Making tracks
Working steam engines fuel enthusiasm for building model trains
Johnny Cash charmed a generation with songs about the mighty locomotive steam engines that rumbled and roared across the country.
Though those puffing steel leviathans have long disappeared from the landscape, nostalgia for the great age of steam is still alive and well. The precision of each engine part, the valves, pipes, pumps and gauges in those old train engines are a source of fascination for folks with a mechanical bent like Jack Harris.
“I just like doing little things, little complicated things,” said Harris.
Those little complicated things include working model steam engines. In the basement workshop of his house on the outskirts of Santa Fe, sits a 500-pound scale model of an F-4 “Mogul” 2-6-0 steam locomotive. It’s the kind of engine that pulled trains on the Wabash lines through the Midwest until the early 1950s.
Harris is one of more than a thousand enthusiasts throughout the country who build these livesteam trains. They are big enough for a grown man to drive, seated on the tender behind the engine, and enough to pull passengercarrying cars on tracks that measure 7½ inches between the rails.
It’s a challenging hobby demanding hundreds of hours of patient labor, poring over complex blueprints, machining tiny parts to within a hair’s breadth tolerance, understanding the mechanics of steam.
Harris has a workshop fit for the task. One wall bristles with screwdrivers, a half dozen drills sit on the counter beneath it. A lathe, drill press and other machining tools stand nearby.
The Mogul is a model Harris bought from another builder and refurbished with a new boiler and paint job. He’s built numerous cars and three engines from scratch. One was a near replica of the Jupiter, one of two engines present at the Golden Spike Ceremony in 1869 that marked the meeting of rail lines from the east and west coasts. A model of a 1915 Case Traction engine he built has pride of place near the living
room of his house.
Learning the mechanics of steam engines “just came naturally,” Harris said.
Mechanical roots
He was adopted into a family that owned a string of papers in Kansas and Iowa.
“My father wanted me to write the editorials,” said Harris. “But in school I was taught to spell phonetically. I was never a speller.”
He found his niche in the pressroom. Although he was the boss’s son, he started as a teenager in the mid-1950s earning 75 cents an hour cleaning the presses. In 1957, he helped install a used press purchased for the one of his family’s papers, the Hutchinson News.
“So I got to scrape bearings and put things together on it. That’s how I knew how it came apart,” he said.
Taking the press apart happened a few years later when he convinced his father they could speed up the switch from letterpress to offset printing technology.
Albuquerque Journal Vice President Rod Arnold, who started his career in the early 1980s as a journeyman pressman, vouched for the skills involved.
“You have to be very mechanically inclined to be a pressman. Some of the settings we deal with have to be within a thousandth of an inch,” Arnold said.
Harris has never belonged to any of the live steam clubs active around the country but he used to travel to rallies in Florida, Michigan and other states. Rally organizers set up tracks with switches and sidings where dozens of enthusiasts could show off their trains. Driving them can be a dirty business.
“When you’re riding on the tender behind a coal-fired engine, smoke gets in your eyes. Dust gets on your glasses. Your eyes start to tear and it mixes with the coal dust and you get black streaks down your face,” Harris explained.
At one rally in Florida he returned to his hotel covered in coal streaks and ran into the housekeeping staff.
“They took one look at me with the coal dust all over me and I know they were saying ‘I hope it’s not the bathtub I have to clean’.”
Harris also had steam meets at the property he owned in Hutchinson, Kan., where he built a mile-long circular track complete with a 100-footlong tunnel and a 7-foottall bridge that spanned two sand hills.
Expensive hobby
Steve Alley, who owns Allen Models of Gardnerville, Nev., one of only a handful of companies that specialize in the parts and supplies for live steam model builders, estimates there are round 1,500 hobbyists currently active in the United States. Alley said he ships to customers all over Europe, Australia and Japan.
Alley said his basic kits run up to $5,000, add on the necessary parts for the boiler and plumbing and you’re talking upward of $15,000. Plus, builders need to invest in thousands of dollars worth of tools and equipment. A finished model could fetch up to $33,000.
So what is the attraction?
“It gets under your blood,” Alley said. “It’s so relaxing. The one beautiful thing with the hobby is how everybody shares how they do things and where to get parts.”
And there’s the incomparable thrill of seeing it run, Alley said.
“Once you see the thing start up for the first time, you realize that thing is coming alive. That’s why it’s called live steam.”