Going Back in Time
By Dana M. Nichols, The Record, Stockton, Calif.
Jul. 8–WHITE PINES — Yosemite Lumber Co. Engine No. 4 started its career with much promise and in a spectacular setting. The oil-fired Shay steam engine was built in 1920 and immediately set to work hauling lumber from Sierra forests near Groveland, not far from Yosemite National Park.
But the mighty 164,100-pound engine was laid off in 1943. Without work, it just couldn’t find a purpose. It hit bottom in a Stockton junkyard, buried in a huge pile of old tires.
Now, after a start-and-stop career that included time as a tourist attraction in Utah, and another forced retirement for being slow and overweight, No. 4 has a shot at glory again in the Stanislaus National Forest. This time the locomotive — which already is in rehab in White Pines — would star in a re-created logging camp of the kind that existed there in the 1930s, complete with a short rail line that could take families to the hilltop camp.
"The beauty about the Shay locomotive is it can negotiate extremely sharp curves and steep grades," said Patrick Michael Karnahan, a member of the Sierra Nevada Logging Museum board and a longtime proponent of restoring the engine and replicating a historic mining camp.
Shay locomotives get their name from Ephraim Shay, a Michigan industrialist who in the 1870s invented a steam engine that used a gearing system to send power to each wheel axle and mounted the axles on articulated trucks so they could negotiate tight turns.
"They were like the four-wheel drives of locomotives," Karnahan said.
Thanks to work by Karnahan and others, the Shay locomotive now rests on rails next to the museum in White Pines and is on the verge of receiving $116,000 in federal transportation enhancement funding. That money would go to replace boiler pipes and bring the engine back into operation. The work could take until 2011 to complete.
After that, Karnahan and museum officials dream of moving onto a much grander project — building a logging camp on a hilltop inside the Stanislaus National Forest just across the road from the museum and laying tracks so that No. 4 can wind its way up the slope. Karnahan envisions a time when families can glide through the through the forest behind the iron horse and when Scout troops can rent the replica loggers’ cabins for overnight events.
"On the Stanislaus National Forest, at one time there were 300 miles of railroad logging line," Karnahan said.
But times have changed since No. 4′s career began. Then, it mostly took iron, steam and muscle to do business in the forest. Now, forms, faxes, e-mail and bureaucracy regulate what happens out in the trees.
The funding for No. 4′s rehabilitation comes from the federal government, but it is channeled through the California Department of Transportation. That means that any work on the engine, even at this early stage when it won’t move any-where, must go through separate environmental review processes for the state and federal governments. The state environmental review is done.
The Calaveras Council of Governments, which co-ordinates transportation for the region, originally thought the Shay restoration funding would be flowing by the time the current fiscal year began July 1. Now COG officials expect it to happen sometime before the fiscal year ends next June.
Karnahan said the museum already has taken a number of steps to minimize the engine’s environmental impact. Instead of heavy fuel oil, it will burn biodiesel made from recycled vegetable oil. And to spare the ears of neighbors in White Pines, the engine’s steam whistle will be muted.
Stanislaus National Forest officials have long been supporters of the logging museum and of a proposed logging camp.
"I love trains, and I am sympathetic to the idea," said Bill Lorenz, ranger for the forest’s Calaveras District, which includes the museum site.
One potential hurdle is money: The National Forest Service doesn’t have any for the logging camp project. The museum would have to subsist on grants or donations. And then there’s the question of whether neighbors who might hear even a muted train whistle will support the project.
Still, Lorenz agrees with museum officials that a replica logging camp, complete with a Shay engine to haul rail cars full of visitors, would mesh well with other plans to make Arnold and neighboring White Pines a center for Sierra Nevada history and tourism.
Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 754-9534 or dnichols@recordnet.com.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Record, Stockton, Calif.
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