FROM OKLAHOMA

535 S. E. 14th Street Oklahoma City 9, Oklahoma

I have been a reader of your wonderful magazine for the past
seven years, but I never see anything in the ALBUM from this neck
of the woods, so I will try to write something, mainly to let the
folks know that Oklahoma is still on the map.

I have been very much interested in the articles on valve gears
and I notice there is some difference of opinion on this subject.
Now I am not writing this to get into an argument and I am not
taking sides with anyone, but I just want to tell Mr. Blaker and
one or two others that I have enjoyed their writing and get a lot
of good out of it and those of you who take the Steam Engine
magazine printed in California have no doubt read the articles on
valve gears by Mr. B. B. Brown. I also got a lot out of his
writing.

It is things like this that make the magazines worth while. I
hope we can have more of it. Some of us ‘old boys’ have
handled engines most of our lives, but still don’t claim to
know all about them. I, for one, am willing to learn. I have
handled about a dozen different makes of engines with several
different kinds of valve gears and I am not going to stick my neck
out and say that any one valve gear was better than all the
rest.

I think that most of you will agree that the Baker was the best
valve gear ever put on a locomotive, but whether it was best on a
traction is something else again. There is another angle to be
considered. Have you thought about how many different kinds of
valves were used on different engines? What I mean — a valve that
would work perfectly with one kind of valve gear might not work so
perfectly with another kind. I would like to know what some of you
experts think about that.

I am surprised that Mr. Hutzell would wonder about being able to
keep the steam up in a Case under full load in 1912. I was working
for the old Geiser Company in their branch house at Springfield,
Missouri, just before they sold out to Emerson Brantingham, and
during that time there was a carnival came to town and stayed about
a week. They had a 25 hp Peerless engine which they used to pull a
dynamo to light the carnival grounds. We loaned them a 25 Peerless
to use while we overhauled their engine. They said they could tell
by the dynamo how much power the engine was putting out. They said
it was pulling a 56 hp load and that was more than twice the rated
hp of the engine and it had to do that without a stop from five in
the evening until seven the next morning and seven nights a week,
and I think a Case or any other good engine would do the same
thing.