in today's Portland Oregonian A&E section.

Metal behemoth

03/29/02

"To start your 1941 Lima Northern-class steam locomotive, simply insert the key into the ignition lock, ensure that the gear selector is in either 'park' or 'neutral' and twist the key to the right until the starter motor engages."

A person wouldn't have to be very familiar with the arcane world of live steam to know that nothing in that sentence is true. Especially "simply."

Firing up a steam locomotive is the work of several days and a couple of dozen volunteers, a task that takes a village if anything does. As I learned recently when the folks who maintain and operate Southern Pacific locomotive No. 4449 let me hang around while they readied the magnificent old pro for a trip to Bend.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, volunteer Pat Tracy sat in the fireman's seat -- the one on the left -- in No. 4449's cab and "Hot Water" Jack Wheelihan (who flew from Chicago to work on the locomotive over the weekend) sat in the engineer's seat. Both have been a part of No. 4449's crew since the 1970s.

The night before, a booster car filled the boiler with 5,000 gallons of hot water and now pumped steam through a hissing hose. But it was time to light the fire in No. 4449's belly and start building pressure to 300 pounds per square inch.

The cab of a steam locomotive is a dark cave, dominated by the rivet-studded back of the firebox. It sprouts a tangle of pipes and manifolds, red-handled valves (I lost count at 22), brass gauges, taps, levers, switches and a speedometer that goes up to 100 mph. If ever there was an unautomated, unvirtual machine, this is it. Nothing is programmed or built in; each choice is made by the men whom this monster dwarfs.

That was evident as Tracy and Wheelihan tossed sputtering flares (railroaders call 'em fusees) in front of the oil spray in the firebox and peered through a smoky blaze to see if the fire had caught. It was a little like trying to start a campfire on a rainy night by sitting in your tent and tossing matches through the fly at the kindling. But after four flares, some oily rags and deft jockeying of steam atomizer pressure and the firing lever -- which controlled the oil spray on the firing manifold -- they got the beginnings of a respectable fire.

Watching the goings-on was like stepping back into a lost world.

"No one can actually travel back in time, but the roundhouse is like a time machine," Tracy said later. "It's smoky, drafty, dusty, greasy and the roof leaks, but it's from a different time." He was just right: The place is seemingly untouched, a building once populated by a race of giants who left behind machine tools weighing many tons and locomotives weighing hundreds of tons.

If anybody can rule in the place of those vanished giants, it's Doyle McCormack, a big man himself and one who owns locomotives the way some guys own old Fiats: several, plus one for spare parts.

"It depends on how you count," he says, grinning. "I'd say three." Which doesn't count the crashed BC Rail road switcher that'll donate a diesel engine to a locomotive he's restoring. That would be four to most of us, but McCormack says three, and he's not a man much used to being disagreed with.

Especially not about steam trains. Although the engines he owns, and the ones he operates for Union Pacific, are diesels, McCormack probably has as many hours in the engineers' seats of steam locomotives as any man in the country today. He's a nationally known expert in restoring and operating steam engines and a technical advisor to the feds who regulate steam trains.

But a fair chunk of his heart and soul must reside right here in No. 4449, the locomotive into which McCormack has poured thousands of hours during the past 28 years. Built in 1941, No. 4449 spent most of its working life on SP's Coast Daylight passenger run in California before it was retired in 1957. An astute city official got it donated to Portland in 1958. In 1974 it was rolled out of Oaks Park and restored for its most famous role, pulling the American Freedom Train during the American Bicentennial. McCormack was the project's chief mechanical officer and No. 4449's engineer, and he still is.

The other thing you should know about No. 4449 is that it's one of the three locomotives that you own.

You in the metropolitan sense -- the city of Portland owns No. 4449 and the Spokane, Portland & Seattle No. 700 and Oregon Railroad & Navigation No. 197, which is older, smaller and mostly disassembled. The two big guys are Northern class locomotives: 4-8-4s, as they're known, because each has a pilot truck of four wheels, eight huge drivers and then a trailing truck of four wheels. Both are huge, though No. 700 is 10,000 pounds heavier. Seldom has five tons seemed so trifling as in the difference between 435 tons and 440.

Anyway, numbers are merely an attempt of all-too-mortal hands and eyes trying to frame this fearful symmetry, to ensnare their steamy, sweaty magic with dry logic. The reality is as undescribable by numbers as a scorpion or a dandelion. McCormack says a steam locomotive is the closest that man has ever come to creating life. And by Friday afternoon, I knew he was right.

The engine towers into the gloom of the roundhouse, seemingly as big as God and gleaming in its fresh red-white-and-blue livery. Steam billows and hisses from two dozen valves and orifices. Hot water drips from pipes, which crack and bang as they heat up. The firebox roars and the stack billows a plume into the smoke jack in the roundhouse roof. Heat radiates off the metal as turbo-generators on top of the boiler whine up like a trio of jet engines.

It's a bright, sparky, digital world outside those huge doors, but here there be dragons.

Contacts: Note that the roundhouse is not a safe place for visitors; you should contact one of the following groups for volunteer opportunities: Northwest Rail Museum, 503-244-4449; www.northwestrailmuseum.com/ Friends of 4449, 503-287-4229. www.4449.com/

Sound sample: To hear Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys play the best train song ever, "Orange Blossom Special," call Inside Line, 503-225-5555 (Clark County, 360-397-5555), category 2372. If you know of an event or scene that should be covered in this column, call John Foyston at 503-221-8368 or johnfoyston@news.oregonian.com.



Wrinnbo@aol.com

Very Nice:
"It's a bright, sparky, digital world outside those huge doors, but here there be dragons."

are they referring to the crew ? :o)


lamontdc@adelphia.net

Very nice indeed. And again, nothing about Lionel trains or being "train crazy".


bobyar2001@yahoo.com

"Here there be dragons." How true. Whitewater Valley's locomotive 9339, even though she be a diesel, in our house she is refered to as "The Black Dragon".

This was a wonderful article full of imagery and warmth. What I found most heartening was the fact that the author didn't treat the readers as a bunch of idiots. The general public doesn't really know a lot about steam engines but nobody likes to be talked down to. This was a beautifully written piece.

I am more than a little sorry that there are no plans that those of us back in the east and midwest will be able to see 4449.Mr.MacCormack has done a lovely job on her. By the way, does anyone know what the progress is on those FA's (PA's?) he brought up from,I believe it was, Mexico?Haven't really heard anything on that project in quite some time.

(And, yes, Bob, I am):
Just Train Crazy,

-Angie

Ladypardus@cs.com