I am scanning and restoring some images in a family album, many images from the late 1880's in Michigan. Included was this photographic, hand colored postcard of Baby on the Harbor Springs Ry, also known as the Hemlock Central. So far, it is the sharpest version I've ever seen of this image, which shows up now and then in black and white. This is cropped, and doesn't show the whole train behind.





It actually makes a very nice looking 8" x 12" print, although it is the ugliest "Shay" I've ever seen. Looks sort of like a Forney cab and boiler on a set of shay trucks.

Thanks for posting this image. I'd glanced at it before in various publications, but upon taking a close look, I've got two questions:

Where's the frame?

Where's the firebox?

Traces and records of the Harbor Springs railroad can be found in northern-Michigan museums, and I may have to look around on this month's vacation up there. The Petoskey city museum in the old Pere Marquette depot has some materials from Shay's retirement, which he devoted to experimentation with weird machines, presumably financed by royalty checks from Lima Machine Works. The brick machine shop he used was bulldozed for condo construction in Harbor Springs a few years back, but his octagonal stamped-steel house is still standing and in use as a store. The PRR Harbor Springs station is in use as a restaurant, but we ate in the Greek-run place across the street, so I can't vouch for the food.

On last year's vacation I learned that the small-boat museum has been displaced from the Mackinac City state park, so I don't know what's happened to the hulk of Shay's steel yacht, the AHA.

It's been moved to the Harbor Springs Historical Society, Shay Historic Park, Harbor Springs, MI.

http://homepage.mac.com/dfahey/ShayDays ... bum54.html

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a

Surviving World Steam Project

I assume the firebox is hidden behind the engine assembly. From another source, I read that the boiler on his engines served as the frame as well.

I imagine that it has a marine style boiler-basically a tube within a tube. Some call this a bull head or ramsbottom boiler. The first Hiesler had one, and many English industrial locomotives used them as well, notably Bagnall and sir Arthur Heywood on his 15" steamers