Letter

Orrin G. Seaver, 958 Sheridan Avenue, Ypsilanti, Michigan

I nearly jumped out of my boots, although I don’t wear
boots, when I saw the picture (evidently copied from a post card)
of an ‘old friend’ of mine at the bottom of page 26 of the
January-February issue of the Album. I’ve seen this old
locomotive many times and have always marveled at its many
distinctive characteristics, such as having a Scotch-type boiler;
an enormous steam dome, nearly one-half the volume of he boiler; a
geared-type of locomotive, with the engine unit running backward,
or under, when the locomotive is going forward; power transmitted
via gear to the front two wheels; power transmitted to the rear two
wheels via side rods, connected to the front two wheels; pinion on
engine shaft of the open ‘squirrel-cage’ type (If I
remember correctly, engine shaft does not pass through the pinion)
like clock-work pinions.

A bit of history of this old locomotive is interesting due to
its involvement in early Oregon railroading. Early in 1858 a
railroad was built along the south side of the Columbia River,
Oregon, named the Oregon Portage Railway, the motive power being
supplied by horses and mules. In May 1862 the ‘Oregon
Pony,’ this locomotive, arrived on the scene, having been built
by the Vulcan Iron Works of San Francisco.

This locomotive was built between 1858 and 1859; cylinders 6 x
12′; 34 inch drivers; weight 9700 pounds; overall length 14 ft.
and 3¹/₂ inches; track guage 5 feet.

Some of the operational history of this locomotive involves the
running for several years between Bonneville and the Cascade Locks,
Oregon, hauling on the average 200 tons of freight daily, making
her last trip on the Portage in April 1863. She was transferred to
the Dalles-Celilo R.R., about 40 miles up the Columbia River, where
she operated for three years, after which she was shipped back to
San Francisco where she was used for street grading and other like
chores. In 1905 she came back to Portland for the Lewis & Clark
Exhibition and was then donated to the State of Oregon at that
time. In 1929 the Union Pacific R.R. bought and put her on a
permanent display in front of their Portland depot.

Well Anna Mae, I hope this rambling historical description of
the ‘Oregon Pony’ somewhat clears up your curiosity
regarding this peculiar steam-engine freak!

Dear Johnny

As soon as I got your letter on Feb. 10th I got to work and
contacted again the foreman of the Maintenance Shop of the M.O.B.
Railroad, up the hill somewhere around and I got exactly what you
want; however, I had to spend the full 50 guilders because these
gadgets are carried in the company’s inventory and he could not
possibly do otherwise than charge me for them. I say them because I
got two whistles, one to operate by hand or foot through
compression, the other electrically. Both these whistles weigh
together at least 20 kilos and are pretty tough to wrap up
properly. I therefore offered 60 Swiss Francs for the 2 whistles,
which includes the packaging into a wooden case as well as the
transportation fee (I believe) to Bilthoven.

The whistle to be electrically operated looks like an ancient
automobile horn of the 1915’s, a kind of siren, and mind you is
for a 4 volt (which in fact is indicated on the gadget). So
don’t use anything else on it but a small 4 volt battery or
have it inspected by an electrician. I believe it is made of brass
about 50 years ago.

Now for the second whistle, this is a more complicated affair.
The whistle in itself is rather small but the part that lets the
air through is rather quite a piece of machinery. It is being sent
to you in 3 parts: viz. the mechanical part, the whistle itself and
the roof-like cover to protect the whistle which is supposed to be
fixed on top of the locomotive’s roof. They had two of these
more complicated whistles to be operated by air flow, neither of
them complete or in working condition. So, while I was examining
them they transferred parts from the one to the other and completed
one ready to be operated. Besides they gave me the blueprint of
this thing which I enclose herewith and which I will explain to
you. You see that I could not possibly expect all this for nothing
and I think F1 50 for 2 is quite a bargain. You may send me F1 50
in an envelope (or whichever way you prefer), or 60 Swiss Francs,
which is about the equivalent and I thank you beforehand. It was a
pleasure for me to do this for you.

