Steam & Excursion > You like smokejacks? Here's a whole forest of them!

As this enginehouse grew larger over the years the number of smokejacks, as viewed from a higher elevation, began to look like trees in a forest.

---

Who, what, when, WHERE????

Classic photo.  Thank you, Jim.

This is the first time I noticed the western extension was five tracks instead of all six.

Jim will tell you all this is the west extension of the S.P.& S. roundhouse at Wishram, Wash., during the time the addition was in place to handle the Z-6's and Z-8's.  JIm, can you tell us when this addition was built and when it was demolished?

Bob Willer
 

Thank you.

Greg, I was doing some research to answer your question but it disappeared by the time I returned to it.  According to a dictionary
I accessed a smokejack is, as you stated:

"English dictionary definition of smokejack.  n  a device formerly used for turning a roasting spit, operated by the movement of ascending gases in a chimney."

I had never heard of that definition.  Possibly because I've never lived for a long period of time in a "barbecue-crazy" area of the country.  As for its use in the railroad industry, that's the only term I've heard used for a chimney on an roundhouse or enginehouse specifically placed to allow the exhaust from a parked locomotive to escape through the roof to the atmosphere.  Perhaps it's a regional term.

I thought of a railroad smokestack as a much taller fixture as would be found adjacent to a roundhouse or backshop powerhouse to exhaust the large output from a stationary boiler, as is also found adjacent to large powerhouses of other industries such as lumber mills.

OSWishram Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> JIm, can you tell us when this addition
> was built and when it was demolished?
>
> Bob Willer


Bob, I don't know the exact dates but I can narrow it down somewhat.  Soon after my father retired in January 1976 a long-time co-worker, Conductor Ward Marr, gave him the torch pictured below.  He passed it on to me, shortly before he died in February 1991, along with the typewritten description.  He mistakenly typed "North" instead of "West" side of the roundhouse.  Yeah, I know it wasn't round, but everybody called it that.  There was no addition to the north side as witnessed by the six long stalls originally constructed as displayed on page 139 of Walt Grande's The Northwest's Own Railway, Volume 1.

He said it was during WW II when construction for engine stalls and pits started.  Perhaps with the increased wartime freight business and the Z-6s having arrived just a few years earlier, they realized that they simply didn't have enough roundhouse space to also handle the soon-to-come Z-8s.

I recall that the roundhouse was still the same when we moved to Spokane on Memorial Day 1955.  What I don't recall is whether the north wall was moved three tracks closer to the river before or after the merger.  I started working the Wishram Engineer Freight Pool in January '73 and I know it was moved by then because of an incident that occurred.

I was often called for the only unassigned switch engine shift each week, the Thursday midnight, due to so much sharpshooting by the guys on the pool.  One night Gary Sachtjen (brakeman date 11-08-72) was working the engine end as we pulled a cut off of the west end of track #1 and shoved it east down the lead.  Gary was riding the river side of the car coupled to the engine and it decided to pick the points on the track #2 switch.  As the box car was rocking side-to-side, Gary literally leapt off of it and turned around in mid-air.  As his feet hit the ground he was running as fast as he could to get away from it.  It's a good thing that the north roundhouse wall had already been moved three tracks south or he would probably have been doing his own impression of the cat-through-the-wall cartoon.

The resolution of the roundhouse picture is poor because I zoomed in to snip it from a much larger field of view taken from high up on Pilot Rock.


 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/31/20 02:46 by Jim700.

---

---

---