The Nevada State Railroad Museum in Carson City runs trains with link and pin drawbars (not couplers, couplers are automatic) as does the SPCRR at Ardenwood in Fremont CA...

As for the paint. There are a number of people who study paint, both by sampling on historic buildings or artifacts, or by researching railroad records, or by studying paint technology, locating and reviewing old paint catalogs or sample cards or even the paint and decorating aesthetic of the time. Those studies can be very involved. I know of a couple of cases where a sample of the paint has been analyzed to identify the specific pigments used. In some cases, particularly Baldwin the records identify the original paint colors and striping patterns as well as where brass was used.

Most physical paint research uses a simple “crater” cut through all the layers found on a car. Of course railroads were known to strip paint occasionally… I have included a sample below… the chip in resin is only occasionally used on railroad equipment if only because it is more time consuming.

We include paint studies in all of our preservation (restoration) reports as do most railroad museums in California and Nevada… the paint report can be as short as 3 pages or as long as 150…

As for the red found on the current paint on William Mason, assuming the scheme is pre-1880 or so the red would almost certainly be vermillion, a mercury based pigment. Note the wheels are not red… that is for the most part a railfan fantasy.

Mason used wagon top boilers as well as straight boilers prior to the Civil war. There is photographic evidence in several books.

I won't say you're wrong, but that seems a bit unusual--not so much for the expenditure for a new boiler (the B&O even built replicas from the ground up for the 1927 exhibit and other occasions), but for the idea that it would have been built new for only 65 or 75 psi (I've seen sources with either pressure listed as the current pressure). Chances are the pressure would have been well over 100 psi in service; the famous General of the W&A, built at about the same time, supposedly worked around 140 psi.

That low pressure--which is also what a number of other engines in the collection have had (such as the 600 and the 147--a 2-6-0 and 4-6-0 respectively) suggests concerns about an old boiler, possibly of iron construction.

http://www.csa-railroads.com/Essays/Spe ... eneral.htm



Indeed that's true. It's just that I was under the impression that Mason was more associated with straight top rather than wagon top boilers. . .that eye of his for flowing lines, you know!

And yes, all the available photos I've seen of the engine. . .which only go back to 1927, it seems--do show the wagon top boiler it has now.

I wonder if there are any older photos of the engine around, specifically prior to its retirement in 1892. No matter what the engine looked like, they would be a treasure.

Got me looking up older pix of No. 25

These look to be at an exhibition in the late 1930s, maybe "Railroads on Parade" as part of the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940:
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/loc ... 0902015807

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/loc ... 0902015234

As the General in Disney's "The Great Locomotive Chase:"

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/loc ... 0225205555

In a scene from "Gods and Generals:"

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/loc ... 0503164532

As most of us remember her--and take note of the C&O 4-8-4 in the background.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/loc ... 0224221702

Postcard image, possibly from the 1950s:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/73 ... 881434.jpg

This is cool--under an earlier overhaul in 2013. The boiler looks like it has butt-seam longitudinal joints, but I have to say the welt plates look awfully narrow!

http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/loc ... 0222223823

There was an old photo or illustration I remember of a sister B&O engine #26 in an issue of the B&OHS magazine featuring an article on the Mason about the time of its restoration in the late 90s. It was also a Mason and showed a wagon top boiler.

It's also possible that the 1927 B&O boilermakers--or more specifically their supervisors--"cheapened out" on the new boiler, "knowing" that they only had to keep this thing running through the Fair of the Iron Horse towing a couple old wooden cars around on display, not keeping a schedule to Cumberland or D.C. You don't need speed, you don't need power, and you're only kicking it down the road for another couple years, right? Think in terms of a movie prop and not a piece of motive power, and of course building a 75-psi boiler makes sense. And it might also explain why the crownsheet is now thin.

Now, of course, had this only been a 75-psi boiler, I have a nagging feeling we would have heard about it by now from the various sources that worked on her for movie work and museum display. But, then again, maybe not--it's not exactly a detail you publicize, and it may indeed have been a discrete secret disseminated only on a "need-to-know" basis.

I note with interest that this must be a boiler with crown bars; a style long obsolete by the time the 1927 replica was built. To my way of thinking, the easiest way to get this project through the shop with minimum time, expense, and discussion with the executive suite, would be to simply use the old drawings... even if they were over sixty years old. This would ensure that the replica did indeed look like the original. Numbers would have been run to ensure that the boiler met current code, even if that meant choosing a working pressure far below what the then currently accepted standard was. So long as the pressure appeared to allow for the limited display service desired, what's not to like? Nobody appearantly felt the need to prove they could take an old design and 'make it better,' they had already proven that hundreds of times over on other engines.

That's a concept maybe our present day preservationists should pay more attention to.

.

I've seen a video of the Inyo being coupled to a box car that way, it was at the NV State Railroad Museum, but not sure when. They probably would want to do it with the brakeman sitting on the passenger car platform inserting the pin, or hang the pin from a pole while standing to the side, like they do in the UK...

No we have to do it like they did south of the border! (On the Salvador division of the Ferrocarriles Internacionales de Centro America)

https://chasingtrains.smugmug.com/Inter ... -hrZb39N/A


But we can also adapt knuckle couplers to link and pin...

https://chasingtrains.smugmug.com/Inter ... -csLfJcW/A

Photos by John West


Cody Muse

Correct. No personnel in the red zone. I've attached a photo of the V&T #22 being coupled to an 1873-era combine. Although the locomotive has an air pump, the combine does not have air brakes. When this train runs (for demonstration purposes, not carrying passengers), there is a Brakeman on the combine platform with a brake club.

Looks like an "iron box", for holding spare links and pins, on the back of the tender.

And the rebuilt B&O William Mason has a larger such box in the same place, same shape as well.

Darn! Wish I had remembered this earlier thread, wouldn't have started this new one on the completed--and striking--William Mason.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=41147

And a belated thank you to Kelly Anderson for his explanation of the low pressure on the engine as it is now.

A bit of speculation. . .considering what Mr. Anderson said about this being a new boiler from 1926, and considering the thin crown sheet even for the current pressure, I have to wonder if the whole boiler was a replica based on what may have been original records from 1855 or so. That might have included some plates that were lighter than recommended by the 1920s, but as Mr. Mitchell suggested in an earlier post, it may have been considered adequate for exhibition duty.

A bit of foam. . .as it's likely the engine ran under considerably higher pressure when in service, I wonder how she would run with that capability restored. She wouldn't pull much by modern standards; indeed I still wonder how we conquered the West with locomotives that were mostly of this size, which is quite small.

But she was built as a passenger engine, and originally assigned to the B&O's "Washington Branch,' which is what the line between Washington and Baltimore was before the construction of the Metropolitan Division between Washington and Point of Rocks after the Civil War. In terms of alignment and grades, it's essentially not much different from what it was when it was built in 1835--and it still has passenger trains on it.

It could be considered the 1835 equivalent of a modern high speed route today.

Which makes me wonder--how fast could that little engine go, with her restored boiler pressure and steel rods, on the route she was built for, pulling replicas of the cars she would have handled back then? Could she run at least some commuter schedules on that line, and keep the pace with the modern equipment?

(Headed for the bunker after that one!)