Let me now explain the blueprint as they explained it to me. Of
course as a whistle expert you probably need no explanation!

I have drawn a red line right through this print because the
part you get is the one at the right of the blueprint, that is at
the right of this double red line. The part that says Ruckschlag
Ventil belongs to the brake and has nothing to do with the whistle
itself, or its operation.

If you place the gadget straight up on its round bottom you will
notive 4 holes (outlets or inlets). Two of these holes are blocked
by vises because the air has to be pumped into one hole and pumped
out of any one of the 3 remaining holes (which can be chosen
according to the position of the whistle itself). Thus one hole now
remains open for the air to be pumped in and another to pump it out
into the whistle. To work this whistle the lever (attached to the
coil) has to be pressed down (or up), thus closing the outlet
(Auspuff). In other words the air comes into the inlet
(Lufteinlass) and normally (when the whistle is not operated) goes
out through the outlet (Auspuff). When you close this outlet by
operating the lever the air continues to the whistle (all the way
at right of the blueprint) where it says Zur Pfeife on the B.P. In
other words you have yourself to make the connection between this
Pfeife and the bottom of the whistle (at right) and so does the
thing work.

Do not take any notice of the tube that goes right through this
gadget (B.P. to the left). It has nothing to do with the operation
of this whistle but is part of the brake.

Now once you have connected this main gadget with the whistle
itself by a hose or tube we come to the blueprint at right. This is
the whistle to be placed on top of the locomotive and protected by
a cap. There is one more thing that you have to do is buy a piece
of rubber hose (indicated in dark ink and named Kautschuk Schlauch)
to fit the actual copper (Messing) whistle airtight into its
housing (what I mean by protective cap). And then the Pfeife (as it
says on the B.P.) or Wistle, works!

‘Dach’ means roof and ‘auf Dach montiert’ means
‘installed on the roof.’

I hope Johnny that I have made myself clear and wish you a lot
of pleasure and luck with these two whistles. But beware of the 4
volt of the copper horn, lest you ruin the mechanism.

I will keep in touch with the R.R. workshop and find out just
when this thing is being sent off to Bilthoven. The Swiss are
rather slow workers and they have to obtain papers from the Swiss
Customs to send it out.

As soon as I know when I will at once send you word. And this is
all my friend.

Many cordial greetings, also to Lillian, and from Madelein.

Yours very sincerely, /s/ Walter Gockinga

P.S. I hope you are not disappointed that I have spent all that
you allowed me to, but you see there is more to it than we thought
and quite some work for these fellows.

Regarding these whistles the Base Commander thought it would be
a fitting farewell for me upon my retirement from the USAF to have
all them ‘sound off’ at the ceremony. Since I had them
mounted on two special manifolds by the Hamminga Machine shop in
Utrecht (the metric system specs would have presented difficulties
in the States) it was quite simple to ‘hook’ them up to a
portable M 1 aircraft flight line compressor. The Colonel and I had
first honors in blowing them after which we had a half hour of the
finest music in Europe. I might add many of the Dutch people
surrounding the base also enjoyed it. At the present time they are
all carefully packed and will be on their way to the States when we
return next month.

There is a whistle on its way to me from Hungary that I located
in Budapest while there a short time ago visiting my wife’s
relatives. So I will also have one from behind the Iron Curtain.
Pulling power in Hungary is principally steam so it was not too
difficult to find an old one. The design of the whistle is very
unusual compared to ours and has a unique sound of its own.

While attending a steam traction engine rally at Bletsoe,
England near Bedford this past summer I met several men from the
States who had it on their itinerary while traveling through
Europe. It was good to see them.

Johnny

Donald Schultz, Sidewalk Supt., Macedonia, Iowa

Some fifty years ago this 45-HP International Titan roamed the
hills and valleys near Emerson, Iowa. With its companion separator,
it completed the year’s grain harvest for many of the local
farmers.

