 1973.

After its last main line excursion, from Boston, Massachusetts, to Montpelier, Vermont, and back, over the Boston and Maine and the Central Vermont in October 1973, Locomotive No. 759 deadheaded under steam to Rouses Point, New York, for winter storage in the Delaware and Hudson roundhouse there, since the locomotive had been scheduled tentatively for excursion duty on the D. & H. the following April. Unfortunately, negotiations for that excursion broke down, and the D. & H. management in an apparent fit of pique had the locomotive pulled out of the promised warm roundhouse storage and set out in the icy winter of upper New York State without draining it. Various pipes, connections, and fittings containing water froze and broke. The Steamtown Foundation sued the D. & H. for its negligence.

No. 759 returned to Bellows Falls towed dead in a train in the spring of 1975. In settlement of the lawsuit, the D. & H. contracted out repair work on some of the freeze damage and on July 6, 1975, a Steamtown crew fired up the locomotive and tested it on the enginehouse lead at Riverside, Vermont. Then it rested unused until the spring of 1977, when Steamtown received a request to use the locomotive in a mainline excursion. Steamtown management planned the completion of freeze-damage repairs and an application to the Federal Railroad Administration for an extension on the deadline for replacing the flues. But when they gave the locomotive a preliminary hydro test a flue burst. Recalling the experience of having two flues blow out while one of Steamtown's older locomotives was in service, and at the suggestion of Steamtown's boiler-repair contractor, Steamtown management decided to reflue the locomotive. The boiler contractor removed all the older flues, and Steamtown ordered a new set. Then sponsorship for the proposed excursion fell apart, Steamtown cancelled the order for new flues, and a partially disassembled No. 759 awaited an uncertain future. She remained in that status during and after her move to Scranton.

Twenty Berkshire-type locomotives survive in the United States today, six of them from the 80 that operated on the Nickel Plate Road. These include No. 755 at Conneaut, Ohio; No. 757 in the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania at Strasburg; No. 759 at Scranton; No. 763 at Roanoke, Virginia; No. 765 at Fort Wayne, Indiana; and No. 779 in Lincoln Park at Lima, Ohio. Of the remaining surviving Berkshires, 12 were C & O locomotives, and two came from the Pere Marquette.

Condition: Nickel Plate Road No. 759 is in need of a major overhaul including flues, but reportedly is a basically sound locomotive that can be restored to operable condition.

Recommendations: Nickel Plate Road No. 759 is exactly the sort of main line, heavy-duty 20th century steam locomotive that should be the main focus of the Steamtown collection. It is recommended that a report be completed on the subject of this locomotive, after which it should be restored both cosmetically and mechanically and operated occasionally for either excursions or interpretive demonstrations.

In terms of the research in the report, there is extensive published literature on this class of locomotives. The report needs to synthesize that literature and concentrate on pinning down the details of modifications specifically to Locomotive No. 759 over time, and on obtaining copies of photographs of it when it was in service, representing all stages of its career and its modifications and especially when it was in freight service on the Nickel Plate. Operational history of that particular locomotive, together with oral history of any of its surviving crews, should also be a part of the report.

Boyd, Jim. "The Berk Goes to Work." Railfan & Railroad, Vol. 3, No. 6 (Sept. 1980): 26-35. [This article features No. 759's sister locomotive 765 on the Toledo, Peoria & Western.]

Cook, Richard J. Super Power Steam Locomotives. San Marino: Golden West Books, 1966: 7, 9-15, 19-23, 58-60, 126-129. [The quotations of Paul Hackenberger and E.A. Donovan are from pp. 59, 60.]

__________. Famous Steam Locomotives of the United States and Canada. Cleveland Heights: Author, 1974.

Ferrell, Jack W. North American Steam Locomotives: The Berkshire and Texas Types. Edmonds: Pacific Fast Mail, 1988.

"Further Adventures of 759: The Berkshire Visits Roanoke." Railroading, No. 27 (Apr. 1969): 20-24.

Hampton, Taylor. The Nickel Plate Road: The History of a Great Railroad. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1947.

Harding, Talbot. "Nickel's Plate's S-3: The Newest in Steam." National Railway Historical Society Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 3 (1973): 6-8, 47.

Hirsimaki, Eric. Lima, The History. Edmonds: Hundman Publishing, Inc., 1986. [See pp. 201-205, 350-351.]

_________. The Nickel Plate Years. North Olmsted: Mileposts Publishing Co., 1989. [See especially p. 109.]

Huddleston, Eugene L. The Van Sweringen Berkshires. Hicksville: N.J. International, Inc., 1986.

This excellent locomotive history, a principal source for this narrative on Locomotive No. 759, appeared first as a series in Railfan & Railroad, beginning in Vol. 5, No. 4 (May 1984): 36-42; Vol. 5, No. 5 (July 1984): 42-49; Vol. 5, No. 6 (Sept. 1984): 34-39.

"Landmarks and Post-Era Steam," Railroading, No. 36 (Nov. 1970): 21-24. "Lima delivers its latest 2-8-4's to the Nickel Plate," Trains (Sept. 1949): 39. News Letter," Railroading, No. 25 (Oct. 1968): 22.

"One More Time: NKP 759," Railroading, No. 40 (Sept. 1971): 21-24. "Photo Line," Railfan, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter 1974): front cover, 38-39.

"Promontory Diary: l. Will There Ever Be Another Training Like This One?" Railroading, No. 29 (Aug. 1969): 6-23, front and back covers.

"Promontory Diary: II. Celebrating and Returning," Railroading, No. 30 (Oct. 1969): 19-31.

Railroading, No. 39 (July 1971): 2, 7, 10, 12; No. 41 (Nov.-Dec. 1971): 2; No. 49 (1st Quarter, 1974): 4, 5, 7, 19-22, back cover.

Rehor, John A. "The Engines That Saved a Railroad: The Success Story of Nickel Plate's 700's," Trains, Vol. 22, No. 12 (Oct. 1962): 18-32.

__________. "First 56, Engine 758: 'The Railroad is Yours.'" Trains, Vol. 22, No. 12 (Oct. 1962): 33-35.

__________,and Philip T. Horning. The Berkshire Era: A Pictorial Review of the Nickel Plate Road, 1934-1958. Rocky River, Authors, 1967.

"The Return of 759: A Photographic Record." Railroading, No. 25 (Oct. 1968): 8-2 l. Sentiments Formal and Informal." Railroading, No. 34 (June 1970): 2. Steamtown News, Special Edition. n.p., n.d. (ca. 1979): 3-4.

"Three Famous Cutoffs, Six Historic Bridges: And Two Action-Filled Days behind Berkshire 759."

"A William A. Swartz Photo Sampler." Locomotive Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Winter 1984): 58.

Wood, Don. NKP 759 Is Alive and Well." Trains, Vol. 9, No. 5 (Mar. 1949): 29-42.

Young, William S. "S-1, S-2, S-3, S-4: The Erie Berkshires, I, Bernet and Black," Railroading, No. 34 (June 1970): 18-34. [The Erie Berkshires were 'cousins' of the Nickel Plate Berkshires.]

__________. "S-1, S-2, S-3, S-4: The Erie Berkshires, II, The Working Years." Railroading, No. 35 (Sept. 1970): 6-15.

Builder: American Locomotive Company (Cooke Works, Paterson, New Jersey)
Date Built: December 1923
Builder's Number: 65265 (or 65365)

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 20 x 26
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 180
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 56
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 28,400

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 8
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 5,000

Remarks: Locomotive has an all-weather cab and is a manually fired coal burner. This is a tired, worn-out locomotive.

History: The origins of the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad paralleled those of other New York State short lines built in the 20th century. Omin E. Martin, a prominent Norwood, New York, businessman, interested Watertown industrialist Charles H. Remington in the development of water power in nearby Norfolk, New York, and the two organized the Remington and Martin Paper Company, which secured water rights on the Racquette River where it passed through Norfolk, as well as a right-of-way for a railroad.

At their instigation, citizens of Norfolk, Raymondville, and Chase Mills, New York, gathered in the Norfolk Town Hall in February 1900 to promote the organization and construction of a railroad to serve their region. An unusual aspect of this railroad promotional meeting was the active participation of four women, who received special notice in local newspaper accounts of the gathering. Ambitious plans came out of the meeting for construction of a railroad along the Racquette River from its confluence with the St. Lawrence to Piercefield and beyond. Those at the meeting organized a committee including men from Norfolk, Raymondville, Chase Mills, and Waddington.

At 8 a.m. on September 6,1900, a hundred people gathered to watch O.E. Martin turn the first sod for the new railroad at Norfolk. Curiously, no railroad company had yet been organized, but the committee envisioned the line commencing on the north side of the river near the Furnace Street Bridge and running to the mill and a half-mile beyond. A newspaper account of the day said that it would then be decided whether to continue to Norwood or run to connect with the Raymondville, Waddington and Ogdensburg Railroad at the Marble Hill School House.

Not until March 30, 1901, did its promoters get around to incorporating the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad, which then proceeded to construct 7.5 miles of track from Norwood, New York, to Raymondville, New York, which it opened for traffic on July 2, 1901. The railroad's progress then stalled for several years until, under an agreement approved on January 6, 1909, the Norwood and St. Lawrence absorbed and consolidated with the Raymondville and Waddington Railroad Company, completing its 12-mile line between those two towns on July 1, 1909, to create a railroad 18.02 miles long, with 1.5 miles of siding. At Waddington, the railroad had reached its intended destination as stated in its corporate title:

the St. Lawrence River. There a ferry provided a connection for traffic across the river, which was also the international boundary, to Morrisburg, Ontario, in Canada. The Norwood and St. Lawrence was thus one of those select few railroads that actually reached the typically over-ambitious objectives stated in their corporate titles.

By 1912 the company owned an ancient, secondhand 4-4-0, another 4-4-0, a 2-6-0, and a 2-6-2, seven box cars of 30-ton capacity, four 20-ton capacity flat cars, and three work-outfit cars, as well as an elegant wooden combination car.

The Remington and Martin Paper Company built mills at Norwood, Norfolk, and Raymondville. The Norfolk mill boasted two paper machines, one of which supposedly was the largest machine of its kind in the world at the time. The hauling of paper pulp became one of the most important functions of the line.

