Book hauls

Borrowing an idea from another group I'm on, the idea is that when we have a particularly productive buying session, we post the results here for the delight (or perhaps envy) of other group members. So to start with:

A recent visit to the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway's gala saw me come back with:

Mixed Gauges by J.B. Snell
30inch railways worldwide by David Scotney (a new publication from Frank Stenvalls in Malmö)
Engines that bend by David Joy

whilst last Saturday, I popped into the Chasewater Railway on my way back from a job and came up with:

Railway Holiday in Northern Germany by W.J.K Davies
Round the world on the narrow gauge by P.B. Whitehouse and P.C. Allen

(No touchstones on either title).

Well, I haven't purchased much in the way of RR books lately but I have picked up some ephemera at the Allentown, PA book and paper show last weekend. One of the more interesting items was the Guide for the Pennsylvania Railroad With An Extensive Map printed in 1855 in Philadelphia. I was having fun looking at it as I came back from Chicago last month on Amtrak and used the Pennsylvanian from Pittsburgh to Exton. First time on the Horseshoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel on a commercial train and my first time across the Susquehanna River on the Perryville Bridge ever!

I picked up a Wilmington and Northern Rail Road pass from 1885 as well.

There was some trolley items as well. It's not posted yet but its the Trolley Guide To All City Car Lines by the Denver Tramway Company from 1925.

Oh, ephemera is fine! A friend of mine in the UK has a lot of "grey" literature - ephemera, books and pamphlets that never make it into publishers' catalogues, fan publications and the like - catalogued on LT and I've done likewise. Without this sort of effort, some stuff would never get any sort of formal listing anywhere.

Besides it keeps me from buying duplicates. As I have said a million times (well maybe not that many!) one is not a true collector unless they have bought the same book (read ephemera, pamphlets) twice at least a few times!!

>3 RobertDay:, 4 Agreed about buying the same book twice. It was only when I started cataloguing my books on LT a few years back that I discovered I did have a couple of duplicates. One was deliberate - I had a dirty copy of a footplate manual which I could actually take on the footplate with me, and a clean copy that I kept in my bookcase - but I also had inadvertent duplicates. I also agree that some of the grey railway literature might never have been catalogued anywhere until the likes of us did so on LT.

I have a lot of physical ephemera. The largest item is an old Kenya Uganda Railway porter's trolley which my wife found in an antique shop and which now serves as the main coffee table in our living room. A solid lump of timber and iron! I have various railway lamps (including a working paraffin-fired South African shunter's lamp, which appears to be pretty much identical to the Kenyan ones), a Kenyan number plate and loco headlamp, a South African chime whistle and various things which I still use such as my coach key, driver's tea billy can, the universal key for South African railway padlocks and, of course, my fireman's shovel.

My most recent railway book additions were Steaming to Victory: How Britain's Railways Won the War by Michael Williams, and Railways of Southern Africa 150 Years: Commemorating One Hundred and Fifty Years of Railways on the Sub-Continent Complete Motive Power Classifications and Famous Trains 1860-2011 by Jean A Dulez. This new book is very comprehensive. A friend bought it for me in Jo'burg and in exchange I bought him Steve Mills' latest, A Railway to Nowhere: The Building of the Lunatic Line 1896-1901 in Nairobi. We exchanged books at O R Tambo Airport while I was in transit to Cape Town. Both books cost about the same so there was no dual-currency cash transaction to worry about. They were also about the same weight so my heavy hand luggage was not relieved.

Edited to add: Touchstones playing up.

>5 John5918: Off subject a bit. Do any of the rr's in Africa sill run Garrett's? There is a narrow gauge running in Wales.

>6 ulmannc: Nothing to do with railways is ever off-subject to a railway enthusiast!

In South Africa there are a few operational Garratts, including GMAMs 4074 and 4079. I believe there are also some Garratts on the George-Knysna line. I'm not sure of the exact status of them all at this moment, but they have certainly steamed during the last few years. I've fired 4079.

