Trifter

The lumber museum shows a combination of the history of lumbering in Pennsylvania and the current industry.  One exhibit that many see and walk past without seeing the significance is the “stem-winder” railroad engine.  This poster near it gives some specifications of the engine.  Most line engines could pull far more than 22 carloads of logs but this one did it over grades and curves that the line engine could not handle. The term B.F. is not familiar to many, it is the unit lumber is measured with, the Board Foot.  Twelve board feet of lumber is one cubic foot.  A piece of lumber 12 inches by 12 inches by 1 inch is one board foot.  An 8 foot two by six used in construction is 8 times six divided by 12 times 2 or eight board feet.  (8*6/12*2=8)  The 100,000 board feet cut from the logs this train could carry would result in about 12,500 2×6x8’s. They weigh about 20 pounds each pushing the total to over a quarter of a million pounds.

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The line engine had two steam cylinders, one on each side with connecting rods along the driver wheels.  This converted the push pull motion of the cylinders to rotary motion.  The line engine shown below is owned by the Williams Grove Steam Engine Society.

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Compare this to the picture of the Shay with the boiler sitting off center.  In addition the boiler on the Shay is longer and smaller in diameter.

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The four steam cylinders on the Shay are located on the right side of the engine.  They are mounted vertically in a row, much like an inline automobile engine.  The “crankshaft” runs along the right side of the engine.  This picture shows the cylinders, the bright metal object in the foreground is one of the push rods.   

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This engine was used in production for over 40 years. The boiler is set to the right to provide space for the engine and balance.

This is obvious on the front view.

Here we see the close up of the bevel gears that are really a part of the drive wheels of the engine.  All of the wheels of the engine are driven.  This increases traction by putting all of the engine’s weight on the driven wheels.

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I also got two shots of the cab of the engine. This one shows the back of the boiler, where the fireman (the person who fueled the engine) and the engineer (the person who drove it) worked.  With this engine in its use the crew was probably one person.  Two were employed on line engines where the amount of fuel needed was such that shoveling it was nearly a full time job.  Firing and operating a boiler and a steam engine were not trivial tasks.  The crew had to maintain water level in the boiler, something that is as much an art as a science.  The water is boiled off as steam.  The more power, the more steam, the more water needed.  The heat of vaporization of water – the BTU’s to turn it to steam – is turned into mechanical energy.  It is possible to calculate the number of gallons of water needed.

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Here we show the engineer’s stand, where he stood and held his “hand upon the throttle” and :”his eye upon the rail”. These lines are from the song, ‘Life is like a Mountain Railroad‘   If you want to get an idea what it was like as an engineer that song has some great insight.  In the article linked above I take the song and bring it into today’s words.

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