According to comments obtained from other sidewalk
superintendents, the active life of this giant included a trip back
to the factory for overhaul, and the addition of a one
cylinder-auxiliary starting engine.

After its return to Emerson, the history becomes a little more
clear. The Titan continued its labor for a Mr. Honeyman, after
which it was sold to a man reportedly from Harlan, Iowa. He began
the long overland drive, up a side road. At a point two miles
northwest of Emerson, the old Titan chugged to a painful stop, and
was abandoned.

It stood idly by the road side for a period of time, until the
adjoining farmer hooked 4 head of horses to the brute and dragged
it down a hill and into a ravine. During a severe rain storm, trees
and wire piled up against the Titan, and the water force was
sufficient to move it down stream some 15 rods to a wooden
bridge.

May I suggest you take notice that we have some new books
advertised? You book worms will be especially interested. Also,
while I’m reminding you of little items, please don’t
forget your Code Numbers when sending in your renewals, and if you
have material to send us, it processes much faster if it is typed
double spaced. Thanks for being in the Iron Men Album Family and we
hope you enjoy it for many years.

I think I’ll sign off for you have lots of Reunion news and
are more interested in that, I am sure, but I’ll have to leave
with a few quotes A friend is someone who likes you even though he
doesn’t need you anymore When God measures a man He puts the
tape measure around the heart, not the head. Speed is not
everything direction counts. Anger is the wind that blows out the
light of reason. Beware of the half truth; you may have gotten the
wrong half.

Steamcerely, Anna Mae

Stewart Fenton, Secretary,1316 Huntington Ave., Waterloo,
Iowa.

Members of the Black Hawk Steam Engine Club, Inc. of Cedar
Falls, Iowa are interested in having a permanent home for the
annual shows and a place to store equipment-have purchased 80
acres-4 miles north of Cedar Falls on U. S. Hi-Way 218. A
corporation known as ‘Antique cures, Inc.’ has been found
with the investors of the club as its members and the new
corporation will lease the land to the Black Hawk Club. The new
location for the 1964 show September 4, 5, 6 and 7 has a fine grove
of trees for shade, and good water supply and is a fine location
with 80 rods frontage on Hi-Way 218.

Major J. P. Hansen

Reference is made to the article on page No. 28 of your
July-August 1963 issue.

Since I have been in Europe I have continued the collection of
steam engine whistles and acquired ones from France, Sweden,
England, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, two from Denmark, and the
latest two from Switzerland which this story concerns.

During the summer of 1963 one of our neighbors in Holland
exchanged houses for the summer months with a Dutch man and his
French wife who were living in retirement in Switzerland. While
walking with my young son one day he overheard me talking to him in
English and after seeing my car assumed I was an American. Soon
thereafter he introduced himself and thus we became good friends
with Mr. and Mrs. Walter Gockinga.

In visiting with them one evening he mentioned that a Dutch
nephew of his collected old automobile license plates. Since I
still happened to have my outdated plates from Michigan I gave them
to him. I then mentioned my own hobby of collecting steam engine
whistles and he promised that when he returned to his home in
Switzerland he would make every effort to locate one for me.

The following letter which is self-explanatory is the result of
his thoughtfulness.

Steve Cook, 824 Berry St., Toledo, Ohio 43605.

From one of your ‘young’ readers who is 79 and left the
farm when he was 21. You have done a lot to brighten my sunset
years and brought back a lot of nice memories.

I am a subscriber to your magazine and wish to say I enjoy
reading it very much. It brings back many memories of my boyhood
days. I was fortunate of living in a community that threshed with
steam.

My father was part owner of three different threshing machines,
two of which are shown by the pictures enclosed. I do not have a
picture of the last Case engine and seperator the company
owned.

These are threshing scenes in central Kansas in the 1890’s
and the one which we had when we quit steam for the combines, is
not shown.

The threshing crew in both pictures are neighbors, uncles and my
father. I don’t know the make or size of the machines shown in
the pictures.