In Kenya Garratt 5918 is basically operational and last ran two years ago, but has a couple of leaking superheater elements which need fixing before she can run again. She failed in a cloud of steam on her last outing and had to be ignominiously hauled home by a diesel. Actually she moved this week but not under her own steam; she was shunted around a bit by a diesel so that we could bring out a smaller non-Garratt loco, 3020, which will be hauling a steam excursion the weekend after next.

In Zimbabwe I believe there is at least one Garratt which hauls tourist excursions at Victoria Falls, and as far as I know there are still a few Garratts which are steamed regularly in Bulawayo on normal service duties. I was last in Bulawayo over ten years ago and found three Garratts busily working in the station and yard on shunting duties and hauling local trains. The economic climate in Zimbabwe meant there was a shortage of diesel fuel but plenty of coal, so the steam locos were pressed back into service, one of the last places in the world outside China where steam is still in regular non-heritage use (a paper mill in South Africa also still uses steam locos commercially, but not Garratts). Bulawayo shed is still a magnet for steam enthusiasts.

The South African GMAM and Kenyan Class 59 are huge locomotives, weighing in at around 250 tons. Magnificent.

A number of the narrow gauge Garratts on the Welsh Highland Railway are from South Africa. There were two main gauges in South Africa, the 3' 6" Cape Gauge which makes up the bulk of the railway system, and the smaller 2' gauge, from which the Welsh locos came. Now there is also 4' 8 1/2" standard gauge on the Gautrain line which serves O R Tambo airport (and interestingly the very first short railway in Cape Town was also standard gauge but didn't last very long; there's a very old standard gauge loco plinthed in the station in Cape Town).

Edited to add: Now I come to think of it, the Victoria Falls Garratt might have been Zambian. I'm not sure it's working at the moment but a non-Garratt steam loco is.

A good up to date source for world steam, particularly outside the areas of Europe and north America where heritage steam is well documented, is Rob and Yuehong Dickinson's International Steam Pages. I've been an occasional contributor to it with news of steam in various parts of Africa.

For Garratts in general, Gavin Hamilton's The Garratt Locomotive is pretty comprehensive.

>8 ulmannc: We did ride behind one of the Garratt's in Wales a number of years ago. Thank you so much for the summary. I keep forgetting how much steam was in Africa and the huge size of a lot of it in the southern part of the continent.

You are getting my juices rolling for a trip to Cass, WV to see their stable of Shays, Heislers, etc. I love to see movies of them where they are running like crazy and going no place fast!! I'm into the 'different' stuff. I was lucky enough to ride behind UP 3895 Challenger about 10 years ago when the Rocky Mountain RR Club had an anniversary run. Here is hoping UP can get the big boys running. The challenge for them will be to get it running with oil. If I remember correctly, they were strictly coal units when UP ran them in revenue service.

Now if someone would get a 'GG1' running (fat chance) I would be there in a flash to ride behind one again. I did several times running the Northeast Corridor and to Harrisburg a LONG TIME AGO!

>8 ulmannc: I'd love to see a Big Boy running. I've seen quite a few videos of them and they are impressive beasts. Mind you, so are our big Garrats, the Kenyan 59s and South Africa GMAMs, albeit not as big as a Big Boy.

What would be the reasons for converting it to oil-firing? Environmental, cost-effectiveness, convenience? I would have thought that you still have plenty of coal available in the USA. I think I'll always prefer coal-fired locos, partly because they are the ones I have mostly fired.

>9 John5918: I did a bit of digging around to see why coal and not oil. First off, they came on line during WW II so oil was rationed and for the most part coal was not. It was designed to burn low grade bituminous which was available in Wyoming (?). Some people contended that the large firebox needed to burn the coal would not lend itself to an oil conversion.

An attempt was made to convert Big Boy 4005 to oil right after WW II but it didn't work well due to the size of the boiler and insufficient heat from a single burner. Why only one? I have no idea. I did a bit of digging to see if SP used one or more burners on their cab forwards but didn't find anything. I'll have to dig around in my library and see if a book I have with mechanicals of the various SP models shows burner/burners arrangements on the various models.

