29. Interlude: The SP&S 700

The year 1995 represented a significant transition in my career. Before 1995, nearly all of my work was studying forest planning and forest policy for environmental groups. After 1995, nearly all of my work was studying urban growth and transportation planning and policy for free-market groups. Before describing that transition, it is worth taking an interlude to look at what was almost my third career: railroad history.

I’ve loved passenger trains ever since my first ride on one, from Grand Forks, North Dakota to Portland, when I was five years old. I grew up with Diesel-powered streamlined trains, and can’t remember ever seeing a steam locomotive in operation except in places like the Portland Zoo and Disneyland. Compared to a real, full-sized steam locomotive, these were toys, so I ignored them and maintained a fondness for streamliners.

One such streamliner was the Rio Grande Zephyr, a remnant of the Chicago-Oakland California Zephyr. The Rio Grande Railroad had elected to not join Amtrak in 1971 and so continued to run its Zephyr between Denver and Salt Lake City over what is probably the most scenic rail route in America. By 1983, however, Amtrak talked the Rio Grande into letting it run Amtrak trains on its route rather than the far-less scenic route it had been using. Vickie and I were on the last run of the Rio Grande Zephyr, and I wrote about it in Passenger Train Journal. After returning from that trip, I became much more interested in rail history.

The city of Portland owns several steam locomotives that had been donated to it by the railroads when they were converting to Diesel. These locomotives were on display in Oaks Park near the Willamette River. In 1976, the creators of the American Freedom Train picked one of Portland’s locomotives, the Southern Pacific 4449, to restore and pull the bicentennial train. Although I lived in Portland at the time, I didn’t see the locomotive operate until 1984, when it took a trip to New Orleans; at that time, I followed it from Portland to Eugene.

Suddenly, I was hooked. The sights, smells, and sounds — especially the sounds — of this locomotive in operation simply exuded power, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Shortly after that, we located our offices to an industrial part of Eugene about a block from the Southern Pacific railroad tracks. Every year or so, I would hear the whistle of a steam locomotive, and everyone on the office knew to drop everything they were doing and rush out to the tracks to watch the 4449 go by on some excursion or another. Sometimes we would pile into cars and chase it up Willamette Pass or even as far as Klamath Falls.

Once when we were in Portland, Vickie and I went to Oaks Park to see the two locomotives that remained and we found a bunch of people working on one of them, the Spokane, Portland & Seattle 700. One of them was a young man named Chris McLarney.

McLarney had gone to Benson High School, Oregon’s premiere vocational arts school. The school included a complete foundry and other equipment to teach students the skills needed to build, operate, and maintain mid-twentieth-century technologies such as steam boilers and internal combustion engines (today the school focuses on high-tech hardware and software).

When work began to restore the 4449 in 1975, the 15-year-old was disappointed that he was too young to go with the Freedom Train. So, legend has it, he knocked down the fence surrounding the 700 and began restoring his own locomotive. In 1977, he founded the Pacific Railroad Preservation Association (PRPA) to support the locomotive’s restoration. Within a few years, he was joined by about a dozen other enthusiasts, and by 1989 they had moved the locomotive into the same roundhouse that the Southern Pacific was leasing to the city (for a dollar a year) to house the 4449.

In 1989, I was restless to move out of Eugene, and Vickie suggested we move to Portland so I could work on the 700. We found a house in Oak Grove, about six miles from the roundhouse where the locomotive was stored, and located an office just a few blocks from the roundhouse.

Before making the move, we went to the roundhouse and met Clint Myers, PRPA’s vice president. Clint was an auto mechanic who was so enthused about steam locomotives that he went to Portland Community College to become an expert welder. He quickly sized me up as someone who had absolutely none of the skills needed to restore a steam locomotive, so he suggested that I become the group’s newsletter editor.

That was a perfect choice. I would interview people about what they were working on and write it up. Since I knew very little about steam locomotive technology, the newsletter became a good introduction for other novices while at the same time having enough depth of detail to satisfy old-timers who had worked with steam. I wrote and laid out the newsletter on our office computers and printed them on the office photocopier, effectively donating the costs to PRPA. I also assembled and published a 24-page photo booklet about the history of the locomotive which we sold for $5; it was a great fundraiser.

