Cute little rig, isn’t she? See the mail-racks; and the slots in the
doors where you could mail a letter once upon a time. Some of these
philatelist fellers think it would be a super idea for Mr. Atwood to
arrange with the Postal Department for a one-day Railway Post Office on
the Edaville; mail clerks cancelling letters _Edaville & Cranberry Bogs
R.P.O._ or something like that. Gosh! We’d pay off the national debt
with stamps that day. You know how wild stamp collectors get about such
things?
Up here from the head platform, or blind end, as it used to be called,
you can get a closeup of No. 7 batting off the rail-joints. See how
she--Oh! here we are at the sand pit. He’s stopping. Let’s drop off and
see where all that sand comes from.
[Illustration:
(_Atwood Photo_)
Here’s how the flatcars were trucked down from Maine; loaded
three-deep on a C. E. Hall & Sons diesel trailer.
]
Wonder why everyone else is jumping off? I see: that work train’s got
in; they’re loading sand to grade the Sunset Vista picnic ground, a flag
stop down the east side. Their engine, little No. 3, came from another
of those Maine roads, the Monson. They had two just alike, No. 3 and No.
4. Mr. Atwood bought them from a concern in Rochester, New York, where
they’d been taken when the Monson road was scrapped in 1945. Yes, she’s
lots smaller than No. 7. Weighs only eighteen tons. She has inside
frames, like wide gauge engines do. No. 7 and No. 8’s frames are
_outside_ the wheels, you know.
The Monson engines were built by the Vulcan Iron Works down in Wilkes
Barre, one in 1912 and the other in 1918. Their cylinders are much
smaller, too; only ten by fourteen inches. Carry a hundred and sixty
pounds of steam. The inside frames, which make a narrower support for
their balance, makes ’em ride different from the big engines. Slop
around more. They’ll scare you, too, until you get used to them.
Actually these inside framers are as safe as the others; it’s just that
their equilibrium is kind of emotional. Nearly all the early two-foot
locomotives had inside frames and they’re the ones that hung up most of
the slim gauge speed records.
See: the big Lorain shovel over there is loading sand onto the flatcars;
ten cubic yards to a car, about fifteen tons. There’s usually a work
train out, doing routine plantation work along with construction and
maintenance duties. That’s what she’s doing: building the station
grounds at Sunset Vista.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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