Image :
dir =misc/ page =index 136667 bytes, pixels
Date : Jan 1985, catalogued 30 Sep 1999
Photographer : John Hurst
Medium : Kodachrome, slide number 13101
Description : Oops! I've forgotten any details about this little train. Sort of interesting, though, given its unusual wheel arrangement! If any reader can forward details of the loco and location, I'd be grateful.
Matthew Milroy subsequently wrote to me saying:
The image 200-1 under Pleasure trains in your photo
catalogue is of the "Enchanted Train" at Nostalgia Town on the
Sunshine Coast, Qld. 2km South of Maroochy Airport. It is
supposedly a scale reproduction of an 1863 steam loco, but given
the wheel arrangement, I think some artistic licence has been
applied!
Thanks for that update, Matthew.
My thanks also to Richard
Further correspondence from Robert Little, who says:
The little amusement park locomotive in
your Image 200-1 (the "Enchanted Train" at Nostalgia Town on
the Sunshine Coast, Qld.) was obviously built as an
approximate replica of Central Pacific locomotive number 3
(later, Southern Pacific no. 1), the "C. P. Huntington." Yes,
the replica builder took some artistic license, but not with
the wheel arrangement!
I can understand Mr. Milroy's doubts. Such a wheel
arrangement does not provide much tractive effort, but strange
as it may seem, the "C.P. Huntington" really is a 4-2-4 ('2A2'
in UIC nomenclature). The Central Pacific wanted a larger
locomotive, but the American Civil War was raging at the time
(1863), and the little 4-2-4 was about the only locomotive
available. It was built by Danforth, Cooke & Company of
Paterson, New Jersey, and was shipped by sailing ship from New
York, around Cape Horn, to San Francisco, California, where it
was delivered to the Central Pacific railroad on March 19,
1864. It has been preserved and can be seen in the California
State Railroad Museum, Sacramento, California. To learn more
about the original locomotive,
see the web
page
at http://www.csrmf.org/doc.asp?id=157. It is the
good fortune of rail fans around the world that the Southern
Pacific adopted the C. P. Huntington as a "mascot" in 1894 and
preserved it.
All in all, quite an interesting model!