Riding a sidewinder
Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2019 11:57 pm
I meant to post this months ago but somehow it just didn’t get done. Last August, Honey and I escaped the searing heat of California’s Central Valley to Felton, CA., the home of the Roaring Camp and Big Trees Narrow Gauge Railroad. The Roaring Camp railroad is what I call “user friendly” — there are no fences or barricades here to keep you from fully enjoying the experience. The day of our visit their signature Shay, the Dixiana, was in operation, and needing some steam inhalation therapy, I strode over to the engine to inspect its wonders. I asked if I could climb into the cab and was granted access. After chatting with the engineer, he apparently deduced that I wasn’t just another tourist but knew what I was looking at, and he invited me to take the ride in the cab.
The Dixiana is a 1912-vintage Class B, 42-ton, two-truck, three cylinder Shay. Now I’ve had cab rides in rod locomotives and fired one. And those of you who have done this know that the noise inside the cab when underway is orders of magnitude louder than what you hear trackside. Depending on who you ask, the grade on this run up Bear Mountain is 8 to 10 percent. And running up that grade in a Shay, with the Johnson bar in the corner and three cars full of tourists behind, the noise is something I’ll not forget.
BAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TY!!
Doing some math, with a driver diameter of 29 inches, a gear ratio of about 2:1, and three cylinders providing six exhaust blasts per revolution of the crankshaft, that creature at about five miles per hour was putting out about 12 exhaust blasts per second. It sounds like an abused Northern with loose rods running at 120 mph while pushing a 12-foot diameter ball mill filled with rocks and scrap steel down the track. At any moment I was expecting to see large pieces of metal thrown from the right side of the engine all over the mountainside.
Anyway, there are always plenty of exterior shots of engines, but cab shots are not common. I shot a bunch of pix of the backhead and I thought I’d put them up as reference for those of you who are building Shays. I just shot randomly and haven’t edited duplicates since a slight change in camera angle might give someone some info they need. Feel free to download anything useful to you. If you’d like a higher resolution image, just send me a p.m. This is just a quick-and-dirty web page. Click on any shot for a larger view, there are navigation links at the top of the pages. Here’s a link:
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~gregl/shay/index.html
Enjoy.
The Dixiana is a 1912-vintage Class B, 42-ton, two-truck, three cylinder Shay. Now I’ve had cab rides in rod locomotives and fired one. And those of you who have done this know that the noise inside the cab when underway is orders of magnitude louder than what you hear trackside. Depending on who you ask, the grade on this run up Bear Mountain is 8 to 10 percent. And running up that grade in a Shay, with the Johnson bar in the corner and three cars full of tourists behind, the noise is something I’ll not forget.
BAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TYBAM!TY!!
Doing some math, with a driver diameter of 29 inches, a gear ratio of about 2:1, and three cylinders providing six exhaust blasts per revolution of the crankshaft, that creature at about five miles per hour was putting out about 12 exhaust blasts per second. It sounds like an abused Northern with loose rods running at 120 mph while pushing a 12-foot diameter ball mill filled with rocks and scrap steel down the track. At any moment I was expecting to see large pieces of metal thrown from the right side of the engine all over the mountainside.
Anyway, there are always plenty of exterior shots of engines, but cab shots are not common. I shot a bunch of pix of the backhead and I thought I’d put them up as reference for those of you who are building Shays. I just shot randomly and haven’t edited duplicates since a slight change in camera angle might give someone some info they need. Feel free to download anything useful to you. If you’d like a higher resolution image, just send me a p.m. This is just a quick-and-dirty web page. Click on any shot for a larger view, there are navigation links at the top of the pages. Here’s a link:
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~gregl/shay/index.html
Enjoy.