The Engine that Could

I found out a school teacher was selling the engine for another
fellow who owned it. At this time my boss, Jim Koenig, was
interested in buying a steam engine, so I got the teacher’s name
and where he could be reached.

We made arrangements to look at the Advance, and after looking
it over closely, Jim decided to buy the Advance with encouragement
from me. (It’s fun to spend someone else’s money!)

Home Again, Home Again

Now we had the task of getting the Advance home to Cottage
Grove, Minn. We lined up a trucker with a lowboy trailer to haul
the engine the day after Thanksgiving. It snowed Thanksgiving Day.
We left at 5:30 in the morning with 180 miles to go.

We arrived where the Advance engine was located and after
looking over how we could get it loaded, we decided it was going to
be a long day. The engine sat parallel to the road. The trailer
didn’t have ramps, so we had to move the engine back and turn right
to line up to the trailer. Then we backed the trailer into the
ditch far enough to get it level with the back of the ditch.

I took the guy’s Lindemann crawler and dug the back of the ditch
out to get the trailer in far enough to get the engine onto the
trailer – boy, it was a cold job. Now we had to get the engine up
on the trailer, but I couldn’t get the steering wheel to turn
because it was filled with ice.

We chipped the ice out and tried to pull the Advance, but we had
no traction for the crawler. We wrapped a rope around the pulley
and with two tractors on the rope we could move the engine, but at
a snail’s pace. So, I called a wrecker to winch us around. They
came with a big wrecker. We put a block and tackle on the trailer
and winched the engine onto it.

Now we had to load a wooden water wagon. We took all four wheels
off the water wagon and tied it down. After making sure we got the
trailer out of the ditch, we released the tow truck. It was just
dusk when we finished tying everything down and started down the
road.

We stopped at a truck stop for dinner and I told the trucker we
would be lucky to get home by midnight. He said, “I’ll have you
home by the 10 o’clock news.”

We got to the freeway and he opened the Kenworth up. I was
afraid to look at the speedometer, but I know it was over 70 MPH.
Did you ever ride in a semi that every time you came to an overpass
you would duck because you thought the smokestack was going to
hit?

In the spring, Jim cleaned the engine and painted it. The flues
had been replaced and the boiler passed inspection in Minnesota.
Two years later, Jim sold the engine to Cliff Woycik of Whitehall,
Wis. I ran it for Cliff at the Strum, Wis., show. After having the
engine for three years Cliff passed away.

I told Bill Vouk about the Advance being for sale at an auction
and he bought it. Lehart moved the engine from Whitehall to St.
Stephen, Minn. At the following St. Stephen show, Bill told me to
run the engine. This time we had ramps and a winch to get it on the
lowboy.

Yes it Can, Yes it Can

For three years I helped with Bill’s 65 HP Case at the St.
Stephen show. For years the 65 HP was on the Huber 36-inch
separator and Bill’s 80 HP Case was on the sawmill. I was relegated
to running the Advance single-cylinder on the clover huller and the
hand-feed separator. Gary Schacth and I wanted to get on the
sawmill at Vouk’s, but it took two years to finally talk Tommy Vouk
into just letting us on the mill for an hour. We had heard that the
Advance couldn’t pull the mill because it didn’t have enough
horsepower.

After sawing two logs, the sawmill man had a smile on his face.
He came up to us and said, “The Advance did a good job and the
engine could saw all the logs in St. Stephen without any
trouble.”

Two years later, the 65 HP Case was having some bearing trouble
and Ed Claussen, another engineer, wanted to shut it down and fix
the problem. On Saturday they didn’t get two stacks of grain done
with the bad bearing. Sunday morning, Jim Vouk, who sees that
everything is kept moving, didn’t know how he was going to finish
the two stacks. I asked Jim to let us run the Advance on the
separator and we would have the two stacks finished by noon. He
laughed and said that the little Advance couldn’t pull the
separator. I said, “Just let us try.”

Jim said, “OK, but you will run out of steam.”

I knew if we did run out of steam we would go down giving it all
we could. Both Gary and I have run engines on wing-feed separators
before, but I think the Huber would be the biggest we were ever
running on. I had run Vouk’s 65 HP Case on that separator for two
years.

We belted up the Advance to try it and Gary and I traded off
running the engine. While Gary ran the engine, I set up the water
truck and wood wagon right by the engine. I asked Jim Mullenhaur if
he would keep wood on the deck. I went to get the video camera
because I didn’t want to miss out on the engine pulling the
load.

Lawrence, the separator man, had four pitchers just waiting to
get us stuck. The pop valve was set at 150 psi. Gary said, “If she
pops, we will never get it back.”

We finished the two stacks and never ran out of steam. I think
we made the Vouks know the Advance was a good engine. After the
parade we went on the mill for an hour and Jim asked us to go on
the separator and finish the other two stacks. It was my turn on
the Advance and we did the job again without running out of
steam.

I still get a lump in my throat at how hard we fired that
Advance with wood. A good day’s work done.

Bill passed away and there is no longer a show in St. Stephen.
Good times are passed. The Advance-Rumely was sold at an auction to
a man in Minneapolis. That Advance was sure a little engine that
could.

Contact steam enthusiast Ted Knack at 1545 10th Ave.,
St. Paul Park, MN 55071.