Wonderful photos, everyone. Bedhead, the first London photo with the smokestacks and the tracks curving around the structures is a stunning composition.
Here's my contribution from Memorial Day Weekend.
Hesston Steam Museum is located straight north of La Porte, Indiana and east of Indiana 39, barely south of the Michigan state line.
The 3-foot Shay Locomotive was built in Lima, Ohio in 1929. Shay locomotives use a side-mounted driveshaft, universal joints, and gears to deliver power from a 3-cylinder vertical side-mounted engine to trucks that swivel like those under a freight car. This enables them to deliver great pulling power and move heavy loads on hastily-laid uneven track with steep grades and tight curves often encountered in logging, quarrying, and mining operations. This locomotive was heavily damaged in an engine house fire in 1985 and was restored by volunteers at Hesston.
On the left, eighteen tons of sophisticated design and remarkable power, this two-footer was built in Germany in 1938 by Orenstein & Koppel, survived World War II, and continued to work in East Germany into the 1960s. Founded in 1875, Orenstein and Koppel today manufactures mining and excavating machinery. On the right, one of many pieces of donated 1/4 scale equipment from publisher Elliott Donnelly's Stet & Query Central railroad. "Stet" and "Query" are proofreaders marks, so they were appropriate to a railroad built and operated for many years by someone in the printing business.
I don't know anything about the provenance of this 2-foot gasoline-powered locomotive, but I did learn that it came to Hesston with a four-cylinder Jeep engine and was overhauled and equipped with a 6-cylinder, 300 cubic inch Ford truck engine for more power. It's very smooth and sweet souding.
These 1/4, or Grand, Scale locomotives once operated at Kiddieland amusement park in Melrose Park, Illinois, just west of Chicago. They have been acquired on loan by Hesston and restored to operating condition. The lead locomotive is a Northern type built in 1950 and the second one is patterned after the New York Central's famed Hudson type. It was built in 1941.
Many of the 1/8 scale locomotives are operated by the people who built them and it takes skill just like running a full-sized machine. The steamers burn coal to boil water to generate high-pressure steam in their boilers, and have a startling amount of power for their size. Typically they can accelerate a heavy train of large adults up the hill just outside the station at a pace that would make you hustle to keep up.
The internal combustion locomotives typically use Briggs & Stratton V-twin engines and have comparable pulling power.
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