Kevin Burkholder/Steel Wheels Photography
THE 7470 RETURNS TO THE VALLEY By Phil Franklin
THE STEAM ENGINE THAT COULD ... AND STILL DOES!
T
he grand era of steam locomotion spanned the century from roughly the 1850s through the late 1950s. It brought major and lasting changes to the United States and Canada. Steam locomotives pulled the trains that helped build our nations, moving people and freight at much faster rates than the horse and wagon or stages coaches. In 1800, Oliver Evans, inventor, engineer, and one of the first to build high-pressure steam engines, said, “The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines from one city to another, almost as fast as birds, 15 or 20 miles an hour … .” When two steam engines met at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869, a ribbon of rails stretched across the United States. Similarly, with the driving of the last spike completing the Canadian transconti-
nental railway on November 7, 1885, at Craigellachie, British Columbia, Canada, the western regions of our friendly neighbor to the north were opened. The infrastructure was set to bring Mr. Evans’ foretelling to reality. Steam locomotives would soon crisscross our nations and a love affair for these mighty giants was ignited. While the railroad industry phased out nearly all of the steam engines by the beginning of the 1960s, the fascination and nostalgia for these engines has only grown over the years. Fortunately, as the “steamers” were being taken out of “revenue service” and sold for scrap metal, a number of them were purchased by collectors. Some were mothballed in museums, while others were stored with the hope that someday they would run
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