I have spent a good share of my life with steam, running steam
locomotives and had to leave it when the ‘growlers’ came,
on account of deafness. From what I read, see and hear they have
been no great blessings to the railroad and surely not to the so
many men who have lost their jobs on account of them, nor to the
shippers with the thinned down service, or the crowded bus
passengers or those who risk their lives in the air. I read in
today’s paper of a jet that went down near New Orleans with a
loss of more than 50 passengers – and we have been reading such
news all too frequently.

Like Brother Leroy Wilson, who wrote your lead article in your
March-April number, I feel that steam is a long ways from through.
I am glad that men like him are still around and also those good
souls who write you those intelligent and down to earth
letters.

Please accept my best wishes to you and all yours in your good
work. May the Lord give you the courage, strength and understanding
to carry on, is the desire of an appreciative old timer.

Dear Sirs:

On page 37 May-June Album, Mr. J. Rex Haver shows photo of an
air cooled engine, and wants to know the make of it. It is an IDEAL
engine. I have two of them, both different models, Specs, as
follows. Flywheel 11′ Dia. Rim 1 wide. Bore 3 Stroke 4,’
Shaft Dia. 1¹/₈‘ on Roller Bearings,
Closed crank case.

Other one is-Flywheel Dia 13′ Rim 2′ wide.
Bore-3′-Stroke 4′. Crank-Shaft Dia.
1¹/₈‘. Babbit Bearings, open Crank
Case.-the smaller one was taken from an Ideal three unit Lawnmower.
The larger one from an Ideal lawn roller.

We have twenty-three gas engines up to Five H. P. and Five
Steamers from ³/₈‘ bore up and looking
for more. Hoping this information will be helpful to all Album
readers in the next Issue, I remain Sincerely Yours.

Bill Luss, Hamburg, N. Y.

Courtesy of O. R. Aslakson, New Rockford, North Dakota

Being confined to the house with a siege of the flu, I should be
doing ‘end-of-the-year’ bookwork but just cannot resist the
urge to comment on the very interesting articles in the
January-February ‘Album’ by Lyle Hoffmaster and Leroy
Blaker. These opinions by experienced operators of the advantages
of the different engines are always interesting to me. I really
should not ‘stand up and speak’ in this kind of company,
but then it will not be the first time I should have been ‘just
listening’.

The fact that I threshed nine North Dakota threshing seasons,
running three different compound engines might qualify me as a
little of an authority on compounds. These were all large rigs, it
was in the 1930’s, so the compounds were not the first to be
discarded. By 1940 the steam rigs in North Dakota were rather far
between. These were all Advance engines, the first one a 35 HP
tandem-compound, side-mount, (I got some education on this one) ;
the second one a 30 HP cross-compound, rear-mount and the third one
the 26 HP side mount that I still have. We used straw for fuel for
all these except for one short fall I used coal in the
cross-compound. At our annual show we thresh at least once with the
26 HP, burning straw, powering a 36 x 58 Case plain bearing
seperator, at 100 lbs. pressure and it does it surprisingly
well.

So I am with Mr. Blaker in regard to compounds, I agree that the
compound should have a high boiler pressure, but I think that even
with lower pressure a compound in good condition has advantages,
particularly for steady work like threshing. Possibly compounds
could develop troubles affecting their efficiency a little sooner
than a simple, particularly with bad water conditions. On the other
hand, the 30 HP cross-compound previously mentioned came out new
about 1909, when I first had charge of it it had been reflued for
the first time only a year or two before, probably still had the
original piston rings and it still worked very good and used little
water for it’s load. Another compound that I had a chance to
observe before I started to run engines was a 20 HP Gaar-Scott
return flue tandem-compound (this may not be the exact HP, but it
was about that size), this old engine was belted to a Avery
‘Yellow-Fellow’ which was not an easy pulling machine, it
used three medium sized tankfull of water one day and four the next
as regular as clockwork. I believe the advantages of a compound
were more than just the direct saving of fuel and water, I am sure
the boiler benefited by the lighter demands on it.

