Crazy Train

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lowbudget50

Creators of all things awesome
Joined
Sep 23, 2012
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So my oldest daughter and my dad and I took a little 450 Mi round trip adventure today to pick up an old 30-foot windmill for my backyard. On the way home we were driving along the Washington side of the Columbia River and noticed a sign about a historical locomotive in the small town of wishram. So we pulled down to the small little railroad town and at the end of the road we found this hundred two-foot-long locomotive and tender. It's a 4-8-2 locomotive with 73 inch tall Drive Wheels. Has a 200 PSI boiler and the tender held somewhere around $15 gallons of water and 560 gallons of oil. It was used in the area until the mid fifties when it was donated as a historical reminder of the steam locomotives and all the men use them in the small logging towns. It is by far the biggest locomotive I have ever seen it was huge. Thought you guys might want to see it. Kind of hard tonsee with the fence around it
 

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A small rail museum bout 30min from us is almost done restoring a locomotive. I got the chance to go help them for a day turn really big wrenches on it. They had all the boiler tubing out of it while I was down there. What an engineering feet that is. Crazy!
 
That train reminded me of the train in Dolly Wood . it was a big ole steam engine . we took the kids on it for the ride and we decided to get a piece of coal for a souvenir .. that conductor thought i was nuts ,,, I told him my kids never seen a piece of coal before , then he was kind of tickled about it .. Me I came from a house that we used coal to heat with in the big ugly furnace in the basement ..
 
There is a main set of lines right behind that locomotive. They may have picked it up and set it there but I wonder if it was still operational when it was donated.
 
A few years ago, My daughter Holly arrainged to reserve this train for My grand boy Ethan's birthday....They made a tour thru the lake area...pretty cool ride!
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I remember when I was a kid, Columbus and Greenville Railway donated a working retired steam engine to the city of Columbus MS. To get it from the rail yard to the city park where it was going, they built a set of tracks about 50' long I guess, may have been 100', and drove it to the end of the track, picked up the rear section of track and carried it to the front, drove to the end again, repeating the process until they got it where it was going. It took a while, maybe a day or two, I can't remember now. I was about 10 years old, so that would be about 48 years ago. I remember we got to see it on the Columbus TV station. After it made it to the park, they built a shed over it, as far as I know, it's still there. About 20 years ago they went in and repainted it. It had deteriorated a lot, had some vandalism damage too. At one time, you could climb up in the engine, I think they fenced it off when they repainted it to keep it from being damaged again.

Got my interest stirred up, going to have to go look at it again the next time I get over to Columbus, probably next summer when they have the big cruise in on the river.

There is a rich guy over just north of Birmingham named Hallmark that has two old steam engines, one of which I have always heard was the train from the TV show Petticoat Junction. His wife supposedly bought it for him for his birthday one year. I've heard he has a track circling around his property, and runs it from time to time. One of the trains is visible from I65, it looks like it's in pretty bad shape.
 
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