Here's a great shot of the Yukon Queen in 1969. Frank and the crew made many changes after she came in from Alaska. He raised the cab roof and the domes nine inches, put that stack (which I always thought looked silly) on her, and changed her from oil burner to coal burner. She was completely frostproofed when he bought her as well, with steam heat lines wrapping anything that might freeze.
I want to talk about this engine a little bit to you. First, she was built in 1943 for the Army Transportation Corps. In this picture she was only twenty-six years old. That is like a locomotive today being built in 1980. Feel old yet?? I do.
She was built during World War II by Baldwin, the same folks who built Tweetsie Number 12 in 1917. The "wheel arrangement", or the standard designation of a steam locomotive is 2-8-2. Two little wheels in the front (engine truck), eight drivers, and two little wheels under the cab (trailing truck). All these wheel arrangements have names as well as numbers. The 12 is a "ten-wheeler", or 4-6-0 (four little wheels on the engine truck, six drivers, and no trailing truck). The 8's (both of them),9, 10, 11, 12, and 14 were all ten-wheelers. The 3, 4, 5, and 6, 204, 207, and 208 were "consolidation" engines. They were 2-8-0 wheel arrangements. Go look at the pictures and figure them out.
Anyway, I got carried away there, but for a reason. The first 2-8-2 engines were built for the Japanese Railroads and their designation was "Mikado". With the current events in 1943, "mikado" would not have been very politically correct. These "War Department" engines were all known as "MacArthur" engines, named for the pipe-smoking Army General.
The old Yukon Queen is a pure-bred Baldwin MacArthur, and in the words of her sugar daddy and my old boss Frank Coffey, "about the finest damned little engine a man could want on a narrow-gauge railroad." I think she is a treasure just like the 12, and she is so lucky to be in the hands of Tweetsie Railroad. For comparison, the 195 is still in Alaska and not looking so good.
The 192 down at Dollywood is a sister from the same batch of ten Baldwin MacArthur engines that went to the White Pass with the U.S. Army Railway Operation Battalion. There are several more MacArthurs around the world still in existence, and a few of them in operation.
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