Re: Climax as a road engine

One road that did use the Climax for a road engine, in mixed service no less, was the San
Joaquin & Eastern near Fresno, CA. While their
3 truck machines did not employ Superheaters, they did have Walschaerts motion.
As an aside to this general discussion, the much heralded Pacific Coast type was an interesting machine. To achieve the considerable t.e. that it possessed (38,200 lbs.) with modest 13 by 15 inch cylinders, it gave up some speed by having 17 teeth on the pinion as opposed to the 20 that the 80-3 and 90-3 models did.
I have it as really good information from the son of a former Pickering engineer that although the shop was happy with their PC number 11, that they would not have considered purchasing another for their operation. The ideal locomotive for the Pickering was a Superheated 90-3 class Shay. Helper crews who had the 11 assigned to them sometimes used to find some defect that they could write up to take her out of service for a few days so that they could get the 80-3 class 6 or another engine. Part of this was because the 11 caused the train to run a mite slower and the other reason was that all-weather cab made conditions inside nearly unbearable on hot summer days. And it did get hot out in the Stanislaus River Canyon.
Tom