The following is wrong - the locomotives at Merrimac ARE NOT the engines from Cache (I was given some bad info). So where did they come from?

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For years steamlocomotive.info has had a pair of 600mm gauge tank engines listed at a defunct amusement complex - Eagle Park - in Cache, Oklahoma. I'd never seen as much as a photo of them, and seriously doubted their existence.

They recently surfaced in Merrimac, Wisconsin, apparently owned by a local scrap dealer (who, it would appear, is not going to scrap them). Both look to be in very rough shape. The 0-4-0T was operable for a short time at Cache. The photos were taken by Brian D. Allen this past Sunday.

http://www.steamlocomotive.info/vlocomo ... splay=1706
http://www.steamlocomotive.info/vlocomo ... splay=1707

- Jeff Terry

They look like a couple of engines Hesston at La Porte could have fun with.

600 mm is almost 2 feet may as well say 2 feet, its that close, Hesston has 1 or 2 german engines 2 ft, I don't think they regauged at all. One was hidden in a haystack during the war.

Thank you Jeff! I had puzzled about these locomotives as well. Had made a number of calls to Cache, OK and knew they actually existed but couldn't get any solid information about disposition, future or photos. Thank you so much for resolving this one!

Regards,
Doug

Does anyone know the name of the scrap dealer? Interested in the IGA locomotive for the 14th Engineers.....

Glad to see them turn up, at least somewhere, although I know of some folks in OK that may be upset to see them gone, as they tried for YEARS to buy them.

BTW If that 0-8-0 is a Feldbahn engine of WW1, it isn't like any I have ever seen. It seems much larger, and has piston valves, which the WW1 didn't have.

I wonder if this engine may be one of the several built for the Russion Front in WW2? It also should have the Klien Lindner swinging axles, which I can't tell on this one, but I don't think the later engines had this feature, but they were regageable to 750mm.

The IGA locomotives came in a bunch of different classes. We are all used to seeing the squat little tank engines, but the larger ones are very rare. Also we tend to think of only the little 0-8-0s and not the 0-4-0, 0-6-0, and 0-4-4-0 varients that they also used.

I was not aware of the German Army using specially made narrow gauge stuff in Russia....anywhere to find out about that?

I was shown these locomotives by a friend of the property owner back in August of 2010. I believe they had been recently moved from Black Earth, WI at the time. I have a few more detailed pictures on my Flickr page

I was almost wondering if they were the missing Leavenworth, WA locomotives when that topic was raised.

If you know where I could talk to someone about the IGA engine, could you PM me and let me know? That would be great.

Interesting that these locos were considered a mystery, I had no clue and have known about them for a long time, as have a lot of folks that I know in the preservation community here in Wisconsin...
They actually belong to a friend of the scrap dealer, and are just being stored on the property. They were previously stored on a Christmas tree farm down by Black Earth, WI. He purchased at least one of them from the Midwest Central in Mt Pleasant, IA. I cannot remember if I saw them both there before he purchased them or not.
I know the owner has no plans to sell them any time soon. His intention is to restore them and use them as power for a tourist railroad somewhere here in Wisconsin.

According to my phone logs, I made 21 phone calls over a 3 year span (from 2007 until 2010) trying to learn the fate of these two, to obtain photos if they were still in Cache, and so forth. As recently as 2009 relatives of the owner were saying that he was in poor health, and that the locomotives were still in Cache. Talked to the local librarian, the local "historical society" with near zero results.

We have lots of "mystery" locomotives floating around. And doubtless there are people out there who know of them. The difficulty lies in connecting the question to a knowledgeable source. Sigh.

Well, the plot indeed thickens. I just received an email from Florian Rauh in Germany who says the following:



I am strongly inclined to agree that the 0-8-0T in the photo isn't Maffei and much more like is the sister of the locomotive in the link he provided. And the 0-4-0T looks much more like a Jung than a BMAG 0-4-0T.

So where does that leave us? Either the initial information as to the provenance of these two locomotives is wrong...or we have two previously unaccounted for locomotives floating around. Any information would be useful, to say the least.

Rob Dickinson has now written an accounting of the ten locos in this family with images and the help of Thomas Kautzor.

http://www.internationalsteam.co.uk/tra ... many11.htm

TH

Tonight's new American Pickers episode showed the Eagle Park locos stored inside at the closed park in Cache, OK in much better condition than the "mystery" locos pictured above.

Rob

Here's a screenshot of one of the locos from the American Pickers episode.

I feel that this falls under the "fair use" provision of copyright, it's a short excerpt, a single frame of video, and being used for educational/research purposes. Should the mods disagree, they can remove it.