Merry Christmas!!

in Estonian!!

Narrow Gauge in California

This website gives us a lot of good history about the railroad that the locomotive on the front of this post card is working for: https://www.abandonedrails.com/west-side-lumber-company The back of the post card says that it is the West Side Lumber Company, but it wasn't always known by that name. Take a read... Tuolumne to Stanislaus National Forest, CA Home | CA | HH&YV , WSLCRR Note: For more information on the WSLC and its railroad, check out Last of the Three Foot Loggers by Allan Krieg. A railroad that had many names over the years, this three-foot narrow gauge railroad first operated under the name of the Hetch Hetchy & Yosemite Valley Railroad, starting in 1898. As a wholly owned subsidiary of the West Side Flume & Lumber Company, its primary purpose was to haul fresh-cut logs from the vast sugar pine forests of eastern Tuolumne County to the expansive West Side Lumber Mill in Tuolumne City. Here, the logs would be cut into dimensional lumber and transferred to the Sierra Railway of California for shipping. As the years went past, the HH&YV was eventually reorganized and absorbed into its parent company, becoming the West Side Lumber Company Railroad, but all the while its Shays and Heislers continued to run into the rugged backcountry, winding through the multiple canyons and creeks that fed the north fork of the Tuolumne River. For 64 years they ran, until finally in 1962, technology and economic forces caught up with them. By that point, the West Side reigned supreme as the last narrow gauge logging railroad still operating in the American west. In later years, efforts were made to resurrect the mighty West Side as a tourist railroad, spearheaded primarily by Glenn Bell and his "West Side & Cherry Valley Railroad" operation. But the numbers simply didn’t add up, and the WS&CVRR was forced to close its doors in the early 1980s. Today, a portion of the former West Side right-of-way serves as a hiking and equestrian trail. Members of the public can hike from the former station of Friedenberg (approximately milepost one point five by the original railroad timetables), to the station of River (milepost seven), where the tracks crossed the north fork of the Tuolumne on a large wooden trestle. Much of the trackage through this area still remains undisturbed, more than 20 years after the last train rolled by.

Once again the mysterious publisher strikes the blog post. At least in this one he points out that the fireman is sitting on the back of the tender, so he titles the card "Love me tender".

A Big "Boo-Boo" on the back

The front of this post card contains a picture of a Ten-Wheeler (4-6-0)

that was built in the early 1900s. It ran on the Warren & Ouachita Valley Railroad line - a total of 16 mles. This great website gives us the most detail that I could find about the railroad company: https://www.american-rails.com/ark.html I suggest that you visit this website if you have any questions about the history of railroading in the United States. This is what Adam Burns has to say about it: The Warren & Ouachita Valley Railway was jointly owned by the Arkansas Lumber Company and the Southern Lumber Company. It was incorporated in 1899 and began operations around 1901 connecting Banks, Arkansas with Warren, Arkansas a distance of about 16 miles. At both locations the W&OV had connections with Class I lines, the Rock Island at Banks, Arkansas and the St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway (StLIM&S) at Warren. The railroad was another of the "tap lines”, hauling the finished lumber products to the Rock Island and StLIM&S. However, it also operated direct logging trains to the mills as well. You can see this same locomtive on a different post card if you go to my blog entry from June 14, 2023.

Again, the post card is published by Railcards.com - the mysterious publisher. However, as I read the back of the post card and compared it to what Adam Burns says above, I think I found an error on the post card. It says that the Warren & Ouachita Valley Railway operated in Alabama. It was actually in Arkansas, as Adam says.

Thank you, Ephraim Shay

Designed by Ephraim Shay, and named after the inventor, the geared locomotive proved to be an invaluable tool in the logging industry. As early as 1872 he began development of a new locomotive that used gears rather than standard rods to propel the device forward. He built the design from the ground up using a flatcar as a base. Upon this he placed a boiler, vertical cylinders, and two-axle trucks on each end. The uniqueness of his design included that essentially the vertical cylinders drive a

horizontal crank shaft attached to drive shafts extending to each truck axle. These axles have gearboxes attached to them which propels the engine forward. Because geared steam locomotives have all of their trucks powered, they provided excellent adhesion enabling them to climb grades well over 5% (something all but unthinkable on main line railroads), although this high adhesion factor limited its top speed to just 18 mph. The flexibility of the design allowed each truck to negotiate the track independently of the other, thus keeping the locomotive on the rails and allowing it to operate over almost any type of track (which was usually nothing more than rails laid directly onto a hillside for most logging operations). The above information was condensed from the article "Shay Locomotives" Which was written (and last revised on May 12, 2023) by Adam Burns. It comes from the website: https://www.american-rails.com/shay.html This website provides the following statistics about Shay Locomotives https://www.shaylocomotives.com/ 2,767 Shays were built over 67 years under four company names. (116 survive) 350 were built by Lima Machine Works between 1878 and April 12, 1892; 1,557 were built by Lima Locomotive & Machine Co. between April 12, 1892 and 1912; 362 were built by Lima Locomotive Corporation between 1912 and March 1916; 498 were built by Lima Locomotive Works, Inc. between March 1916 and 1945; If you rank them by Class, MPH and Speed Range you get the following: 685 were 2-cylinders/2-trucks known as Class A that could travel between 7.7 - 17.5 MPH; 2 were 2-cylinders/3-trucks known as Special that could travel between 14.0 - 16.2 MPH; 1,481 were 3-cylinders/2-trucks known as Class B that could travel between 10.1 - 21.0 MPH; 580 were 3-cylinders/3-trucks known as Class C that could travel between 10.1 - 27.9 MPH; and 20 were 3-cylinders/4-trucks known as Class D that could travel between 18.8 - 26.7 MPH. Once again, I have an interesting post card from a publisher about which I know nothing.