Steam & Excursion > If You Look Closely You Can See An Old Trick Done By The CMO!

Steam locomotives had a habit of wearing out certain pieces faster than the rest of the locomotive itself. This fact would cause the chief mechanical officers to find innovative ways to stretch the lives of these certain parts so that the locomotive could live on.

Built by Lima in 1923 for the West Side Lumber Co. of Tuolumne California, 3-truck Shay #9 was still in good shape and in daily summer logging service 3 decades later. However, by 1952 she had developed a leak in the floor of her 3433 gallon water tank on the 3rd truck. This would need attention if she was to continue in service.

Ed Sullivan, the CMO for the West Side had seen this condition before and he knew the best means to resolve it. If you look closely at this photo taken by Jim Wren a few years later at the Tuolumne log dump you can see what Mr. Sullivan did. Yes, he simply flipped #9 water cistern over so that her old leaky bottom was now the top of the tank. All that he had to do was to take the water hatch from the old top and remount it on the new top and to modify the brackets that hold the tank to the tender floor.

Say what you want, but this fix worked. Some 65 years after Mr. Sullivan flipped #9's tank she is still in service today on the Georgetown Loop RR in Colorado.

Martin

As we can see from the second photo, West Side #8 also had the same "tank-flip" performed on her a few years earlier.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 07/11/17 12:40 by LoggerHogger.

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Wow Martin, Thanks... I'm going too look a little closer at my Dads West Side Slides..

Mike Jr

Love it

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