I do not know how a 26 HP Advance compound would compare , with
Mr. Blaker’s Port Huron on a test, but if I had a run of shock
threshing to do and had either a 26 HP or 35 HP advance engine I
would look no farther, particularly if straw was to be the fuel. As
my friend George Melby of Dalton, Minn. would say ‘that is the
kind of test that counts’. Unlike Mr. Blaker, I think the Marsh
valve gear is one of the best, it’s motion is easy, it is
easily maintained and I think the double-ported Advance valve gives
it a quick opening action. This gear along with the superheat
effect of the steam pipe thru the top of the boiler and thru the
smoke box and stack along with very good straw burning boiler are
the things that I believe made the Advance side-mount compounds
what they were. I will say that the center-head stuffing-box on
these engines had to be kept well packed.

There were very few Port Huron or Baker engines in North Dakota,
I never saw either one till I started attending the shows. We had
plenty of Advance, Avery, Buffalo Pitts, Gaar Scott, Nichols &
Shepard, Minneapolis, Case etc. In this straw burning country they
were all considered pretty good straw burners, but the Advance was
pretty well in the lead. Mr. Hoffmaster would find many men out
here that would not agree that the only good machinery made by
Avery was their jack. Of course almost every man had the BEST
machine, but I think the Yellow Fellow seperator was generally
regarded as a well built machine that gave less trouble than most
and had very good cylinder teeth. I think the return-flue engine
was also well regarding in this area.

In regard to Mr. Hoffmaster’s article I wonder if I
misunderstand column 8 or if there is a mistake here. If this is a
correction for the disadvantage of a large flywheel as compared to
the 36′ flywheel on the Baker 16 HP then I would think the
percentage given in column eight would be larger rather than
smaller than in column seven. Possibly I misunderstand something
here. Like Mr. Hoffmaster when I first saw the curved-block Wood
Bros, valve gear I could see where they could have gotten exactly
the same motion with a pivoted arm instead of the curved guide.

I am not a sawmill man, the only sawing I have done is at the
shows. This is probably the kind of work where most men would like
a simple best. I have seen the Advance 35 HP almost climb the wheel
block when a very wet bundle hit the thresher cylinder, it might
perform pretty well on a saw.

Letter

By Donald R. Jackson,4461 West 34th Street, Indianapolis, Ind.
46222

In the November-December ‘Soot in the Flues’ column,
your friend ‘Casey’ Jones of Wichita, Kansas, asks
‘What became of the Compounds?’ I have part of the
answer.

I learned the air brake end of the railroad business in the Army
in France in World War I. I suffered several injuries ‘over
there’ and finally recovered enough that I could work at least
eight hours again, so I took a job on the ‘Pennsy’ in the
Indianapolis District.

They had many types of Engines in and out of there, including
the famous ‘Madison Hill’ (Ohio River) Angle Frame Engine.
They also had a few long compounds on the ‘straight track’,
East and West Divisions. We hated to see one of those Monsters come
in. They had so much machinery crowded into the over all width
allowed for locomotives that you had to be a contortionist to work
on them. It would take four to six times as long to make many
repairs.

They were two feet shorter than the turntable and you
couldn’t spot one of them within eight or ten feet of where you
wanted it. We always used another engine to push them on the table
and another engine on the storage spurs opposite an empty stall in
the Roundhouse to push them in. If you forgot to fill the tender
with coal and water, you would blow the motors on the turntable
trying to turn them around. A few of them went thru the outer wall
where some hostler tried to spot one in the Roundhouse. If you ever
saw two or three wreckers trying to get one of them picked up after
they had split the rails you would know what I mean.

To prove my point I will quote one General Manager, ‘They
cost more than they are worth’.

However, you can find several Compound threshing engines still
around, and many more, some old and some new, in steam launches and
steam automobiles owned or being built by steam hobbysts around the
country, especially on the West Coast. Also the Indianapolis Water
Company still have a huge triple expansion pumping engine that they
use in the dry seasons. This engine is as tall as a two story
house.