I knew that the 4449 and 700 were both 4-8-4 locomotives, meaning they had four lead wheels to help the locomotive on curves, eight driving wheels for power, and four trailing wheels to carry the weight of the firebox. The 4449’s driving wheels were 80 inches tall, while the 700’s were 77 inches. Taller wheels meant higher speeds while smaller wheels meant more power.

I didn’t know that the 4449 operated at 300 pounds of boiler pressure per square inch while the 700 was just 260, which gave the 4449 an advantage. But the 700 had something that the 4449 didn’t have: roller bearings on all of its wheels. Before roller bearings, railroad locomotives and cars used friction bearings, which were just as they sound: axles turned within a curved bearing, with grease applied to reduce the friction caused by those bearings. Roller bearings greatly reduced the friction from movement.

Although owned by the SP&S, the 700 was built following a Northern Pacific design. Northern Pacific had pioneered locomotives in the 4-8-4 configuration, so they were often called Northerns. A few years after NP had ordered the first 4-8-4s, the Timken roller bearing company ordered one Northern locomotive outfitted with roller bearings and then sent the locomotive to railroads around the country as a demonstrator. The story goes that the locomotive was damaged when it was running on the NP, so the NP bought it and from then on all new NP locomotives were equipped with roller bearings. Southern Pacific was late to the roller bearing revolution, so continued with friction bearings.

Northern Pacific got most of its coal from mines in Montana, and the coal was of poor quality. To compensate, its locomotives were built with really large fireboxes. The SP&S didn’t burn coal; it burned out, but the same large firebox was included on the 700, which gave it a huge advantage. While a locomotive’s theoretical power was based on driver size, boiler pressure, and other simple measures, that power was not much use if it ran out of steam.

Due to its large firebox, the 700 could turn five gallons of water into steam per second, allowing it to pull a 12-car train at 100 miles per hour without worry that it would run out of steam so long as it still had water in its tank. Because of its ability to rapidly turn water into steam, locomotive expert Robert Le Massena called the 700-class locomotives “exceptional.” It wasn’t long before I got to see this exceptional machine in operation.

By 1990, McLarney had worked on the locomotive for 15 years, and many other members of the group had worked for well over a decade. So I was lucky to have arrived less than a year before the 700 was put under steam for the first time since about 1956.

Although the all-volunteer crew had put in thousands of hours towards the locomotive’s restoration, a critical factor was that a Burlington Northern vice-president named Bill Francis had gotten interested enough in the project to donate goods and services to the project. When the locomotive was steamed up in 1990, thanks to Francis we had someplace to go.

Built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1938, the locomotive spent its most of its life pulling passenger trains between Portland and Spokane. After passenger trains were entirely Dieselized in the early 1950s, it hauled some freight trains. When the SP&S had completely replaced steam with Diesel, it decided to have a “farewell to steam” run from Portland to Wishram, Washington, 105 miles up the Columbia River, and back. Jim and Bob Vanderbeck, two of the active members of PRPA, had been on this run as children.

Having restored the locomotive, the natural route for a “return to steam” run was from Portland to Wishram, and with Francis’ help, PRPA arranged to do this over the Burlington Northern in May, 1990. Rather than ride the train, I decided to chase it and take photographs along the way, and I invited old-growth ecologist Jerry Franklin to join me. As I recall, we drove to Wishram and met Vickie, who took the train, and she drove back so we could ride the train back.

Burlington Northern was the result of the merger of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways, the co-owners of the SP&S. After the merger, BN decided that it didn’t need to operate the former NP route over the Cascades from Kennewick to Auburn Washington, so it sold it to a man named Nick Temple who served local freight customers under the name of Washington Central Railroad. After the successful trip to Wishram, Temple invited us to pull some community appreciation trains between Kennewick and Cle Elum, Washington, which we did in fall of 1990.

Once again, I drove to Kennewick and Jerry Franklin joined me there to take photos and, in my case, videos of the train. One rainy day the locomotive pulled 14 cars jammed full of people up Yakima Canyon. One of our members riding the cab was so excited he kept blowing the whistle. The engineer, Ken Prager, who had worked as a fireman on the 700 in SP&S days and in 1990 was working as an engineer for Amtrak, had to listen to the driving wheels to make sure they didn’t slip. Every time the whistle blew, the drivers slipped because Ken couldn’t hear them. Franklin thought that was amusing; later, a professional videographer mentioned to me that he was happy to see we were excited about the locomotive, but it would look more professional if we only blew the whistle at a crossing or another appropriate spot.

