Normally I would agree with your statement 100% Ted. It would always be better to have money sent on the “real” engines instead of building replicas; normally. However, the SVRy is not just planning to build these 2-6-6-2s because they are historic. We are developing this plan because we will need 3’ locomotives that can handle the expected loads on the planned grades. We did not come to this decision of building replicas just because it would be “cool”.
You see, this has been an on going debate at the SVRy for some years now. We know that once our second extension is completed, we are going to need more then just our two original 2-8-2s #19 and #20. So, we started to try and figure out what other engines we could use. Since there are no other original SVRy engines still around to rebuild, we knew we would have to obtain engines that where not original to the SVRy and still be big enough to be able to pay for themselves and hopefully keep the SVRy in the black.
So, what engines could we use? All the K-27s,K-28s and K-36s are spoken for. Anything smaller like the D&RGW 2-8-0 would be too small and we doubted that we could even obtain any of them from their present owners anyway. The White Pass 70 class engines would be great. Newer engines and good power but we seriously doubt if the owners would ever part with any of those three engines. If they are ever up for sale, that may be a different story but I think the White Pass may put up a fight for them and we are really not interested in making enemies.
EBT engines? Same story as the White Pass. I once heard that the White Pass was looking into obtaining an EBT engine a couple of years back and the White Pass people received very “cool” responds from the EBT, and that is putting it nicely.
So, after all of that, we knew we would probably need to look even further a field. We looked into the 2-8-2s in Central America and even thought about Garretts from South Africa but when faced with the huge amount of money it would take to just get them to the U.S. we figured that it would be cheaper to just build a couple of brand new engines. We thought about a couple of K-37s but when we consider the age of the boilers, we though we would get more for our money if we went new. In the end we decided that the engines we needed did not exist anymore or where not for sale.
OK, new it is then. So, what do we build? At first we were thinking of 2-6-0s like the early SVRy engines. A little small for what we needed but we were also thinking that we could sell a few to other tourist and park railways. We envisioned a “modular” type of design where we could use the same parts on custom frames to “build to order”. However, in the end, we thought we were getting off track with this type of project. The goal was to obtain a couple of engines to pull our train and now we where building engines for the Steam railway tourist industry! It was time to get back on course
Too make an already way too long of a post a little shorter, after looking at Hawaiian K-28s and other types that are not based on older prototypes, in the end we decided that the 2-6-6-2s where the perfect fit. Big enough to haul good size trains and with axel loading that would not destroy our tracks and somewhat historic to the SVRy. After all, while we do want the SVRy to earn enough money to keep itself running, we are also trying to preserve the history of the original SVRy.
Now, if Dollywood goes broke and the White Pass has no interested in those engines, or the C&TS ever wants to sell off the 492 & 497 or if some other suitable engines become available that we don’t even know about yet, we may change our plans and spend the money on “real historic narrow gauge steam locos”, but until then Ted, we believe updated replicas make the most financial sense.
I’m sorry that this post went on for so long but I thought some of the back ground on this project might be interesting.
