Are these engines visible on Google? I can't seem to find any sizable island in that lake but maybe I am looking in the wrong place.

What a great job of stabilizing! I had presumed a little jacking, a few ties, and some tamping. But a complete lift...wow!

Steve

They are not on an island - its a 3000' wide strip of land that separates Eagle Lake from Chamberlain Lake to the South.



Here you can see clearing the locomotives sit in as well as the railbed curving southwest towards the trestle.

The straight, North/south path is the carry trail from Chamberlain Lake - it follows the remains of the Tramway.

Yes, it was a complete lift. We had to excavate (by hand) down about 4 feet through hard clay than construct an underdrain system, install geo-fabric and than build a new crushed stone roadbed.

This is what No. 2 looked like before we started:


The closet we could truck the crushed stone was about 3 miles from the site


We loaded the ballast into 5 gallon plastic buckets which were hauled by snowmobile across Chamberlain Lake to the site. We had to move 150 cubic yards of crushed stone which figures out to about 5000 buckets. blocking etc. came in by small boat.


Once the ballast was in place we assembled panel track and worked it into place. Here we are using a chainsaw winch to place a section under the front of No. 2

What is a chainsaw wench?
How does she work?

Terry, again I have to say congratulations on a difficult job in a place that looks awfully hard to reach. In fact, the job looks all the tougher with the additional photos. I just hope you and your friends didn't get a "vampire virus" from all the mosquitoes you must have had up there in the warmer months, and I also hope you all didn't get frostbite, either!

On the road itself, one of the more amazing things is that it was built as late as it was, with the result that the running time was as short as it was. It wouldn't surprise me if this was one of the last logging railroads built in America, and may well have been the last one built in the eastern part of the country.

It's also amazing that it was built after experience with internal combustion road haulage, which would normally have prevented the building of the railroad in the first place. Of course, it seems likely much of the investment was lost, much of which can be blamed on the economic depression that started just after this road opened, but still, it seems unusually late for the construction of such a woods railroad, and amazing that it held on as long as it did in the face of that depression.

The more I look around your material, the more impressed I become, and the more appreciative that you tolerate my bad jokes about getting the railroad and the engines running. I say this after looking at your weblog on the Lombard engine restoration--very fine work, and the nature of it is reminiscent of steam work. More congratulations are in order. . .

I dare say, you should go and show those fellows on the Flying Yankee project how this is done. . .(no direct criticism of the Flying Yankee group, just a comment that this is the sort of work, and the sort of person, to bring an old EMC to life).

Thanks; I didn't think that island description in the first post made sense. I take it the lake doesn't freeze solidly enough to drive across.

Some info about one brand of chainsaw winch for anyone wondering:
http://www.lewiswinch.com/

Edit to add:
If 3 different online map services are to be believed, there are two Eagle Lakes in Maine. The one in question, directly east of Allagash Lake and another farther NE, just west of Square Lake, and home to the town of Eagle Lake.

Steve

Terry,
In your first group of photos you show a Lombard hauling an engine's running gear. Can you add any details? Thanks...mld

A lot has to do with the location and nature of the Maine paper/timber industry and technology. With no efficent road building equipment it was far more efficent and cost effective to haul pulp in the winter on cheap ice roads and drive it long distances in the spring on the rivers. However, in this case the water shed flowed the wrong way - thus the railroad.

At that time there were simply no adaquate roads into this region. Now there are close to 30,000 miles of roads. In fact, to support this operation Lacroix built a 50 mile all season gravel road from Lac Frontier Quebec to a large supply depot at Churchill Lake.

Lacroix maintained a fleet of REO trucks which clattered across this road night and day. In addition he maintained a fleet of at least 30 Lombard gasoline tractors. During the winter months they worked 24 hours per day 6 days per week to haul pulpwood from the cuttings to the north to be piled on the ice at Churchill - some of these hauls were a 40 mile round trip for the tractors and the hauling season averaged only 90 days. Come Spring, the pulp was boomed up the lakes and loaded onto the railroad.

In 1929 - the best year - this sytem of Lombards, Railroad and river moved 163,865 cords of pulpwood.

The ultimate end of the operation was the sharp decline in the paper industry - pulp prices plumeted and Great Northern Paper was not willing to pay the premium price Lacroix was able to get in previous years.

Whats amazing with this operation is the magatude of the logistics - in 1929 the locomotives burning approximatly 40 gallons of oil per hour required over 200,000 gallons of oil all of which had to be hauled by Lombard from Lac Frontier during the previous winter - mind you Lombards were efficent but they themselves burned gasoline at the rate of 8 gallons per hour! In fact Lacroix had setup his oil company.

Here is a video which shows how efficent Lombards could be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgyt0uqi7KA

Interestingly this is a Great Northern Paper operation which features a Lombard model LD Diesel. The model LD used a Fairbanks-Morse 36A 5-1/2 diesel engine. This particular tractor pulled a 298 ton load of pulpwood. Only one was built and that was the very last Lombard.

That is the frame for EL&WB No.2 (ex-LS&MS 780, NYC 5780). To move it over the 50 miles from Lac Frontier to Tramway they broke it down - boiler, frame, tender.

This was March of 1928. At one point the boiler ended-up on its side when a sled hit a soft spot or slid off the road. The trip took 3 days. After arriving at Tramway it begain to rain the next day and the ice roads were all but gone.

It intersting to read forum posts about how this locomotive or that locomotive is going to be moved and the need for cranes etc. These guys had no crane. It was all done with blocking and jacks.

In the photo below you can see a sled with the tender trucks and lead truck, the tender itself and the boiler (with marker flags) in the background. Note the oil bunker retrofitted to the tender. Its a long way from Collinwood, Ohio where this locomotive was operating in 1927.

Steve,

Yes there are two Eagle Lakes which is confusing. The one that counts is indeed just east of Allagash Lake and to the North of Chamberlain Lake

Terry,

Amazing thread and thanks for your informative responses.

When was the recent jacking and tracklaying done for these two locomotives?

Chris

The lumbering crews used to skid trees across the lake, often pulled by teams of Belgian and other draft horses. The ice wood get to be several feet thick, and harvesting blocks of the stuff was money in the bank each winter. We had winter snow storms that buried houses and eliminated streets. During the twentieth century, the annual amount of snow fall and severity of winter freezing diminished spectacularly. People will still take pickup trucks out onto lakes to ice fish, but fewer do so these days. A lot of trucks wind up with fish in them.

Hi Terry,
I live but 20 min from you. Are they looking for volunteers on the tramway/ loco work this spring/summer?
Who would one contact to make a trip? Have been meaning to see these things up close and this would be a great opportunity to do so.

Bob

Bob,

I sent you an e-mail

Best regards,

Terry

Great information and great stabelizing work.

I liked the one web site quote "it was originally a steam locomotive but later converted to burn crude oil".

As though burning oil made the steam locomotive something other than a steamer. Today's people are too far removed from when railroading was a common place thing - sort of like kids asking how many trains you have, not train cars or railroad cars.

Doug vV