Photographed by its builder, the American Locomotive Company, at its Cooke Works at Paterson, New Jersey, the brand new Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad Engine No. 210 exhibited, top, its engineer's side on December 28, 1923. Bottom, in a view of the fireman's side of the engine, Norwood and St. Lawrence No. 210 fairly glistened in a fresh coat of paint, this time apparently after being overhauled for its home railroad.
Collection of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Courtesy California State Railroad Museum Library

In 1920, the St. Regis Paper Company purchased all three Remington and Martin paper mills and obtained control of the Norwood & St. Lawrence through purchase of stock. Incorporated in New York on February 4, 1899, the St. Regis Paper Company had begun the manufacture of paper in July 1901 in upstate New York near the St. Lawrence River, and during the next seven decades would expand not only from New York to Florida to California and to the state of Washington, but would own numerous subsidiary plants in Canada, Belgium, Brazil, Argentina, the Republic of South Africa, Rhodesia, Australia, Nicaragua, Colombia, Zambia, Angola, Panama, and Ecuador. It was a company destined, in other words, to grow into a multinational corporation. Meanwhile, it also would own the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad.

Robert Wagner, whom the Norwood and St. Lawrence hired in 1945, recalled the line as a "robust Class 2 road" whose traffic outbound consisted of

The railroad interchanged traffic to the south and west with the New York Central (later the Penn Central) at Norwood, and to points east with the Rutland Railroad. Traffic inbound consisted of

In December 1923, the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad purchased what was at least its fifth locomotive from the American Locomotive Company, whose Cooke Works in Paterson, New Jersey, outshopped No. 210, a high-boilered, modem 20th century version of a 2-6-0 Mogul-type engine. Why the railroad chose to number it 210 is unknown, but its purchase apparently resulted from acquisition of the railroad by the massive St. Regis Paper Company. A hand-fired coal burner, Engine No. 210 featured a second sand dome mounted behind the steam dome, and an enclosed, all-weather cab, the latter believed to be fairly rare on 2-6-0 locomotives. Down through the years of mixed train service (freight cars with a combination baggage-express-passenger car on the rear) as well as freight service, the railroad replaced the locomotive's original wooden pilot, or cowcatcher, with a "boiler tube" pilot made of steel pipe, and eventually removed the road number plate from the center of the smokebox front and moved the headlight from atop the smokebox to the center of the smokebox front in place of the number plate. Originally the tender carried the lettering NORWOOD & St. LAWRENCE R.R. but the railroad later changed this to simply N.& St L. While the railroad operated its own blacksmith shop for running repairs to motive power and rolling stock, for major overauls the Norwood and St. Lawrence sent Locomotive No. 210 and her sisters down to the Rutland Railroad shops in Rutland, Vermont.

When Bob Wagner hired out on the railroad in 1945, the company paid him 40 cents an hour as a mechanic. "The work was sometimes dangerous, there's no doubt about that," he recalled. "You had to keep your eyes open."

Coming out of military service in Europe during World War II, Wagner found the cacophony of the railroad's roundhouse took some getting used to:

Locomotive No. 210 was among those Wagner had to repair. He recalled its paint scheme:

Wagner recalled that the rest of the roster of equipment included two more locomotives, No. 211, a Baldwin 2-6-0 outshopped in 1926, whose firebox grates eventually were burned and damaged due to lack of proper cleaning, and No. 14, a 40-ton 2-8-0 borrowed from and eventually returned to the St. Regis Paper Company at Deferiet, New York. The company also owned a wooden snowplow with built-in flanger, a small two-way flanger, two section crew motor cars, and around 40 to 60 secondhand 33-foot Rutland Railroad converted wooden boxcars, whose roofs the railroad had removed and whose sides had been shored up with rail across the top. These the Norwood and St. Lawrence used to haul pulp wood from Canada to Norfolk. The cars did not meet standards requisite for interchange with other railroads. The railroad operated the same old combination baggage-express-passenger car until 1949, when the railroad discontinued passenger service.

With its two little Moguls, the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad continued to haul freight through the years, serving the Norfolk Mill. (St. Regis had closed the Norwood and Raymondville mills during the Depression.) In 1956, two great changes affected the railroad: First, the St. Regis Paper Company closed the Norfolk Mill; second, the Norwood and St. Lawrence purchased a small diesel locomotive, shipping No. 210 late that year to Abe Cooper's scrapyard in Watertown, New York, and No. 211, under its own power, to a paper mill at Carthage, New York. Without the traffic of the Norfolk mill, the railroad had a difficult time surviving. The railroad continued to haul pulpwood from the St. Lawrence at Waddington to Norfolk, from which the New York Central then hauled it to the St. Regis mill at Deferiet. In 1973 the Simplicity Pattern Company operated in the old Remington and Martin mill at Norfolk, providing some traffic, as did other businesses, but it diminished until it could no longer sustain the railroad.

Bob Wagner had by this time worked his way up from mechanic to machinist, foreman, master mechanic, and assistant superintendent to the position of manager of transportation. He had witnessed a drop in the shipment of carloads of freight from 2,513 per year in 1971 to 161 in 1972, after the elimination of pulpwood imports from Quebec. On June 2, 1973, the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad applied to the Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to discontinue service and abandon its line, and the history of New York State's last steam-powered short line railroad seemingly came to an end.

That was not quite the case. The St. Regis Paper Company did not subsequently have the line dismantled, and on January 2, 1975, donated the railroad to the Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority. The Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority in turn leased the line to the National Railway Utilization Company, a railroad car leasing and managing corporation which in turn owned the St. Lawrence Railroad Company, to which it turned over the trackage formerly that of the Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad. In 1977, Robert Wagner became president of the St. Lawrence Railroad, which now included the trackage of his former employer. Thus the railroad company for which Locomotive No. 210 operated had vanished, but the actual trackage of that company over which it once operated still remained in service in 1988, owned by a government agency.

Condition: Although Norwood and St. Lawrence Locomotive No. 210 will make a fine static exhibit engine, mechanically it is reported to be a tired, worn-out machine, not suitable for operation.

Recommendation: The NPS should commission a report to document the operational and physical history of this locomotive. The report should include a roster of all Norwood and St. Lawrence locomotives to place this locomotive in context, as such a roster has not been located for this railroad. The report should discuss in detail all paint and lettering schemes and recommend the period to which the locomotive should be restored. Upon completion of this report, the NPS should undertake restoration of this locomotive for static exhibit in the roundhouse at Scranton or in some other indoor exhibit facility.

It would probably be feasible to restore this locomotive to its as-built condition by building and installing a wooden "pilot," remounting the headlight atop the smokebox, and casting a replica brass or bronze road number plate to be installed on the smokebox front (unless, of course, the original number plate can be located and obtained). This is not to say that such restoration work should be done. While the final decision should be recommended by the historic railroad locomotive report, this study leans toward preserving the locomotive in basically its present form, but with an earlier style of initials on the tender.

Available historic sources differ on cylinder specifications (which may be 20 by 26 inches or 22 by 28 inches) and driver diameter (53 inches or 56 inches). The report on this locomotive should ascertain which measurements are correct, and document any significant changes to cylinders and drivers that account for the differing accounts (such as reboring of cylinders, replacement of driver tires, etc.).

As part of the report, unless the locomotive was entirely stripped to bare metal before Steamtown volunteers repainted it in the fall of 1980, physical analysis of past paint and lettering schemes on the locomotive, locomotive cab, and tender needs to be performed by means of careful sanding followed by measurement and tracing of letters and numbers and their location on tender and engine, as well as color analysis of the paint layers on the smokebox, pilot, boiler jacket, domes, frame, cab interior and exterior, cab roof, drivers, tires, tender, tender frame, and tender trucks. Robert Wagner reported the colors he remembered, but he did not work for the company until 1945, whereas it acquired this locomotive in 1923. In any case, it would be desirable to ascertain the exact shade of dark green Wagner recalled inside the cab.

Beebe, Lucius, and Charles Clegg. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: 272, 302.

Blabey, E.H., II. "Rutland Revival, Part 3; Ogdensburg Bridge & Port Authority." Railfan, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Fall 1975): 30-32.

Cleaves-Hirsch, Melanie. "His Memory Long on Short-Line Rails." Watertown Daily Times, June 18, 1986: 17.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973). [See Item 11 and roster entry.]

Kean, Randolph. The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays. Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, Publisher, 1973: 174.

Lewis, Edward A. American Short Line Railway Guide. Strasburg: The Baggage Car, 1975: 65, 122.

Lyman, Susan C. Rails Into Racquetteville. Norwood, N.Y.: Norwood Historical Association and Museum, 1976. [See chapter on Norwood and St. Lawrence Railroad.]

Moody's Industrial Manual, June 1966. New York: Moody's Investors Service, 1966. [See pp. 2939-2943.]

"Norwood & St. Lawrence Railroad." The Short Line, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1977): 10.

Official Steamtown Locomotive Guide, Vol. l. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, 1970. [See page on Norwood and St. Lawrence 2-6-0 No. 210.]

Palmer, Richard F. "Abandoned Railroads in New York State." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 45, No. 4 (1980): 17.

"Photo Line." Railfan, Vol. 2, No. 7 (Nov. 1978): [Photo of No. 210 in service on July 22, 1952, by John F.W. Minke, III.]

Poor's Manual of Railroads, 1920. New York: Poor's Publishing, 1920: 944, 945.

Wagner, Robert H. Letter to author, July 8, 1988. [Supplied five-page manuscript, a resume, and photocopies of a 1909 schedule, photographs, and miscellaneous newspaper clippings.]

Wallin, R.R. "The Shortline Scene." Extra 2200 South: The Locomotive Newsmagazine. Vol. 9, No. 6 (July-Aug. 1972): 18. [See both "Norwood and St. Lawrence" and "Ogdensburg Bridge & Port Authority."]

Builder: H.K. Porter
Date Built: February 1923; also reported as July 1923
Builder's Number: 6816

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 30 x 28
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): Storage: 190; Working: 60
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 52
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 24,300; also reported as 24,000

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): Not applicable
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): Not applicable

Remarks: A "fireless" locomotive No. 6816 was charged with live steam from a stationary boiler, it used no fuel.

History: One of the strangest aberrations in the long history of steam locomotive technology was the fireless steam railroad engine. Carrying no fuel and having no means to heat water to create steam, its engineer periodically connected it to a stationary steam boiler and charged the engine with steam, then operated it until the steam pressure diminished to a point of ineffectiveness, and then recharged it again from a stationary steam boiler.

A Dr. Lamm supposedly invented the type, and engines of his design entered service on the Crescent City Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1875. A French inventor, Leon Franque, introduced an improved version in 1876 on a tramway that ran from St. Augustin, Paris, to the Boulevard du Chateau at Neuilly. Franque's design used a reducing valve and also featured an atmospheric condenser on top of the reservoir to collect exhaust steam. He also conceived the idea of injecting high-temperature steam into the reservoir instead of emptying and refilling it after each run.

