A Weird(?) Locomotive?

April 13, 2024

A Weird(?) Locomotive?

Colorization by the author. Original image from the Library of Congress / Shorpy.

Author's note: although this blog is principally about my garden railway, occasionally, deviations will be made into other topics of interest, particularly the real-life Catskill railroads that have inspired the Hillendale Railway. Today's post is one such segue.

Recently, I colorized a historic photo. It's a classic photograph from the Greene County Catskills, lensed around 1902 in Haines Corners, N.Y., nowadays a little hamlet known as Haines Falls.

It's a terrific, high-resolution image. My colorization is amateur, but based upon historical data to the extent I was able to find it, particularly the paint scheme of the locomotive, which I was able to recreate based on the locomotive's surviving factory specification card.

Today I want to focus on that locomotive, which to my mind anyway is the main subject of the composition: the strange little gremlin, Catskill & Tannersville Railway #2, that for eighteen years worked on a picturesque mountain ridge in the Catskills.

This to my perception is a weird locomotive. Which would indicate one of two things. 1. My perception is skewed, or 2. is it indeed a weird locomotive. Given that I am an amateur hobbyist and not a historian, and am but a spectator to the railroad history that other, more learned people interpret, it's likely the former is the case, but in any case, it's still a locomotive worth discussing.

Or I think it is, anyway. Your warning has been given: there is extreme nerdiness to follow. This is your chance to leave.

Ready?

Three... Two... One...

Alright. Let's get started.

Catskill & Tannersville #2 colorized to its original Baldwin livery.

Catskill & Tannersville Railway #2 is an outside-frame, narrow-gauge, camelback 2-6-0. If that didn't make your head spin, it's got three-dimensional cast iron lettering instead of painted lettering, and a weird smokebox door as wide as the whole smokebox front, with no dogs, and a British-style smokebox dart. And no, that muffler on top of the cab is not for the vacuum brakes. This engine doesn't have vacuum brakes. It has air brakes. What's that muffler for, then? Well, you'll find out.

It's like Baldwin threw everything they had at the wall to see what stuck, and what came out was Catskill & Tannersville #2.

Seriously, why is this locomotive so weird? And why was it built?

Unsurprisingly, its origin story is a trifle absurd: The Catskill & Tannersville Railway was brought into existence because of a local phenomenon known as the Fried Chicken War. (Yes, it's real.) Essentially a battle for supremacy between two mountaintop hotels, this feud had two competing narrow-gauge railroad systems vying for the highly sought-after passenger traffic from New York City.

1990 painting by Robert Skiba, showing the two competing railroads on the Mountain Top meeting at Haines Falls. Prints available at mths.org.

The C&T was built as a part of this rivalry. Charting a 5.2-mile course, it ran parallel to the standard-gauge Ulster & Delaware Railroad through that ridgetop spine of hotels and hemlock the locals call the Mountain Top. In some places it was less than a hundred feet away from the bigger railroad. The C&T was built when the U&D standard-gauged its mountaintop branches and cut off the C&T's parent railroad at a place called Kaaterskill. The narrow-gauge now had nowhere to go, and to compensate, built an alignment parallelling the big-and-flashy U&D's. It had upgrades and downgrades where the U&D was flat. It had tortuous curves where the U&D was straight. It was inferior in almost every way, and for eighteen years, the C&T was the U&D's pesky thorn in its side, old #2 here its champion mascot.

C&T #2 was built to replace the Catskill & Tannersville's first locomotive, a secondhand 2-6-0 that either wore out or was deemed inferior to operate on the railroad's crazy alignment. #2 emerged from Philadelphia's Baldwin Locomotive Works in spring of 1901, after which it was sent up to the C&T shops at Otis Summit (today's North-South Lake Campground). The C&T was a bit of a slipshod affair. In its first year of operation, a state inspector questioned whether steam-powered trains ought to be running over the tracks at all.

Then there's this:

Credit: Southern Methodist University DeGolyer Library

This is some poor Baldwin draftsman's notation that the C&T's locomotive needed to be designed to handle a reverse 5% grade, where there literally was a vertical bend in the rail because the line needed to crest such a sudden little hill. (For reference, a 2.5% grade is deemed very steep on railroads. A 4% grade is just about the highest a narrow-gauge route would want to do. 5% is just plain crazy. A reverse 5%? Those Baldwin draftsmen must've cried.)

Still, Baldwin wasn't the world's foremost manufacturer of steam locomotives for nothing. Possibly, these crazy operating requirements were in part responsible for #2's odd appearance, though in what ways, I do not know.

