I joined the Finger Lakes Live Steamers in 1991. My first project was a well used Cli-Shay I picked up from another member of the club. It had been worked on by a number of owners over the years and its plumbing was a bit of a nightmare. I did get it running, but not for long. The steel tubes in the vertical boiler had been dissolving over the years and it was not long before the boiler developed a number of leaks. The engine was dismantled.
I decided to build a more realistic early Shay using as many parts from the old engine as possible. The Shay I would eventually build, only used the wheels from the Cli-shay!
I knew building a live steam engine from scratch was going to be a multi year build, so I decided to build a (quick and easy) electric logging speeder, so I would have something to play with while I worked on the live steamer. I found a couple of 12 volt DC motors at an industrial surplus vendor. Each one powered a wheel set using a toothed belt and sprockets. Power was supplied by two 12v deep cycle marine batteries and I purchased a 4QD controller from England. The body was made of plywood and it was painted bright orange. I mounted a boat seat on a short flat car and in less than a year I had a toy I could ride around the club’s track.
In 1996, the Village Press published the book, “Logging with Steam’ by W.M. Harris based on a series of articles by the same author in Live Steam magazine. The book featured plans and a how-to-make article, building the Mich-Cal Shay in 1-1/2 inch scale to run on 4-3/4 inch gauge track. Perfect! I’ll just scale the plans up for 7-1/4 inch track and I’ll have a big narrow gauge live steam engine. Little did I know when I started building in 1997, the engine would not actually run on steam until 2018!
Other projects and life in general got in the way. I purchased a one-inch scale 0-4-0 in working condition built by my friend Ed McConnell, somewhere around the turn of the century. In 2004 and 2005 I was unfortunate to develop DVTs in my left leg. Sitting cross legged on a flat car behind a 4-3/4 inch gauge engine was all of a sudden impossible. In 2006 I traded that running engine to my friend Rick Rubino for a large 1-1/2 inch scale 4-4-0 that needed a little work.
It took about three years to rebuild the American to working condition. The engine was originally built in 1957 by Jim Turnbull of Montreal (number 13 of 36 engines he built). The locomotive is constructed from Little Engines parts. It is basically their pacific (4-6-2), but missing the front driver set and the rear trailing truck, with a shortened boiler on top.
The engine was built for Howard Crotty, the first president of the Pioneer Valley Live Steamers in Massachusetts. Howard still owned the engine in 1965 when it appeared in an issue of Model Railroader magazine. Carl Hoffman of Kitchener (or Waterloo?), Ontario was the next owner. The engine appeared in an article about his track in a 1975 issue of Modeltec magazine. It was sold to a Frenchman in Canada, who owned it for two years before selling it to Wayne McFarland of Toronto.
My friend Rick Rubino of Fairport, NY, purchased the engine in the mid 1990’s from Wayne who had been pulling people in a park in the Toronto area for some time.
I decorated the freelanced 4-4-0 as Chicago and Illinois Midland No. 500. That railroad had the last three 4-4-0s built by Baldwin for domestic use. They were big and closely resembled my engine. I started running the engine in October 2009. By 2017 it was showing its age. The running gear was worn out and the front tube sheet of the original copper boiler was leaking.
Meanwhile, I moved to a new house in 2014 and was able to retire in 2016. The Shay had been worked on sporadically over the years since it was started. When I moved into my new house, I decided I should really make a push to finish it. I got the engine and drive train running on compressed air on December 18, 2015. The engine finally carried me around the club track on July 28, 2018. I did have a few problems with the engine, needing some reworking here and there but as of this writing (September 15, 2019) the engine is running fairly well.
Timbg Live Steam 