That same year Theodore Schaffer further improved the design in the United States, and eight locomotives of his design were built at Paterson, New Jersey, for New Orieans's Crescent City Railroad. Schaffer patented a valve gear that consisted of a main valve working to control the exhaust and an auxiliary valve on top to govern the admission of steam to the cylinders. These Crescent City locomotives received steam from stationary boilers at a pressure of 220 pounds per square inch. The engines then operated until the pressure dropped to 100 pounds, at which time they would recharge, and could operate 3-1/2 miles in the interim. Still further technical improvements were necessary to make the "fireless" locomotive, as these were called, readily marketable. But by the end of the 19th century, both Baldwin and H.K. Porter were in the business of manufacturing fireless locomotives, principally for use as industrial switchers at industrial plants, although some common carrier railroads used fireless locomotives themselves, generally as shop switchers.

Generally 0-4-0, 0-6-0, or 0-8-0 wheel arrangements, fireless locomotives looked superficially like a saddle tank engine because their extra fat steam reservoir gave them the appearance of a boiler with a saddle tank on top of it, and like saddle tankers, they lacked a tender, although they also lacked a fuel bin or tank behind the cab which many saddle tankers had. Although an article in Trains magazine in 1945 proposed the use of fireless locomotives as "road" or main line locomotives, the railroad industry never considered them for the purpose, and indeed a rebuttal to that article by an anonymous but reportedly prominent railway mechanical engineer in the same issue of the magazine stated that fireless locomotives would not be practical in the role of road engines. The fireless locomotive was destined to remain nothing more than an industrial switcher throughout its history.

One industry to use one was the Public Service Electric Company of New Jersey. Incorporated on June 13, 1910, the company commenced operations on July 1, 1910, and took over the leases of a number of subsidiary electric power firms that previously had been held by the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. The leased firms included eight local firms, such as the Bordentown Electric Company and the Middlesex Electric Light and Power Company as well as another six combined gas and electricity companies. The Public Service Electric Company also shared leases with a sister firm, the Public Service Gas Company, such as with the Gas and Electric Company of Bergen County and the South Jersey Gas, Electric and Traction Company. Actually, the Public Service Electric Company was established as a subsidiary of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey in order to consolidate management of these various subsidiaries. The Public Service Corporation of New Jersey had been incorporated on May 6, 1903, and by 1918, through its myriad subsidiaries and sub-subsidiaries, controlled almost all of the gas, electric, and street railway business through the larger cities and more populous suburbs of New Jersey, with the exception of the seashore resorts and a few other localities. As of 1918, the electric business served 2,196,081 people, the gas business of the firm served 2,033,027 individuals, and the street railway branch claimed a patronage of 2,126,889.

In 1925, the Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice illustrated a fireless 0-6-0 locomotive built by the H.K. Porter Company for the Public Service Electric Company of New Jersey which appears to be Engine 6816 of the company's successor, Public Service, Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey.
Colorado Railroad Museum Library

In 1923, the Public Service Electric Company of New Jersey ordered an 0-6-0F fireless locomotive from the H.K. Porter Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for use at its Newark, New Jersey, coal burning electricity generating plant. The locomotive was to have cylinders 30 inches in diameter with a 28-inch stroke, 52-inch diameter drive wheels, and would weigh 125,000 pounds on drivers. The engine would be 29 feet, 6 inches in length, and with the center pair of drivers without flanges, could turn in a 200-foot radius, or on a 28.5-degree curve. The engine was equipped with Stephenson valve gears. The locomotive was to be capable of hauling a 180-ton train up a 4 percent grade with an effective pressure of 50 pounds per square inch, and a 230-ton train up a 4 percent grade with a 60-pound effective pressure. Oddly, the Public Service Electric Company assigned no number to this locomotive, so its H.K. Porter shop number, 6816, became the only number by which employees ever knew it. As outshopped, it had the words Public Service Electric Co. on each side of its steam reservoir, a rectangle of white pinstriping on the cab, and two horizontal lines of white pinstriping around the single dome. It also had a white "grabiron" forward of the cab door on each side, white driver tires, a white edge to the running board, and a white reverse lever. The body color is not known, but was not black. It may have been gray or some other color that appeared gray in a black-and-white photograph.

At that time the Public Service Electric Company operated four generating plants: the Essex plant in Newark, built in 1915, where this particular engine operated; the Marion plant in Jersey City, constructed in 1905; the Burlington plant in Burlington, constructed in 1914; and the Perth Amboy plant in Perth Amboy, built in 1911.

On July 25, 1924, the year following purchase of this locomotive, the Public Service Electric Company and the Public Service Gas Company merged to form the Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey, which then proceeded in December to merge with seven other companies, and between 1937 and 1940 absorbed 13 more. To its electric streetcar lines, it added motor bus companies. The enlarged concern produced, purchased, and distributed electricity and manufactured gas from northeastern New Jersey southwest across the state to Trenton and Camden, its empire thus extending from the Hudson River to the Delaware. It sold gas and electricity to cities such as Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Trenton, Camden, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Hoboken, Passaic, Perth Amboy, and a dozen more. Among improvements over the years, it added a final unit to the Newark generating plant in 1947, which brought its total effective productive capacity to 330,500 kilowats.

At this time little is known of the operational history of Locomotive No. 6816, but it is believed principally to have switched incoming carloads of coal at the Essex plant in Newark, and to have switched outgoing empty coal cars. It carried a storage pressure of 190 pounds per square inch and a working press of 60 pounds. The 1925 edition of the Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice included on page 925 an H.K. Porter Company builder's photograph that is believed to be this particular locomotive. A copy of its original specifications from H.K. Porter, together with instructions for operation, are to be found in the Steamtown files.

At least four 0-4-0F fireless locomotives, five 0-6-0F, and one 0-8-0F are known to survive in the United States in addition to No. 6816, and there may be more. As far as is known, No. 6816 is the only one that represents the Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey. The other five 0-6-0F locomotives consist of three used by Cleveland Electric in Ohio and two used by Pennsylvania Power and Light.

Condition: Locomotive No. 6816 is believed to be in operable condition, and has been operated since owned by the Steamtown Foundation.

Recommendations: The National Park Service should preserve this locomotive because of the technology it represents. A small report should be prepared and should deal especially with the operational history of the locomotive. The report should include a map of trackage at the Essex plant, photos of the Essex plant, and, if obtainable, photographs of this particular engine at work at the Essex plant, as well as a description of its operations. A former engineer should be located and interviewed. The report needs to focus also on the physical history of the locomotive, documenting any changes to it and especially how the locomotive was painted when built, which may involve physical analysis of paint layers at various locations on the locomotive to ascertain its original body and lettering colors. The reports should also document the pattern of its painting and lettering after the merger in 1925 that created the Public Service Electric and Gas Company. For example, was the locomotive then repainted with the new name, and if so, in what style and color of lettering and at what locations? The completed report should include recommendations as to which period the locomotive should be restored to represent. This special history study leans toward restoring this particular locomotive to represent its as-built appearance of 1923.

Hilton, John J. "Fireless Locomotives Extant in the U.S." The Short Line, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1975): 10-11; Vol. 3, No. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1975): 11.

"Is the Fireless Road Locomotive Practical?" Trains, Vol. 5, No. 9 (July 1945): 34. Johnson, R.K. Fireless Locomotives." Baldwin Locomotives, Vol. 4, No. 1 (July 1925): 34-39.

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, 1925. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1925. [See p. 952. Lower right of four illustrations of fireless engines is believed to be No. 6816.]

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, 1944. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1925. [See pp. 1040-1042. Additional examples of fireless engines built by the Heisler Locomotive Works, the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and the H.K. Porter Company.]

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, 1947. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1947: 1046, 1047. [On p. 1046 is a cutaway sketch illustrating the internal workings of an H.K. Porter fireless engine.]

Moody's Manual of Investments, American and Foreign: Public Utility Securities, 1950. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, 1950: 348, 349.

Ohlson, Kevin. "Steam Without Smoke." Rail Classics, Vol. 4, No. 6 (Nov. 1975): 16-2 l.

Poor's Manual of Public Utilities, 1918. New York: Poor's Publishing Company, 1918. See pp. 197-224.

Sagle, Lawrence W. "Steam Locomotives Without Fire." Trains, Vol. 5, No. 9 (July 1945): 34-38.

Steamtown Foundation files, Locomotive 6816, including H.K. Porter Company Locomotive Specifications for No. 6816, instruction manual for the locomotive, and invoices and correspondence regarding repair parts. [Includes all original documents obtained from the Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey along with the locomotive.]

Builder: Baldwin Locomotive Works
Date Built: June 1916
Builder's Number: 43529

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 20 x 26
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 200
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 50
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 35,360

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 6
    Water (in gallons): 3,500
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable

Remarks: In May 1987, the tender of this engine was rammed by a railroad car and now needs repairs. Engine needs new front tube sheet and flues.

History: Of the four 2-8-0 Consolidation-type locomotives i the Steamtown collection, this comparatively small short line railroad engine has probably the most aesthetically pleasing design. With a lower, smaller boiler than the Illinois Central or Maine Central engines, the little locomotive has a more balanced appearance than the other three 2-8-0s in the collection.

Its history reflects the role of short line railroads in the American rail transportation network, in which they served as essential feeders to the major Class 1 carriers. Incorporated on September 18, 1913 to build from Oneida, Tennessee, to Albany, Kentucky, the Oneida & Western Railroad ordered its Locomotive No. 20 from the Baldwin Locomotive Works. Delivered in June 1916 when the Oneida & Western was but three years old, the trim little Consolidation went to work in the hills of Tennessee. Intended to spur the development of coal and lumber properties, the Oneida & Western disappointed its supporters and became a short line stretching only 25 miles from Oneida to East Jamestown, Tennessee. At Oneida, the short line connected with the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific Railway.

Aside from its fine proportions, Engine No. 15 reportedly became the favorite locomotive of her regular O & W engineer. Despite a narrow firebox, the engine performed well in the hands of crews who knew how to handle her.

Baldwin Locomotive Works photograph Oneida & Western Railroad 2-8-0 No. 20 in June 1916, in its fresh builder's paint job (top), and some time later an unidentified photographer recorded her appearance in a yard in Tennessee (bottom). Both views illustrate the locomotive's original pistons and cylinders and her original "pilot" or cowcatcher.
Top, collection of Mallory Hope Ferrell.
Bottom, collection of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, California State Railroad Museum Library

Built with fairly common Walschaert valve motion and standard slide valves, the engine retained that character only for her first 10 years. About 1926 a neglectful hostler allowed the engine to freeze one cold night, and the expanding ice broke the bridges. The company apparently shipped the locomotive to Baldwin's Eddystone Shops for repair, and for reasons unknown, Baldwin fitted the locomotive with new piston valves, employing outside admission to avoid altering the valve gear. It was a common practice to retain the old-style admission on locomotives refitted with universal valve chests, but it was an unusual feature on an engine just given new cylinders. Furthermore, the use of outside steam pipes that branched above the valve chests made Oneida & Western No. 20 a unique locomotive. It was apparently at this same time that Baldwin applied a Franklin Type B Ragonnet power reverse mechanism and a mechanical lubricator, as well as a standard steel pilot in place of the hardwood pilot and electric headlight and markers in place of the oil (kerosene) headlight and marker lights.