As stated, #2 is an outside-frame engine. This means its driving wheels are shrouded behind the frames, which normally ride between the wheels, so that you can't see the wheels like you can on a typical locomotive. A 1935 Railway and Locomotive Historical Society journal cites that this was because C&T management wanted #2 to be convertible to standard-gauge in the future. I don't know whether that's true. I do know that making a narrow-gauge locomotive outside-framed was a classic way to fit a bigger boiler on it, get a lower center of mass, and more power, and I think that's more likely.

The only published drawing of #2, taken from Tigges and Jacobson's Milwaukee Road Narrow Gauge. By that time, the locomotive was operating out in Iowa, and had been rebuilt with a steel cab.

Strangely, #2's boiler butt sticks out past the end of its cab, making it certainly deckless and potentially a quasi-camelback. (In the above drawing, the original cab had been replaced by a new steel cab that sat farther back. On the Catskill & Tannersville, though, the cab sat forward by 24" or so.)

The boiler rear slopes down in the cab, and the fireman has to stand out in the elements in order to fire. Since I assume the throttle is way up top, and the fireman is shoveling way out back, this might technically qualify #2 as a camelback, but I admit to a bit of sensationalism when I mentioned that at the start of this post. A similar engine built for the 3'-gauge Crystal River Railroad in 1903, which later became the Denver & Rio Grande Western's only C-25 class, had a similar arrangement, and others have said it was common of locomotives Baldwin built for export.

Incidentally, later #2 was fitted with a canopy, presumably to protect the fireman in the weather-vulnerable position afforded by this arrangement. It doesn't show up in the locomotive's Baldwin builder's photo, but it's there later and is consistent with other similar canopies Baldwin built.

No. 2 with canopy over tender. Courtesy Vedder Research Library, Greene County Historical Society.

How about that pesky rooftop muffler, now? #2 has what appears to be a classic Eames vacuum brake system muffler atop its cab. Except that's not what it is. A study of the Catskill & Tannersville will show you they used automatic air brakes. What is it, then?

A Railway and Locomotive Engineering journal from 1901 has the answer. Apparently, it was a muffler for the air pump. There is indeed an air pump on #2, seen in this photo:

Photo from Richie King.

The Railway and Locomotive Engineering journal posed that this saved coal by "preventing the continual artificial draft on the fire," which happens when you plumb your air pump exhaust through the stack. At the time of the locomotive's construction, the little compound pump, made by Westinghouse, was the smallest such device ever built, a nice little easter egg about #2. Why it needed a muffler is unknown to me. Maybe that small size produced a particular reverberation? I'm not sure how common it was. A look at the locomotive's plumbing will assure the skeptic that the exhaust from the pump is plumbed right up to the roof and the muffler. Still, I bet I'm not the only one who thought it was an Eames muffler at first.

How about that cast iron lettering?

Yes, #2 has not painted lettering, but big and heavy cast-iron letters bolted to its exterior, spelling the engine's number on the cab and the railroad's name on the tender. The same journal article helpfully informs us that these were affixed by bolts secured on the inside of the tender. This was a bit of C&T ingenuity, though not completely unique to the Catskill route. The raised metal letters meant that any old shop mechanic could re-touch the lettering, since it was plain as day where it was and what its outline looked like. No sign painter had to be hired. The C&T also used this on its passenger cars, and other railroads through history (Bridgton & Saco River, Canadian National) have been known to use it.

Finally, here's a thing I don't have an answer to. Let's zoom in on the fireman's side steam chest.

Why is there both a mechanical lubricator (?), and hydrostatic lubricator lines running from under the boiler jacket? Like I said, it's like Baldwin threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. This engine just has it all, and in really weird combinations.

Well, that's today's look at Catskill & Tannersville #2, a funky little locomotive that was the mascot of one of the Catskill's most beloved lines, a 5.2-mile narrow gauge that lost money but gained a lofty perch in the hearts of the locals and tourists it served. The C&T's adherence to its timetable was lackadaisical at best, and the one-or-two-car train would often stop mid-route to lets passengers off to pick huckleberries, which flourished along the line. From this operating practice the line earned the name, "The Huckleberry."

The Huckleberry's fortunes eventually ran out, and although #2 had a second career out in Iowa after the C&T folded, it, too, met the scrapper's torch in the 1930s.

But if you ever go to the Catskills, particularly the Mountain Top or anywhere near North-South Lake, remember the Fried Chicken War. And remember the odd but delightful little locomotive that trundled through those magical woods because of it.

If you listen real hard, you might still hear its whistle...