There is lots of coal(the correct grade?) available in the US but many areas have ordinances against using it but something 'flying through' might be exempt but who knows. The big issue will be loading it. I think the one note I saw said the tender takes about 28 US tons. That's a lot of coal to haul around or find for running it. Back hoes probably only pick up about 1/2 ton at a crack assuming the bucket will go up high enough to drop it in. A large truck mounted crane is more cost. Oil is easier to move.

Enough of my musings!

Came away from a fairly local model railway exhibition with Lokomotiven bayerischer Eisenbahnen by Heinz Schnabel - one of the encyclopaedic Alba works on European locos and rolling stock, though my copy appears to have been printed and published in the former DDR under licence - the colophon carries a copyright statement to Transpress in the former East. 400 pages for £10!

Recent rail books added to my library:

A Treasury of Railroad Folklore edited by B.A. Botkin and Alvin F. Harlow, a 1989 reprint of a 1953 book.

Great Railway Journeys of the East by Max Wade-Matthews, a coffee table book from a used book store.

Pennsylvania Trolleys in Color Volume 4: The 1940s by LeRoy O. King -- rather expensive, but a way to support the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum.

>6 ulmannc:, 7 Someone has just uploaded a video of Bulawayo Garratts in 1999 to YouTube. I was there just one year later.

Zimbabwe Steam: Good Morning Bulawayo 1

>13 John5918:. I got a kick out of the driver oiling around in a white shirt. I wonder what it looks like 8 or 12 or whenever one outlaws on a shift.

What's the amount of weight per axle on something like that? Boiler pressure? Good reference book so I can stop asking a million questions?

I doubt if they get moving with any speed as the road bed didn't look the greatest in the world but then some of the branch lines state side can barely handle 10 mph and don't even THINK of going on them with a 6 axle unit.

Just got back from the Gaithersburg, MD show so I'll throw a few of the goodies in shortly. It's nothing like what it used to be. A friend of mine always sends me out looking for a PRR Philadelphia Terminal Division employee time table for 1944 but the two guys that had any PRR didn't have anything earlier than the late 1950's. Oh well

>14 ulmannc: I'm back in South Sudan without access to my books so I don't have the axle weights and boiler pressures. Despite having catalogued all my books on LT, I realise that I haven't catalogued them well enough to remember which cover Zimbabwean steam locomotives. I have two books in mind but I'll have to get back to Nairobi and check them before I can give you the details.

You're right that the permanent way is often pretty rough these days, and speeds are low, although they would have been higher a few decades ago when rail ruled supreme.

Edited to add: I do know from memory that most South African locos operate at around 1,400 kPa. On the 19D which I fire most often these days the safety valves lift at 1,380 kPa. I think that's about 200 psi.

> 14; According to A.E. Durrant's Garratt Locomotives of the world, the Rhodesian Railways (later National Railways of Zimbabwe) Garratts consisted of a number of classes, starting with the 13th class in 1928 and culminating in the 20th class in 1954. Most of these had boiler pressures of 180 psi, though the 17th class worked at 190 psi and the 15A, 16A, 20th and 20A classes worked at 200 psi, as John suggests. Axle weights started at 13 tons on the 13th class and rose over the years to 17 tons on the 20th.

The two books I was thinking of are:

Railways of Southern Africa - a locomotive guide by John N Middleton

Railways of Southern Africa 150 Years by Jean Dulez

The former has more detail (lists and things) while the latter is mainly about South Africa but has a small section on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe with some photos and diagrams.

Well you got me curious so I went digging and I can't find a source and they don't pop up in Worldcat. Any ideas?

I'm guessing that Middleton is out of print. The Dulez one is new but is probably only on sale locally in South Africa. I got a friend to buy mine for me (and swopped it for an East African book by Steve Mills which is probably also only available locally). There are some order details here.

>7 John5918: The Garratt Yahoo group has just reported that someone visited Zimbabwe last month and there were no Garratts operating there. Sad.

>21 John5918: That's too bad. I remember seeing some old movies showing the Garratt's running from who knows when. Looked like 16mm film type clips. I'll wander around at U-tube and see what's out there.