Back in the hills of Tennessee, the locomotive returned to her duties on the Oneida & Western. By 1937, the little engine had performed faithfully for 21 years, and Oneida & Western management (by then the road had entered bankruptcy and was operating under a trustee) considered the locomotive somewhat tired and small for their needs and began thinking of buying larger motive power. Thus No. 20 became surplus, and the frugal company put her up for sale in August 1937 through the Birmingham Rail and Locomotive Company.

Charles Nees, master mechanic of the Rahway Valley Railroad of New Jersey, came to Tennessee with an eye toward purchase of the engine. Older than the O & W, the Rahway Valley Railroad had been incorporated back on July 18, 1904, to acquire the 4-mile-long New Orange Four Junction Railroad and extend it to new destinations. The Rahway Valley linked New Orange, later renamed Kenilworth, with the Lehigh Valley at Roselle Park and the Central Railroad Company of New Jersey, and then reached at the other end for a connection with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad at Summit. Promoter of the Rahway Valley was Louis Keller, rumored to have gone into the railroad business to give himself and his golfing buddies easy transportation to the Baltusrol Golf Club he had founded near Summit. Indeed, construction of the new line proceeded past the golf links to within a few feet of the Lackawanna line near Summit, and there the plans of the Rahway Valley Railroad unraveled, for the Lackawanna refused to allow a connection to their tracks. Instead of serving as a connection in New Jersey between the Lehigh Valley and the "Jersey Central" at one end and the Lackawanna at the other, the little Rahway Valley was frozen into being a short line feeder only to the two connections at its southern end.

Meanwhile, the Rahway Valley initiated a schedule of 14 passenger trains, whose principal patrons indeed proved mostly to be "blue-chip fellows" heading for the golf club, but this did not last. Frequency of passenger trains had dwindled to six by 1909, and in 1911 the railroad turned to the development of further freight traffic as its bread and butter by constructing a 3-mile branch line to Maplewood, later renamed Newark Heights. The Rahway Valley abandoned all passenger traffic in 1919, and thereafter handled freight only.

After World War I, Roger Clark, a short line railroader with extensive experience on the Buffalo, Rochester & Pittsburgh and later on the Central Railroad of Oregon, came to the Rahway Valley, bringing along his son, George, a former lumberjack. When Louis Keller died in 1921, Roger Clark became president of the Rahway Valley, and George became the line's traffic manager. They nursed the little short line through deficit after deficit during the 1920s, when red ink seemed to pour onto the railroad's books. Ironically, it was just as the Depression hit in 1929 that the Clarks began to pull the Rahway Valley out of its pool of red ink, and indeed the Depression marked the start of the short line's era of profit. The Clarks managed in 1929 to find funds with which to buy two secondhand Lehigh and New England Railroad 2-8-0 locomotives. That good fortune was followed by more: In 1931, the Lackawanna at long last allowed a connection between the two roads at Summit, New Jersey, which spawned further business. Roger Clark died in 1932, and George Clark became president. The Clarks' success with the road continued. In 1934, the company's books showed a net profit. Again in 1935 and in 1936 the line was in the black, and President Clark began to consider the need for a fourth 2-8-0 to supplement No. 12, a tired, old former Bessemer & Lake Erie engine, and Nos. 13 and 14, the two Consolidations obtained secondhand from the Lehigh & New England Railroad. It was then that he sent master mechanic Charles Nees down to Tennessee to look over Oneida & Western No. 20.

A later view of Oneida & Western Railroad Locomotive No. 20 in the yard at Oneida, Tennessee, in June 1937, illustrated a rebuilt engine with a rather unique arrangement of cylinders. Note also the new "pilot" of steel tubes which replaced the original wooden one. This engine later became Rahway Valley Railroad Engine No. 15.
Photo by J.B. Allen, collection of Mallory Hope Ferrell

"The small engine had been battling the grade and sharp curves for some time when the visiting master mechanic from New Jersey got down off the left-hand seatbox, glanced at the steam gauge above the sloping backhead, and peered into the firebox," wrote the locomotive's anonymous historian in an article published in the first issue of Steam Locomotive magazine:

But on the Rahway Valley, whose No. 12 had been considered too large and been set aside for years, new No. 15 did not compare favorably with the pair of former Lehigh & New England Consolidations, deckless locomotives that were real workhorses.

Perhaps not the most efficient engine, Rahway Valley No. 15 qualified as the line's most attractive.

Traffic on the Rahway Valley proved not to be so heavy that the line needed to keep three locomotives in regular service, so with No. 12 eventually retired, Nos. 13 and 14 performed most of the work, with No. 15 serving as a spare locomotive to fill in when one of the others was in the shop. For major repairs, the Rahway Valley sent its locomotives to the Lackawanna's Kingsland Shops or the Central Railroad Company of New Jersey's Elizabethport shops, but No. 15, at least on one occasion went down to the Lackawanna's Scranton shops for repairs.

The three steam engines continued to serve as the regular motive power of the Rahway Valley Railroad until January 1951, when the company purchased a 70-ton diesel. Thereafter, Engine No. 15 served as a relief engine when the diesel needed repair. The Rahway Valley Railroad fired her up and placed her in service for the last time for four days in 1953 when the diesel was down for repairs, and the crew dumped the last fire on No. 15 on November 28, 1953. Several weeks later, the company took delivery on a second diesel, and the era of steam motive power on the Rahway Valley Railroad had passed forever.

"President Clark, who knew a good engine when he saw one," wrote the locomotive's historian, "was as reluctant as anybody to see No. 15 go for scrap. Pending developments, the engine remained well protected in a closed and heated shed, part of the diesel shop."

By then F. Nelson Blount, president of the Edaville Railroad, had contracted to operate a railroad at the new Pleasure Island park in Wakefield, Massachusetts and purchased No. 15 for exhibit there. The Rahway Valley Railroad shipped the locomotive on June 5, 1959, via the Central of New Jersey, the Delaware & Hudson, and the Boston & Maine.

Rahway Valley Railroad Locomotive No. 15 featured a front number plate and a headlight mounted on top of the smokebox, which is different from her present appearance in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The changes apparently were made on the Green Mountain Railroad.
Collection of Walt Thrall, Colorado Railroad Museum

But old No. 15 refused to remain an idle exhibit engine, and Blount was not destined to remain involved at Pleasure Island. He moved his collection to Keene and then North Walpole, New Hampshire and finally across the river to Riverside, a meadow north of Bellow Falls, Vermont. While at North Walpole, he had Rahway Valley No. 15 overhauled and put back into service on his Monadnock, Steamtown and Northern Railroad, a tourist excursion line. When forced to move from Boston and Maine trackage at North Walpole across the river to Rutland Railroad trackage near Bellows Falls, he renamed the excursion line simply Monadnock Northern. There former Rahway Valley No. 15, former Oneida & Western No. 20, served so reliably and for so long that she came to be called the "faithful fifteen" During the winter of 1962-1963, the locomotive even ran up to Boston to play a role in a motion picture entitled "The Cardinal."

No. 15 operated regularly from the beginning of the 1962 season until its "flue time" expired early in 1967. After Blount's death, in 1968 the Steamtown Foundation obtained from the Federal Railroad Administration an extension on the flue deadline, and the locomotive returned to service lettered for the Green Mountain Railroad, but after only a handful of runs, broke a piston, and limped into storage. In January 1973 the Steamtown Foundation obtained another flue extension, machined and installed a new piston and piston road, and modified the appearance of the locomotive by removing the front number plate and lowering the headlight to a position in the center of the smokebox door. Steamtown leased the locomotive for a run to Boston to carry a wealthy couple from their wedding to a reception a couple of towns away. After returning to Bellows Falls, Steamtown fired up the locomotive again as part of the "Friends of Steamtown" Day on August 12, 1973. While heading Steamtown's first triple-headed excursion with a couple of Canadian Pacific 4-6-2s, the locomotive blew a flue out just north of Riverside, badly scalding veteran engineer Andy Barbera. Inspection of the boiler indicated that reflueing and installation of a new front flue sheet should be completed before the locomotive operated again, and since the Steamtown Foundation did not need the services of No. 15 at that time, the work was not done. Just a day or two before the August 1973 excursion, the Steamtown mechanical force had placed a round number plate just below the headlight, giving the locomotive the appearance it has today. Briefly lettered Steamtown R.R.," the locomotive received from Steamtown volunteers during the early 1980s a new paint job and lettering that spelled out "Rahway Valley." Nevertheless, its present appearance is not its appearance when on either the Rahway Valley Railroad or the Oneida & Western.

Condition: The engine needs to be restored either to her appearance on the Oneida & Western Railroad after the 1926 rebuild, or, perhaps preferably, to her appearance on the Rahway Valley Railroad, under whose ownership she was shopped in Scranton, and whose operations connected with the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western. Mechanically, the engine needs a new front tube sheet and new flues in order to operate. Furthermore, in May 1987, at the beginning of Steamtown excursion operations out of Scranton, the rear of the tender of this locomotive was damaged by vandals and requires repair.

Recommendation: The National Park Service should commission a report on the subject of this locomotive. The report should recommend whether to restore this locomotive as a Rahway Valley locomotive or as an Oneida & Western locomotive as it appeared after its 1926 modifications. In terms of location, the Rahway Valley Railroad was better situated with respect to the Scope of Collections Statement, as it operated in that northeastern quarter of the United States identified as a particular focus for the collections of this institution, while the Oneida & Western in Tennessee lies south of that geographic area.

Upon completion of the research and the report, No. 15 should be restored both cosmetically and mechanically to operable condition, and a schedule of operation for interpretive use should be established. The locomotive is too light for regular excursion train use to Moscow or Pocono Summit, Pennsylvania, but it could be used in switching around the Scranton yard or for small, occasional, special excursions and charter groups out on the main line, or for period freight trains for photographic purposes.

Rahway Valley Railroad Locomotive No. 15 featured a front number plate and a headlight mounted on top of the smokebox, which made her look different from her present appearance in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Collection of Gerald Best, California State Railroad Museum Library

"Across the Dispatcher's Table: Oneida & Western." Short-Line Railroader, Vol. 1, No. 3 (June-July 1954): 2.

Beebe, Lucius, and Charles Clegg. Mixed Train Daily: A Book of Short-Line Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1961: 80, 284, 334.

Baldwin Locomotive Works. Specification Card for Locomotive No. 15, Oneida [&] Western, June 16, 1916. Copy in the Steamtown Foundation files.

Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society. 32 (1957). [Photograph on the back cover of Rahway Valley No. 15 as Monadnock Northern No. 15 at Steamtown, Bellows Falls, Vermont.]

"A Championship Season." Railpace Newsmagazine, Vol. 3, No. 12 (Dec. 1984): 19.

Cunningham, John T. "New Jersey's Streak o' Rust." Trains, Vol. 10, No. 12 (Oct. 1950): 36-40.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973): Item No. 15 and roster entry.

Hyer, Richard, and John Zec. Railroads of New Jersey. n.p.: Author, 1975: 150-15 l.

Lewis, Edward A. American Shortline Railway Guide. Milwaukee: Kalmbach Books, 1986. [See p. 178.]

"Locomotives of the Railway Valley Railroad." n.p.: Unpublished manuscript, n.d. [Roster supplied by Harry Frye.]

Morgan, David P., and Philip R. Hastings. "Smoke over the Prairies, 12: The saddest train of all." Trains, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jan. 1956): 14-16.

"Oneida & Western Ending Hectic Career . . ." Short-Line Railroader, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Apr. 1954): 3, 4.

Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States, 1913. New York: Poor's Railroad Manual Co., 1913: 256, 257.

Poor's Manual of the Railroads of the United States, 1920. New York: Poor's Railroad Manual Co., 1920: 948, 949, 1119, 1120.

"Steam! News Photos; Genuine G-5d in steam." Trains, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jan. 1965): 15.

"Steamtown Engine Roster, September 1967." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1968): 8.

"The Story of Number 15; Valves; Piston; Admission: Outside." Steam Locomotive, No. 1 (Oct. 1959): 11-15. [This excellent biography of a locomotive, possibly by editor William S. Young, was a key source on Locomotive No. 15 and was quoted in the foregoing narrative.]

Sulzer, Elmer G. Ghost Railroads of Tennessee. Indianapolis: Vane A. Jones, 1975. See pp. 187-197, 315-316. [A fairly decent history of the Oneida & Western Railroad, though incorrect regarding Engine No. 15 in the photograph caption at the top of p. 191.]

"Valuation Docket No. 500, Oneida & Western Railroad Company." Interstate Commerce Commission Reports. Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 106 (1926): 479-49 l.

"Valuation Docket No. 685, Rahway Valley Company Et Al." Interstate Commerce Commission Reports. Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission of the United States. Vol. 119. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office (1927): 389-411.

Builder: Baldwin Locomotive Works; Reading Company Shops
Date Built: January 1947
Builder's Number: (old) 2044

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 27 x 32
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 240
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 70
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 68,000

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 26
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 19,000

Remarks: Has high mileage since last overhaul; needs extensive repairs to be made operable. This locomotive was designed to burn hard coal.

History: By the middle of the 20th century, the Reading Company (not the Reading Railroad) operated a network of rail lines in southeastern Pennsylvania that were originally spawned by the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad Company, chartered in 1833. A major coal carrier, its associated Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company at one time owned 30 percent of all of the coal lands in coal-rich Pennsylvania. The company leased, and through the lease controlled (twice) the Central Railroad Company of New Jersey and the Lehigh Valley Railroad. A holding company, the Excelsior Enterprise Company, was incorporated on May 24, 1871, changed its name to the National Company in 1873, and changed its name again to Reading Company on December 7, 1896. It acquired control of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company of November 17, 1896, which was a reorganization of the original Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company. On December 31, 1923, the Reading Company merged a number of subsidiaries such as the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad into itself, and thus became an actual operating railroad company, not merely a holding company, a practice that was somewhat unusual. This summary is a great oversimplification of a corporate history as complex as the tangled strands on a large plate of spaghetti--a complexity quite typical of large railroad systems.

Reading Company Locomotive No. 2124 became a nationally famous engine, because of its use on railroad-enthusiast excursions, the famous "Reading Rambles" of the 1960s, when she and sister engines hauled trainloads of people at a time when steam engines had nearly disappeared from the nation's railroads. She also appeared in the film From the Terrace with Joanne Woodward and Myrna Loy, which was shot at Jersey City, New Jersey in December 1959.

The 1947 edition of the Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice illustrated the new Reading Company class of T-1 4-8-4 locomotives, which the company itself built from old Baldwin 2-8-0 locomotives in its own shops.
Colorado Railroad Museum Library

Originally a Baldwin-built 2-8-0 of Reading Class I-10a of the mid-1920s, probably No. 2044, the engine was completely rebuilt into a virtually new T-1 Class 4-8-4, No. 2124, in January 1947. While most locomotives used in the United States were built by locomotive manufacturing companies, some railroads such as the Southern Pacific built locomotives new in their own shops, and some companies took older locomotives of one type and rebuilt them into a new type. Reading Company No. 2124 represents a product of the latter practice--it is essentially a remodeled locomotive, the remodeling done by the railroad's own shops to a total of 30 engines thereafter renumbered 2100 through 2129.

According to Reading historian Bert Pennypacker, the rebuilding of these locomotives originated with a former Baltimore & Ohio road foreman of engines named Revelle W. Brown, who became a vice president of the Reading and then president of the Lehigh Valley, where the latter railroad's modern 4-8-4 Northern-type locomotives had greatly impressed him. Subsequently he moved back to the Reading Company as its president, where he decided to speed up its handling of traffic by replacing some of its existing motive power, principally 2-8-0s, 2-8-2s, and 2-10-2s, with 4-8-4s similar to those of his Lehigh Valley experience.

Acting under Brown's instructions, E. Paul Gangewere, Reading Company superintendent of motive power and rolling equipment, got together with the design engineers of the Baldwin Locomotive Works on plans to convert 20 I-10a 2-8-0 Consolidations to new 4-8-4 Northerns. The Reading Company purchased new underframes, wheels, boiler courses, and many other new parts supplied either by the Baldwin Locomotive Works or its neighbor at Eddystone, Pennsylvania, the General Steel Casting Corporation, and then did the work of conversion in its own shops at Reading, Pennsylvania. To bring the comparatively short boiler of the old 2-8-0s out to the length required for the new 4-8-4s, Gangewere and the Baldwin engineers designed a radically long 111-inch smokebox. The first two boiler curses or segments were replaced with new 187-inch extensions, complete with new tubes and flues. They were also able to salvage some parts of the old 2-8-0s not used in the new 4-8-4s and use them elsewhere, such as the 61-1/2-inch drive wheels that Reading used on its I9sb-class locomotives.

Some components of the new 4-8-4s other than the boiler remained unchanged, such as the 94.5-square-foot Wootten firebox and the cylinders. Others, as Pennypacker noted, such as the feedwater heater and the booster, were new, as was its tender.

Assigned to Class T-1, the new 4-8-4 locomotives entered freight service, a large part of which was coal traffic, in 1947, on Reading main lines and some branch lines in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They eventually operated in pool service with connecting railroads into Maryland on the Western Maryland and into West Virginia on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The Reading Company also tested the locomotives' capacity to handle coal trains with a test train of 200 cars, after which the superintendent of motive power and rolling equipment determined that the optimum limit should be set at 150 cars.

Northerns were an attractive, modern, heavy-duty steam locomotive. Replaced in freight service by diesel-electric locomotives, the T-1s found a new career hauling loads of railroad enthusiasts in the famous Reading Rambles, and the first T-1 to be used for this service in May 1959 was No. 2124, now at Steamtown. Later, the 2100 and the 2102 pitched in to help haul railroad enthusiasts throughout the first half of the 1960s. Widely featured in the railfan literature of the era, the Reading Rambles made No. 2124 an individually famous locomotive; it's last "ramble" was on October 22, 1961.

It was also ironic that although the Reading T-1 class engines represented a major post-World War II motive power acquisition drive in 1945, 1946, and 1947, the decline of Reading Company steam motive power began as early as 1950 with accelerating acquisition of main line diesel-electric locomotives. Thus the Reading T-1 engines such as No. 2124 represent steam locomotives in their "last hour" on America's railroads.

The Reading Company operated its heavy 4-8-4 locomotives principally in freight traffic until the twilight of the steam locomotive, when it pressed a number of them into service in passenger or railfan excursions, the famous Reading Rambles, such as the one shown at bottom at Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 1961.
Top, collection of Gerald M. Best.
Bottom, collection of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society. Both, California State Railroad Museum Library

In an article published in 1968, Bert Pennypacker cited one engineer's experience with the T-1s:

Indeed, for all their ungainly front end appearance, the T-1s were fine motive power, and would be one of a few select classes of locomotive that had a whole book devoted to them in the body of railroad history literature.

Even before the Reading Company ceased operating its "Iron Horse Rambles," popularly called "Reading Rambles," it had retired Locomotive No. 2124 to Steamtown. The company shipped her out of Reading, Pennsylvania, at 11 p.m. on July 31, 1963, via its own line, the Central of New Jersey, the Delaware & Hudson, and the Boston & Maine.

Locomotive No. 2124 is one of about 37 4-8-4 Northern-type engines preserved in the United States, and one of four Reading T-1 Class 4-8-4 locomotives to survive out of the 30 built (or rebuilt), the others being No. 2100 at Hagerstown, Maryland; No. 2101 at Baltimore, Maryland; and No. 2102 at Temple, Pennsylvania. These are four of a total of nine locomotives of the Reading Company of various types that have survived.

Reading Company Locomotive No. 2124 rested in its home yard in Reading, Pennsylvania, on November 14, 1959, ready for service.
Collection of Malcom D. McCarter

Condition: This engine has accrued high mileage since its last overaul, which means that it is due for a major, expensive overhaul before it can run again. Otherwise, it is in reasonably good condition.

Recommendation: The NPS should prepare a report documenting the history of this particular engine and any changes in its fabric or appearance since its historic use as a freight locomotive. Then the locomotive should be given a complete cosmetic and mechanical overaul to put it in operable condition. It is just the kind of modem, heavy-duty main line 20th century steam motive power that the Steamtown collection should emphasize. When in operable condition, it should be placed in a schedule of operation for excursion and/or interpretive purposes.

In researching a report on this locomotive, special attention should be directed toward obtaining photographs of it while in freight service, which in the published literature are rare.

Dirkes, Rod. The Reading T-1; An Unusual Northern. Andover: Andover Junction Publications, 1987: 2-5, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 54, 57, 60, 62. [The introduction by Bert Pennypacker on pp. 2-3 followed by construction photos on pp. 4-5 provides the best data available on the history of the development of these engines; remaining pages cited contain photographs of No. 2124 in excursion service.]

Farrell, Jack W., and Mike Pearsall. North American Steam Locomotives: The Northerns. Edmonds: Pacific Fast Mail, 1975: 4-7, 222-227.

Fisher, F.G., Chief Mechanical Officer, Reading Company. Letter, Aug. 1, 1963, to Robert Ames, Monadnock Northern Railroad, N. Walpole, New Hampshire. In Steamtown Foundation files.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973), Item 36.

