Matt:

Thanks to you and others for correcting me on which 12 was headed in your direction. I only have seen the Kahului engine once, in the Georgetown Loop shops, and I thought I was looking at a 2-4-2; the broken off axle shaft was in shadow and the broken-off drive wheel wasn't visible. That was August 2006. Although I have family connections in Hawaii (on Kauai, mostly) I'm not all that familiar with the Kahului line. I have been the engineer for brief times on two of the 30" gauge Grove Farm locos on Kauai back in 1987. One was a Baldwin and the other was Hawaii's oldest engine, an 1884 Hohenzollern named "Paulo".

When people on the Yahoo! lists started talking about "the 12", its origin wasn't specified and I assumed that it was the West Side 12 that was headed your way.

Thanks for all the updates on the true weights of the Shays. Strictly a guess, but the WS Shays were rebuilt and and rebuilt, undoubedly with many changes, so the weights were bound to change over time. The data which I was quoting, as I said, came from the roster in the back of the first book published about the West Side, back in 1962. Author Allan Kreig gives absolutely no info as to where he got the figures or who provided them at least 50 years ago. According to the dust jacket notes about Kreig, he was a Union Pacific "public relations man" at the time the book was written and published. That possibly might explain at least some differences in data in the book.

I first heard that "heaviest ng Shay" regarding the #10 back in 1959 in the office of the West Side in Tuolumne, so it might have originated with Lima, the manufacturer. In the 1960s and earlier, published roster data regarding almost any engines on any railroad often were erroneous and subject to later revisions.

Matt, were you one of the two Midwest Central Crewmen who came out to the West Side Reunion in Sonora in April 2008 and ended up talking with Gerald "Snowball" Bergstrom and several others in front of the Tuolumne City Museum? I was one of the others. We discussed the #9, among other things, and "Snowball" already had been invited back to Iowa to ride in and run his Dad's Shay. One of the crewmen asked me about the "small white flags in the cab of #9" story of mine; it arose from the meeting with Snowball's Dad that I had up in the mountains above River Bridge in May 1959. His Dad had told me the story there. One of the Midwest Central crewmen indicated the desire to recreate the rack on which the flags were mounted in #9's cab, as well as the flags themselves.

Best regards, Hart Corbett