My current working theory on the appliances atop these boilers is that they are added weights that were seasonally detachable. The plates are shown mounted on the 70,000 lb Cooke 2-8-0 and one of the three 77,000 lb ten wheelers. There are quite a number of farms and estates as well as small growers who crank out significant tonnage of sugar cane; the sugar industry in El Salvador began to ramp up after the FES started building inland from Acajutla in 1881. All that cane had to be milled, and big mills started taking the place of small cane grind and processing facilities on the farms themselves at around the time that rail service was available.
I’ve been casting about looking for cane railways in the style of those that operated in Cuba, Hawaii and other Pacific producing countries, Louisiana, etc, and I keep turning up nothing. All I see are photos of cane stacked on 3 foot gauge flatcars with high stakesides on IRCA rails. I missed the forest for the trees. FES and the IRCA Salvador division likely WERE the sugar haul railways I was looking for. It explains why FES and IRCA kept lighter weight consolidations and ten wheelers around- The Zafra.
Rather than full cane haul lines, there must have been field branches and set off sidings along the FES mainlines where stake side flats were set off empty and picked up full every day. These sidings were probably sketchy mud tracks with light rail. FES probably kept their C-16 & C-17 size locomotives and the small ten wheelers around to run cane pickups on sidings and sugar industry lines and yards where the two much heavier classes of ten wheelers and big 2-8-0s couldn’t go because of their weight. I couldn’t figure out why FES ordered three much lighter 4-6-0s in the late 1890’s after buying 6,7 & 8 a few years earlier, which are quite a bit heavier. High traffic light cane field trackage might be the answer.
Where I think the weights came in: When the Zafra was over, FES had the three light ten wheelers and Cooke #5 back for mainline service. Bolt on a few tons of weight plates lowered down onto the boiler from the overhead crane in the shops to bump up the weight on the drivers and they had some heavier locomotives for off season general service. That gave them some interchangability with the heavier locomotives that needed heavy servicing that necessitated significant down time. After WW2 when truck haulage of cane was more readily available the need for a fleet of light engines probably subsided and FES was free to obtain heavy replacement locomotives on the used market. That’s when they bought the OR&L Alco consolidations. If so, the cane hauls from the interior to the mill at Sonsonate during the cutting season would have disappeared by the time US railfans with cameras like Gerald Best began visiting and asking questions about the equipment and operations.
It’s a working theory, nothing more, but it fits the available evidence.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2023 07:15PM by Wayne Sanderson.