Hart, George M. "History of the Locomotives of the Reading Company." Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Bulletin No. 67 (May 1946): 5-19. [Lists 2-8-0s from which the T-1s were built.]

Holten, James L. The Reading Railroad: History of a Coal Age Empire, Vol. 1. Laury's Station: Garrigues House, Publishers, 1989. [No second volume has yet been published.]

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, Thirteenth Edition--1947. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1947: 207. [Reading Company photograph of No. 2100 with specifications.]

"Locomotive of the Month; Reading Lines 4-8-4." Railroad Magazine, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jan. 1946): 64-65.

Moody's Manual of Investments, American and Foreign; Railroad Securities, 1945. New York: Moody's Investors' Service, Inc., 1945: 1182-1198.

Pennypacker, Bert. "The Last Ten Years of Reading Steam." Railroad Magazine , Vol. 84, No. 7 (Nov. 1968): 22-29. [The quotation is from p. 29.]

__________. Reading Power Pictorial; From the Steam Era to Today's Diesels. River Vale: D. Carleton Rail Books, 1973: 168, 204, 206, 207, 214, 215. 320 pp.

"Reading 4-8-4, Class T-1 Locomotives." Railway Age, Vol. 120, No. 12 (Mar. 23, 1946): 629-630.

"What the Reading Saved." Steam Locomotive, No. 2 (Dec. 1959): front cover, 4-14.

Wiswesser, H. Steam Locomotives of the Reading and P. & R. Railroads. Sykesville: Greenburg Publishing Company, 1988. [See especially pp. 168-169 (locomotive folio sheet on T-1 Class locomotives), 170-172, 176-177, 184, 286-287.]

Builder: Baldwin Locomotive Works
Date Built: 1887
Builder's Number: 8395

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 18 x 26
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 160
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 62
Tractive Effort (in pounds): 18,478

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 8, later 14
    Water (in gallons): 2,000,
    Oil (in gallons): 4,000 later 4,000

Remarks: Mechanically this is a tired, worn-out engine, but one that is very valuable for stationary exhibit purposes.

History: Incorporated on July 1, 1862, the Union Pacific Railroad constructed the eastern half of the nation's first transcontinental railroad during the 1860s, its main line extending from Omaha, Nebraska, westward to Promontory Summit, Utah, (later cut back to Ogden, Utah) by May 1869. Subsequently the Union Pacific took over the Utah Central extending south through Salt Lake City, and the Utah & Northern, extending from Ogden through Idaho into Montana, and it built or absorbed local lines, which gave it access to Denver and to Portland, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. It also acquired the Kansas Pacific (originally called the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, though in essence a separate railroad), and until forced to divest it to the Colorado & Southern Railway by reason of bankruptcy during the 1890s, it owned narrow gauge trackage into the heart of the Colorado Rockies and a standard gauge line south from Denver across New Mexico into Texas.

The railroad's early troubles led to bankruptcy during the 1870s, the result of which was reorganization of the Union Pacific Railroad as the Union Pacific Railway on January 24, 1880. It was this second company that purchased Locomotive No. 737, but that company, too, entered bankruptcy in the 1890s from which it emerged on July 1, 1897, reverting again to the original name, Union Pacific Railroad. Such minor changes in corporate titles were a common result of reorganization after bankruptcy among American railroads, but the terms "railroad" and "railway," while interchangeable in common usage, are not interchangeable in the proper title of a company, and generally designate a specific and definable period in that company's history. It was during a surge of expansion in the late 1880s preceding the bankruptcy of the 1890s that the Union Pacific acquired diamond-stacked locomotive No. 737.

The original appearance of Union Pacific Railway Engine No. 737, as shown in an enlargement of a section of a photo of an official inspection train out on the line around 1890, differed considerably from that resulting from the misguided "restoration" by the Steamtown Foundation about 1969.
Collection of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, California State Railroad Museum Library

During the 19th century, the 4-4-0 was the most common type of American locomotive, so common that the type came to be called the "American Standard," or, to be briefer, simply the "American." Thousands of these locomotives rolled out of the erecting shops of America's locomotive builders. At mid-century, and at the time of the Civil War during the 1860s when the Union Pacific was just getting organized, the American-type locomotive was not only the passenger engine on America's railroads but also the freight engine, although by the 1860s and 1870s, 2-6-0 and 2-8-0 types were beginning to supplant it in main line freight service. Nevertheless, the American type continued to hold its dominance in passenger traffic until nearly the end of the century, when heavier and larger 4-6-0 "ten-wheelers" and eventually other types replaced the American on main line passenger trains. Increasingly, as time passed, 4-4-0 locomotives found themselves downgraded to branch line and short line service, where they continued to serve in ever-diminishing numbers until the middle of the 20th century, and some even came into the ownership of industrial concerns such as logging firms and sugar cane plantations. The 4-4-0 thus is a prime example of an engine that started out as a mainstay of main line passenger traffic (and, briefly, freight) on the nation's major railroad systems, but that by the 20th century had been replaced by heavier power and had been shunted aside to the branch line mixed trains as well as to use on lumber, mining, and other industrial railroads. Thus one era's main line motive power became a later era's secondary or branch line motive power. Of the thousands and thousands of these locomotives built in America, only about 39 examples of the 4-4-0 American survive in the United States.

Fittingly, Union Pacific Railway Engine No. 737, the oldest locomotive in the Steamtown collection used in the United States, began its career in 1887 as part of one of the largest locomotive orders on record up to that date, for use on Union Pacific passenger and freight trains. As delivered, the locomotive had a long, pointed, vertical bar wooden pilot, an oil "box" headlight, a "diamond" stack of the shallow diamond style peculiar to the Union Pacific at that period, and steam and sand domes that appeared comparatively square in profile and lacked the common, ornate, cast-iron dome "rings," a decorative molding that dressed up the appearance of such domes and that many 19th century locomotives sported. Upon entering service, the locomotive reportedly had the initials "O.& R.V." painted on the small panel below the windows on each side of the cab, standing for the name of a Union Pacific subsidiary in Nebraska, the Omaha & Republican Valley Railroad. Later the locomotive had "Union Pacific" spelled out in small letters on each side of the cab, probably in white, and a large white "737" on each side of its black tender.

In August 1904 (different sources disagree on the date), the Union Pacific, since July 1897 again a "Railroad," sold Locomotive No. 737 and a few similar 4-4-0s to either Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad and Steamship Company or the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, both of them components of the Southern Pacific System. A Union Pacific Railroad folio locomotive diagram book issued in 1911 showed engines of this class as having had their diamond stacks replaced with straight or "shotgun" stacks, but whether that change had been made before the sale of Locomotive No. 737 is not known.

By the time it purchased Locomotive No. 737, the Southern Pacific Company had grown into a major railroad system that incorporated many smaller companies, such as the Texas and New Orleans and Morgan's Louisiana and Texas, and that extended from New Orleans through Texas to El Paso, across New Mexico and through Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles, throughout most of California including San Francisco and Sacramento; it absorbed the Central Pacific extending eastward across Nevada to Ogden, and had lines reaching north throughout and across Oregon to Portland. Developed by the same Big Four California entrepreneurs who had built the Central Pacific--Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker--the Southern Pacific became their tool for expansion beyond the original Central Pacific, which one might have expected to grow instead, but the Southern Pacific corporate structure proved more amenable to their needs than that of the Central Pacific. Thus the historic Central Pacific slowly vanished into the corporate structure of the Southern Pacific as the original developers of the system passed one by one from the economic scene.

Union Pacific Railroad Folio Locomotive Diagram Book No. 200, issued in 1897, showed the original appearance and vital statistics of locomotives such as No. 737. Note the squared profile of the domes on this engine.
Courtesy Union Pacific Railroad

Although the Union Pacific Railroad and the Southern (Central) Pacific jointly operated the first transcontinental railroad, elsewhere they competed bitterly throughout their history, and only briefly around the turn of the century did they come under the same ownership, that of Edward Henry Harriman. It was during Harriman's comparatively brief period in control of both systems that Locomotive No. 737 and some of her sisters migrated southward about 1904 to the Texas and Louisiana lines of the Southern Pacific System, such as the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway, the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, and Morgan's Louisiana and Texas Railroad and Steamship Company. According to one source, No. 737 became No. 246, lettered "Morgan's Louisiana and Texas." Other sources suggest that it became a Texas and New Orleans Railroad locomotive. The Southern Pacific Company owned or controlled both of these Texas-Louisiana railroads, but the question of which subsidiary owned No. 216 is not unimportant, because it would have determined how the locomotive was lettered. In 1913, in a renumbering and reorganization of motive power, the Southern Pacific Company gave the locomotive its final number: No. 246 became No. 216.

During the first quarter of the 20th century the owning railroads made a number of important modifications to Engine 246, later 216. By the end of 1904, subsequent to Congress passing a safety act that mandated the change, the Southern Pacific converted the locomotive's link and pin coupling equipment to automatic "knuckle" couplers, possibly of the Janney type. At unknown dates, a number of other changes followed. While some of the modification may have occurred before the locomotive left the Union Pacific, such as change out of the couplers and replacement of the diamond stack by a straight or shotgun stack, it was probably on the Southern Pacific lines that the locomotive soon experienced further alteration in the form of modernization quite common on railroads across the country during the first two and a half decades of the 20th century. Mechanics and boilermakers replaced the original short smokebox with an extended smokebox with shotgun stack, and it was almost certainly on the Southern Pacific Lines that the shops converted the locomotive from a coal burner to an oil burner by installing an oil tank in the tender in place of the coal bin and rigging connecting hoses and pipes to feed oil to the firebox, with suitable controls and probably modification of the firebox grates. Thus the locomotive could exploit Texas and Louisiana petroleum for fuel. A steel pipe or "boiler tube" pilot replaced the original wooden type of cowcatcher. An all-steel cab replaced the original Baldwin wooden cab. A new and different headlight replaced the old kerosene "box" headlight.

After its acquisition of Union Pacific No. 737, at an unknown date probably during the 1920s, Southern Pacific Lines prepared its own locomotive diagram sheet for the locomotives it had acquired from the Union Pacific No. 737 had become No. 216 in this series.
Collection of Louis Saillard

In 1913, the Southern Pacific System gave the locomotive its final number in yet another renumbering of motive power. No. 246 became No. 216. At the time, the locomotive probably was lettered "Southern Pacific Lines" in large white letters on her tender, with the number on the cab and the small initials to indicate the actual Southern Pacific subsidiary that owned her. Several variant lettering schemes succeeded each other in Southern Pacific practice.

It was not until December 4, 1929, that Locomotive No. 216 retired from active service on a major railroad system; on that date, the Southern Pacific Company sold her to the Erath Sugar Company for industrial use in the canefields of Louisiana.

