Re: NNG: Geared Locomotive Speeds

I never saw the Pickering. I never saw Shelton run the SRY 2 to Fassler, just heard the stories. I did make plenty of round trips from Jamestown to Chinese (12miles) on SRY 2 in under an hour including runaround at Chinese. I remember on the first trip my fireman Mike Pardina's eyes getting really big when She started bouncing up and down. If you went a little faster She smoothed right out. Did She like it? No. The only problem we had , which was my fault, was seizing the #3 wrist pin brass due to over tightening on my part. Had Her all fixed up the following weekend. After that we slowed it down a bit. If you keep everything well lubed and tight She will run all day at 12mph. 8mph is the current max speed. The biggest problem is not having the same engineer run Her everytime She runs. There is ALWAYS something coming loose and it is very important that the engineer be in tune with all knocks, pounds, clicks, and clacks She will make throughout the day. Some sounds are ok some are not, and he needs to take care of the problem immediately. Shays are definitely not pool power. Im grateful She let me learn how to work on and run Her until my "Shay learning curve" came up to speed without any major issues(with just a few phone calls to Artie and Danny at Cass) .Im not a "Shay man" but i got a lot of respect for them. Tough machine.