Ken’s job of driving the locomotive required a federal license of some kind, but firing it did not. PRPA volunteers were rewarded for their work by taking turns firing the 700 over various stages of the trip to and on the Washington Central. My first time firing was at night with the locomotive running backwards because there was no wye to turn it at one end of a trip. With Clint looking over my shoulder the entire way, I learned that, even though the 700’s fireman didn’t have to shovel coal, firing a locomotive was a lot harder than it looked.

A large gauge indicates the boiler pressure. If the pressure exceeds 260 pounds, a safety valve will open up, making a lot of noise and letting everyone know that the fireman is wasting energy. If it falls below 250, there’s a danger the boiler won’t be able to provide the power needed by the engineer. Two water glasses provide a dim look inside the boiler; if the water falls below the top of the firebox or crown sheet, the temperature disparity will cause the firebox to crack. Such a crown sheet failure could kill everyone in the cab. The smoke coming out the stack should be slightly grey; if it’s black, then the fireman is wasting fuel. If it’s yellow, then the fire is eating away at the boiler’s interior.

The fireman’s job is to keep the boiler pressure, water, and smoke balanced at all times, plus provide extra eyes watching for signals and other possible problems down the road. Whereas the engineer could get off the locomotive as soon as we arrived somewhere and not board it until just before it was time to go, a fireman had to be on board at all times (including all night long when we were on the road) to keep things safe and operational.

Even when not pretending to be a fireman, there was constant work when out on the road. PRPA had a tool car and a coach that came with the locomotive and they required maintenance. The coach had a rest room and Washington Central promised to send a truck around to empty our blackwater tank while we were in Kennewick. The truck never showed up, so Clint and I filled five gallon buckets with sewage and carried them to the nearest dump station and emptied them out, something that took several trips.

At dinner one night, Clint reminded people that “I carried your shit,” and then suggested that maybe it was time to start paying people instead of relying exclusively on volunteers. In particular, he thought Chris should be paid because he was working almost full time on the 700 anyway, but it was also clear that Clint wanted to be paid as well. Everyone he talked to rejected the idea, however, fearing that once the group started paying people, many of the volunteers would probably drop out.

While we were in Kennewick, a videographer approached us seeking permission to mount cameras on the locomotive and to ride in the cab on the return trip from Kennewick to Portland. The videographer planned to edit the videos and sell them to railfans. One of PRPA’s members expressed concern that we would be cheated somehow because the videographer would make all of the income and we would get nothing except maybe a free video or two. I passed this concern on to Clint, who invited me to take part in the negotiations.

When we met with the videographer, the member who was so concerned about getting cheated was there too. The videographer proposed to give us a few videos for our own use and to custom make a video that we could sell exclusively. I was ready to ask for more when the other member said, “That’s a great deal,” and pretty much accepted the offer without change.

Clint knew I was pretty upset that this guy had gotten me all fired up and then undercut me in the negotiations. As compensation, he assigned me the plum job of firing the locomotive from Kennewick to Wishram.

I was in the fireman’s seat early the morning we were to leave. Ken climbed on board shortly before our scheduled departure. Normally loquacious and with a great sense of humor, Ken was quiet and completely serious, knowing we had to prove our professionalism to the BN. The railroad had us scheduled as the first of several westbound trains leaving that morning, which basically meant we would have the tracks to ourselves as long as we could keep going.

It was a beautiful sunny day and the tracks took us through many cuts that echoed the sound of the cylinders. The videographer told me he had been on many Northern locomotives, and this was the loudest one by far. (Another member rolled his eyes when I repeated this. “So the [Norfolk & Western] 611 is faster and more powerful, but we win the noise competition,” he observed.)

I watched the boiler pressure and carefully adjusted the firing lever, which determined how fast oil was sprayed into the firebox, to account for our speed. Every once in awhile, Ken would catch my eye and say, “One more notch,” meaning he would open the throttle a little bit, and I was pleased to note to myself that I had already adjusted the firing lever to provide him the steam that he needed.

After a time, we were going at a steady rate and I thought I could take my eyes off the gauges for a second to snap a photo. Of course, as soon as I did, the boiler pressure crept up above 260 pounds, causing the safety valve to pop off. “See, that’s why you never take your eyes off your work,” chided Clint. That was no doubt the high point of my time with PRPA.