The Erath and Vermilion sugar factories, located in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, at Erath and Abbeville, respectively, had been established in 1909 when the Caldwell and Moresi brothers entered a partnership to process sugar cane. At Erath, they erected for the 1910 grinding a large new factory with a cane-grinding capacity exceeding that of most other mills in the state. Knowledgeable entrepreneurs in the sugar cane industry regarded the Erath mill as one of the most modern plants in the sugar district, a large factory supplied by more than 1,200 outside growers, the company itself owning only 1,000 acres of land.

Extending out from the factory, 17 miles of railroad reached into the canefields to 16 loading stations. The company not only had purchased Southern Pacific Locomotive No. 216, but later acquired Southern Pacific (T.& N.O.) No. 319, a Cooke-built 4-6-0 outshopped in 1892. The company owned no gondola cars of its own, using cars owned and supplied by the Southern Pacific. In August 1947, the Erath Sugar Company sold or otherwise transferred ownership of No. 216 to the Vermilion Sugar Company at Abbeville, Louisiana.

On Vermilion Bayou in the heart of Abbeville, Louisiana, parish seat of Vermilion Parish, the same pair of brothers had built another major central sugar processing factory. This Vermilion Sugar Company plant was not at the heart of a plantation, but drew entirely from outside cane growers to fill its capacity of grinding 1,400 tons of cane every 24 hours. Some 800 growers in the Vermilion Bayou region supplied it with cane, much of it moving to the mill by 18 100-ton barges and one towboat that negotiated Vermilion Bayou as far as 30 miles. The remaining cane came to the mill on the Abbeville Branch of the Southern Pacific. The Vermilion plant had one steam locomotive to handle switching to the weighing scales and to and from the Southern Pacific, and this generally was another Cooke 1892 4-6-0 purchased from the Southern Pacific.

In practice, the three locomotives were used interchangeably between the two mills, so that No. 216 worked the Vermilion plant trackage as well as that of the Erath plant. The sugar companies retained the locomotive's last Southern Pacific number, 216, and other than painting out the Southern Pacific lettering, probably made no other noticeable changes in the locomotive. The Vermilion Sugar Company retired No. 216 in 1956.

Union Pacific Railway Engine No. 742, an identical sister of No. 737, showed the fireman's side of that class of engine in its original appearance (top). By 1947, at the Erath Sugar Company in Louisiana, No. 737, now No. 216, had an extended smokebox, shotgun stack, electric headlight, and "boiler tube" pilot, and had been converted from coal to oil fuel.
Top, Union Pacific Railroad.
Bottom, collection of Guy L. Dunscomb

F. Nelson Blount bought the engine for Steamtown in 1957. To move the locomotive to Vermont on a flat car, it proved necessary in meeting height clearance requirements to cut off the roof of the steel cab that had replaced the wooden cab early in the 20th century, but Steamtown retained the cab roof, and moved it to Bellows Falls and then to Scranton.

It was in 1970, inspired by the excitement generated by the centennial of the first transcontinental railroad even though a year late, that the Steamtown Foundation undertook an ill-conceived attempt to "restore" the locomotive either to the appearance of an engine at Promontory Summit in 1869 or her original appearance of 1887--it is not clear which was the intention. Whichever, Don Marshall supplied a replica of a "diamond" stack that reflected neither the types of stacks present on engines in 1869 nor the types of stacks used on Engine No. 737 during the 1880s and 1890s. This replica was installed, as well as a box or kerosene headlight, and Bill Kimberly built a wooden cab cosmetically applied over the remaining walls of the Southern Pacific steel cab. Thus, No. 737 does not today represent any appearance she presented historically.

As already mentioned, the oldest locomotive in the Steamtown collection, No. 737 is the oldest genuine Union Pacific engine in existence and the only Union Pacific 4-4-0 in existence. It is one of 52 surviving Union Pacific steam locomotives. Considered as part of the entire Southern Pacific System, it is one of only five Southern Pacific 4-4-0 locomotives to survive, and one of about 65 Southern Pacific steam engines to survive.

Locomotive No. 737 arrived at Steamtown in Vermont with some dismantled parts loaded in her tender, others more vulnerable to theft shipped separately.
Steamtown Foundation Collection

After No. 737 and other Steamtown locomotives were moved from Bellows Falls, Vermont, to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1984, stack covers were needed to keep rain, sleet, and snow from going down the stacks in bad weather, collecting in the smokeboxes, and rusting them from the inside outward. A stack cover is nothing more than a disc of steel plate slightly larger in diameter than the stack to be covered and heavy enough not to be dislodged by wind. Seeking scrap steel from which to cut some stack covers, an employee of Steamtown unfortunately found the steel cab roof from Locomotive No. 737 lying in either a box car or gondola and, attaching no significance to this sheet of gently curved steel, proceeded with an acetylene torch to cut two discs about 2 to 2 1/2 feet in diameter out of the middle of the roof, and left the remainder of the cab roof lying on the ground in the Scranton yard.

Subsequently, another Steamtown Foundation employee, one more sensitive to historical values, became curious about the piece of oddly shaped steel, and when he learned what it was, recognized its historical importance, retrieved it from where it was lying on the ground like a piece of scrap metal, and locked it away in a boxcar.

Condition: This locomotive is mechanically a very tired, worn-out engine with a lap-seam boiler. It is missing both boiler lagging and boiler jacket, and has a rotten wooden pilot beam and a rotten wooden tender frame. The steel roof was cut off its metal cab, although part of the walls may remain. They have been covered by a wooden cab of nonhistoric character and design. The engine has a phony "diamond" stack and a nonhistoric box or kerosene headlight, all applied in a misguided attempt to restore a semblance of 19th century appearance. The engine probably is not operable, and probably is suited only for static exhibit use.

In preparation for shipment from Louisiana to Vermont, a crew of men removed the stack of Locomotive No. 737, removed the bell, removed the whistle and top of the steam dome, and cut off the top of the cabin roof, along with other minor work. W.T. Golson photographed the forlorn engine sitting on a Santa Fe flat car coupled with another car carrying another former sugar company engine to Vermont in September 1965.
Collection of Louis Saillard

(1) The specific stack covers that were cut from this cab roof should be located and matched with the holes from which they were cut, and they should be labeled and locked up with the cab roof for future restoration. Eventually, the cab roof should be repaired not by overlapping patches of the holes, but by welding the stack covers back into their original position, with the welding ground smooth on both sides so that when painted, it is impossible to tell that the discs of steel ever were missing.

(2) Substitute stack covers should be made from nonhistoric steel plate purchased from some scrap metal shop, and placed on the locomotive stacks from which the two stack covers cut from No. 737's cab roof were removed. These two recommendations are urgent and high priority.

(3) An effort should be made to trade or exchange this locomotive for Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad Engine No. 952, a Camelback 4-4-0C in the collection of the National Museum of Transport in St. Louis, Missouri. The advantage of this trade to the National Museum of Transport is that it would obtain an 1887 locomotive in exchange for a 1905 locomotive, and a locomotive whose significance to the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads already has been discussed. The advantage to Steamtown NHS is in the acquisition of one of the very few Camelback locomotives surviving, a type once common in Pennsylvania and the eastern United States, and more important, in acquiring the second surviving locomotive of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Steamtown would thus bring Engine No. 952 back to its own territory, and Union Pacific No. 737 would migrate to the trans-Mississippi west in which it once operated. If the exchange is agreed to and sealed in a legal document, the National Museum of Transport should decide to what era No. 737, a.k.a. No. 246 and No. 216, should be restored.

(4) If the National Museum of Transport rejects the proposal to exchange Union Pacific No. 737 for Delaware, Lackawanna & Western No. 952, then the National Park Service should restore the locomotive to its appearance during the 1920s prior to its sale by Southern Pacific Lines to the Erath Sugar Company in 1929, or to its appearance in 1947 on the Vermilion Sugar Company's track, which is documented by a photograph. As a first step, the NPS should commission a report, modeled on a report on Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway No. 1 prepared for the Kansas State Historical Society. The report should contain a thorough narrative history of the locomotive as well as exhibit the results of an exhaustive search for historic photographs of the locomotive, and photographs of sister locomotives, along with all pertinent documents obtainable from Baldwin records and from the records of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific systems. The report should then recommend specifically what the appearance of the restored locomotive should be. It is believed on the basis of currently available evidence that the appearance of the locomotive at the time it was acquired by Steamtown in 1957 was essentially the same as that shown in the photograph made when it was on the Vermilion Sugar Company line in 1947, which was probably essentially the same as its appearance in the 1920s, except for paint and lettering. This restoration, in addition to requiring thorough cleaning of all rust including stripping of the present paint, would involve installing a new wooden pilot beam, a new wooden tender frame (unless some original members are salvageable), boiler lagging, and a new boiler jacket, removing the oil headlight and restoring the type of headlight used on the Southern Pacific (which may be in storage in the Steamtown collection), and restoring the "shotgun" stack (which may be beneath the added "diamond"). Other missing parts of the locomotive, some of which may be stored in the collections, should be restored to the engine. The physical restoration of the locomotive should include extreme care to ascertain original components and colors and to locate and preserve any specimens that might be Russia Iron jacketing on the cylinders; as the engine was stripped of its boiler jacket long ago, none is anticipated around the boiler, but some might still exist around the cylinders. The report should thoroughly investigate and research the various paint, lettering, and numbering schemes that the locomotive carried while on the Southern Pacific System, and it should then be painted, lettered, and numbered in a suitable Southern Pacific style, probably of the mid-1920s. Finally, the engine should be exhibited indoors as an example of a main line 19th century 4-4-0 at the end of its common carrier career as a 20th century branch line locomotive about to be sold to an industrial concern.

A Union Pacific Railroad Folio Diagram Book as of September 23, 1911, illustrated 700-class locomotives as having had diamond stacks replaced with "shotgun" stacks, but whether this change occurred before the Union Pacific sold Locomotive No. 737 ca. 1901-1904 is not known at present.
Union Pacific Railroad

Beebe, Lucius. The Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroads. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1963.

Best, G.M. Locomotives of the Southern Pacific Company. Boston: Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, Inc., 1941: 30.

Daggett, Smart. Chapters on the History of the Southern Pacific. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1922.

Diebert, Timothy S., and Joseph A. Strapac. Southern Pacific Steam Locomotive Compendium. Huntington Beach: Shade Tree Books, 1987: 357.

Dunscomb, Guy L. A Century of Southern Pacific Steam Locomotives, 1862-1962. Modesto: published by the author, 1963: 16, 17, 19, 64.

"Fuel Oil for Locomotives." Baldwin Locomotive Works Record of Recent Construction, No. 37. Philadelphia: Baldwin Locomotive Works, n.d.: 3-23.

