E. B.

E.B. is a 50 HP Emerson-Brantigham Peerless, serial #18286. E.
B. was made in either 1922 or 1923 at Waynesboro, Pennsylvania. The
engine came from Scranton, Pennsylvania. In Scranton the engine sat
out in the weather for forty years.

By the time my grandfather got it home, the stack and water
tanks had fallen off. The smoke box was rusting away. The
connecting rod was unhooked, so the engine wouldn’t be damaged.
The roof was rotted away. There were only a few brackets left and
there were only a few deteriorated boards left from the platform.
When my grandfather brought it home, he put it behind his shop
where it sat out for sixteen years.

In the summer of 1993, my dad and I ‘got a bug’ to see
if it could be fixed. It took a 190 Allis Chalmers to move the old
girl out of her holes. When we got E. B. to the shop, she
wouldn’t go in. We had to take off the governor and the main
steam valve. We had to pull the engine out of the shop at least a
dozen times.

The first time we pulled the engine out we made a new valve
shaft out of stainless steel. We put all new flues in. We also had
tanks and a stack made. It took us a few weeks to rivet the water
tanks.

We painted for what seemed like months, and painted just about
everything. We even painted the boiler. The color scheme is red,
yellow, and green. We even did our own pin striping.

On Good Friday 1994, E. B. was pulled out of the shop. She
didn’t have a roof yet. We had ideas of what it should look
like. With the roof, she looked dignified.

E. B. sat in a shed for a year, when we pulled the counter shaft
out along with the confiscating gear. One of the other times we
pulled her out, we took the whole engine off. You might think that
we could, but our loader tractor could barely pick the engine off.
When back in the shop, we cut the smoke box off so we could put a
new one on. We went to her first show. It was September 7, 1995,
when she left for the Mason Dixon Historical Society. She had come
a long way from when she was bought by my grandfather!