Anyone Else Fascinated By Old Locomotives?

Not all railroading jobs back in the days of steam were created equally. This photo more than adequately proves just that point.

The date is January 1909 and station agent C.R. Lively has left his station on Cumbres Pass, Colorado to capture on film the approaching narrow gauge D&RGW rotary train as it claws it's way up to his location to clear the pass. The snow this winter has certainly been more than the mere flangers, plows and spreaders could keep up with.

Positioned on the top of the smoke belching rotary just ahead of 3 steam locomotives pushing her along is a lone crew member whose job it is to stand on this lonely cold perch and give hand signals back to the engineer on the rotary. Needless to say this was all long before hard hats and ear protection.

1780155125755.webp
 
By August of 1951 there was only one wood-burning railroad left in the West. This was the Lorane Valley Lumber Co. of Cottage Grove, Oregon. All the other wood-burning railroads in the West had faded into history. However the wood-burners hung on until the end at Lorane Valley.

While wood was readily available and relatively cheap for a lumber company, the amount of labor needed to keep the wood-burning locomotives supplied with fuel, together with the fire danger caused by such engines, caused most logging lines (and all mainlines) to abandon wood as a fuel source years earlier.

Despite these negative factors, Lorane Valley decided to hang on to burning the mill ends in their logging lokies throughout the llife of the logging railroad.

As we see here, the crews became very efficient in their ability to pile as much wood into the tender of the Lorane Valley locomotive tenders as they could. One can wonder if they would have piled the wood in ALCO 2-6-2 #2 even higher if they did not have the covered bridge they had to run through just at the edge of the mill grounds on their way back to the woods.

Alas, there were no buyer looking for steam logging locomotives by that late date no matter what fuel they burned and #2 fell to the scrappers torch.
1780408687981.webp
 
August 21, 1946 finds the very last logging mallet built by Baldwin sitting in the railyards in Portland, Oregon on here way to her next operator. Built as Weyerhaeuser Timber #9 in 1937 for their operation in Melbourne, Washington her time there is over. She is now headed to Weyerhaeuser's logging railroad out of Klamath Falls, Oregon. There the WTC shop crews will cut down her side tanks and add a tender while re-numbering her as #8.

1780409201593.webp
 
The Big Boy’s firebox (left), boiler (middle), and smokebox (right) were all mounted as a single unit and can been seen here, ready to be lowered onto the engine’s frame. The steel that formed the boiler was 1.375 in (35 mm) thick. The two humps above the boiler are the sandboxes. Between the sandboxes is the steam dome, its exposed studs waiting for the cover plate. Exiting the lower part of the smokebox is a duct to feed steam from the superheater to the cylinders.
1780753263535.webp
 
Here is a look into the corporate mind that is very interesting, educational, historical, completely true, and hysterical all at the same time:

The US standard railroad gauge (width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Thus, we have the answer to the original question.

Now the twist to the story . . .

There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, the major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass!
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 5 (members: 0, guests: 5)
Back
Top