Hofsommer, Don L. The Southern Pacific, 1901-1985. College Station: Texas A.& M. University Press, 1986. [Unquestionably the best history of the company, though limited to the 20th century; it includes a history of the Texas and New Orleans.]

Kean, Randolph. The Railfan's Guide to Museum & Park Displays. Forty Fort: Harold E. Cox, Publisher, 1973: 175.

Wilson, Neill C., and Frank J. Taylor. Southern Pacific: The Roaring Story of a Fighting Railroad. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1952.

Athearn, Robert G. Union Pacific Country. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1971.

Davis, John P. The Union Pacific Railway: A Study in Railway Politics, History and Economics. Chicago: S.C. Griggs and Company, 1894.

Diagrams of Engines, Union Pacific R.R. Omaha: Union Pacific Railroad, 1911, revised Sept. 23, 1911.

Guide to the Steamtown Collection. Bellows Falls, Vt.: Steamtown Foundation, n.d. (ca. 1973), Item 25 and roster.

Klein, Maury. Union Pacific: Birth of a Railroad, 1862-1893. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1987.

_________. Union Pacific: The Rebirth, 1894-1969. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1989.

Kratville, William, and Harold E. Ranks. Motive Power of the Union Pacific. Omaha: Barnhart Press, 1958: 32, 255, 305.

A List of References to Literature Relating to the Union Pacific System. Newton: Crofton Publishing Corporation, n.d.

McCague, James. Moguls and Iron Men: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964.

Poor, Henry V. Manual of the Railroads of the United States for 1883. New York: H.V. & H.W. Poor, 1883: 805-806.

Trottman, Nelson. History of the Union Pacific: A Financial and Economic Survey. New York: August M. Kelley, Publishers, 1966 (reprint of the 1923 edition).

Union Pacific Locomotives & Tenders, Folio 200. Omaha: Union Pacific Railroad, Office of the Superintendent, M.P. & M., n.d.

"Upon Display: Union Pacific Steam in Existence." Locomotive & Railway Preservation, No. 8 (May June 1987): 26-27.

White, Henry Kirke. History of the Union Pacific Railway. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1895.

Butler, W.E. Down Among the Sugar Cane: The Story of Louisiana Sugar Plantations and Their Railroads. Baton Rouge: Moran Publishing Corp., 1980: 175-177.

Builder: American Locomotive Company
Date Built: November 1941
Builder's Number: 69583

Cylinders (diameter x stroke in inches): 23-3/4 x 32 (four)
Boiler Pressure (in lbs. per square inch): 300
Diameter of Drive Wheels (in inches): 68
Tractive Effort (in lbs.): 135,375

Tender Capacity:
    Coal (in tons): 28
    Oil (in gallons): Not applicable
    Water (in gallons): 24,000

Remarks: Overall length: 132 feet, 9-1/4 inches; retired by the Union Pacific in February 1962 after logging 1,029,507 miles. In good mechanical condition, but with small parts missing.

History: Brief background on the 19th century history of the Union Pacific Railroad appeared in the discussion of Union Pacific Locomotive No. 737. By the 20th century, the Union Pacific had gone through the processes of bankruptcy and reorganization, and early in the 20th century experienced rejuvenation in the hands of one of America's foremost railroad managers, the legendary Edward Henry Harriman. The company had lost its lines south of Denver extending southeastward across Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as its narrow gauge lines into the Colorado Rockies, during the bankruptcy of the 1890s, but under Harriman, it experienced not only a complete overhaul of its physical plant but also new construction across southwestern Utah, southern Nevada, and southern California to reach the growing metropolis of Los Angeles as well as a tidewater port at San Pedro. Thus the Union Pacific of the 20th century extended from Omaha to Cheyenne to Ogden to Portland, as well as to Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Pedro. It also owned a line between Denver and Kansas City. It was, furthermore, a thoroughly modern and up-to-date railroad.

Union Pacific Railroad Engine No 4012 is one of eight 4-8-8-4 "Big Boy" locomotives that have survived out of 25 that were built and operated. Its class remained among the largest steam locomotives in the United States, and locomotives of this type operated on no other railroad. Built in 1941, Engine No. 4012 is the epitome of modern, main line heavy-duty steam motive power. This class of engine was created to haul heavy freight trains over the mountain divide known as Sherman Hill between Cheyenne and Laramie in southeastern Wyoming and further west, across the deserts and then the Continental Divide in south-central Wyoming and the Wasatch Range in northeastern Utah, on the run between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Ogden, Utah. The engine is one of 52 historic Union Pacific steam locomotives that escaped the scrappers' cutting torches. Engine No. 4012 is the only articulated locomotive (with more than a single set of drive wheels pivoting on more than one center) currently in the Steamtown collection. No. 4012 worked on the run between Cheyenne and Ogden for more than 20 years, rolling 1,029,507 miles before the Union Pacific retired the locomotive in February 1962.

Denver railroad photographer Richard H. Kindig found Union Pacific Railroad "Big Boy" Locomotive No. 4012 under steam in Cheyenne, Wyoming, awaiting its next call to service, on May 5, 1946, and recorded the engineer's side of the locomotive (top). Three years later, on June 25, 1949, Kindig made this dramatic photograph (bottom) of Engine 4012 on Sherman Hill near Sherman, Wyoming, with an eastbound extra freight train of 101 cars moving at 25 miles per hour.
Collection of Richard Kindig

Steamtown has claimed that the "Big Boy" was the "largest locomotive on earth," and while there is a grain of truth in that, it is also somewhat misleading. The Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway, in 1941 a 541-mile iron ore carrier operating in Minnesota, purchased early that year eight 2-8-8-4 Baldwin locomotives that were among the most powerful in the world.

The Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 Big Boy, so named because an anonymous mechanic at the American Locomotive Company plant had scrawled those words in chalk on one of the new locomotives, had the larger wheel arrangement, carried a boiler pressure of 300 pounds per square inch to the 240 pounds of the DM&IR engines, had 68-inch diameter drive wheels compared with the 63-inch drives of the Missabe locomotives, had a longer engine wheelbase (75 feet 5-1/2 inches, compared with 67 feet 2 inches on the DM&IR engines), a longer engine and tender wheelbase combined (117 feet 7 inches compared with 113 feet 5-7/8 inches on the Missabe engines), and was the heavier of the two types, with a total engine weight of 762,000 pounds compared with the 695,040 pounds of the Missabe engines.

But in some vital respects, the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range 2-8-8-4 locomotives exceeded the statistics of the Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 engines. The Missabe engines had cylinders 26 by 32 inches compared with the 23-3/4-by 32-inch cylinders of the Union Pacific locomotives. The Missabe engine and tender weight of 1,131,675 pounds exceeded the Big Boys' 1,104,200 pounds, and the Missabe weight on drivers of 560,257 pounds exceeded the Big Boys' 540,000 pounds. Most important, the tractive force, or pulling power, of the Missabe engines reached 140,000 pounds, compared with the 133,375 pounds of the Big Boy of the Union Pacific. What it comes down to is, the Union Pacific Big Boy was the longer locomotive, the Missabe engine and tender combined were heavier, the Union Pacific engine had the higher boiler pressure, the Missabe engines were the more powerful and capable of pulling heavier tonnage, and the Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 locomotives were faster, capable of 80 or more miles per hour. It would therefore be wise to describe the Big Boy as among the largest and most powerful in the world, rather than to focus on simple but misleading superlatives.

On May 10, 1951, photographer Richard Kindig recorded Union Pacific Railroad Locomotive No. 4012 westbound with an extra freight train of 26 cars near Buford, Wyoming.
Collection of Richard Kindig

Condition: Engine No. 4012 is believed to be in reasonably good condition, and with some overhaul, to be operable. However, her operability rests not alone with her own condition and state of repair, but equally with the capacity of track, switches, culverts, trestles, bridges, wyes, turntables, and other facilities that would have to carry her to bear her great weight.

Recommendations: The National Park Service should preserve this locomotive as the only articulated locomotive in the Steamtown collection, for immediate use as a static exhibit engine, with the question of restoration to operation deferred until a study of the line over which she might operate has been completed with respect to its ability to carry her weight and her ability to negotiate its curvature (the latter not believed to be a problem). If the line can carry her weight, this locomotive should be restored to operable condition. Prior to such restoration, the NPS should commission a report to document any physical changes to the locomotive since construction as well as her operational history on the Union Pacific. Because of her fairly recent date of construction, a report on this locomotive should be comparatively easy to research. Due to her great length, the locomotive will not fit on a reconstructed Scranton turntable or in a restored Scranton roundhouse, and may, therefore, have to be exhibited and preserved outdoors.

Marked upside-down in crayon on the side rods lying flat just left of center in this view is the number "4012." Some of the wheels and other parts in this shop bay similarly may belong to Union Pacific No. 4012, undergoing a major overhaul in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, shops during the 1940s.
Photograph by Neal Miller, collection of Tim Klinger

Collins, Joe G. The Last of Steam. Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1960: 177-187.

Frey, Robert L. "The Yellowstone Story--1: Once Upon A Time the World's Largest Locomotive." Trains, Vol. 42, No. 5 (Mar. 1982): 22-30.

"The Yellowstone Story--2; From 'Largest' to 'Some of the largest.'" Trains, Vol. 42, No. 6 (Apr. 1982): 42-49.

Hale, Robert. "Big Look at Big Boy." Trains, Vol. 16, No. 7 (May 1956): 31-39. [No. 4012 is illustrated on pp. 34-35].

Klein, Maury. Union Pacific: The Rebirth, 1894-1969. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Kratville, William W. Big Boy. Omaha: Kratville Publications, 1972. [Whole 96-page book on this class of locomotive. See especially pp. 63, 73 for photos of No. 4012; 64 for folio diagram.]

_________ and Harold E. Ranks. Motive Power of the Union Pacific. Omaha: Barnhart Books, 1958: 198-204, 246, 263, 310.

LeMassena, Robert A. Articulated Steam Locomotives of North America, Vol. l. Silverton: Sundance Publications, 1979, see especially 113-128. [Vol. I is the only one published.]

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, 1941. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1941: 169-170.

Locomotive Cyclopedia of American Practice, 1947. New York: Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp., 1947: 154, 155, 221.

Olmstead, Robert P. Locomotives, Limiteds & Locals. (n.p.: published by the author, 1977): 7-21.

"Union Pacific at War." Bulletin of the National Railway Historical Society, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June-July 1943): 16-18.

Union Pacific Railroad Company, List of Agencies, Stations, Equipment, Etc., No. 65, Jan. 1, 1951.

"Upon Display: Union Pacific Steam in Existence." Locomotive & Railway Preservation, No. 8 (May-June 1987): 27-28.

Westing, Fred. The Locomotives that Baldwin Built. Seattle: Superior Publishing Company, 1966: