Climax An Unusual Steam Locomotive by Thomas T. Taber III Hard Cover

$225.00

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Climax An Unusual Steam Locomotive by Thomas T. Taber III

97 Pages Names stamped with written date on inside cover.

Hard Cover

By Thomas T. Taber III and Walter Casler

First Edition #1376 of 2000

Imagine a heavily wooded hillside with a roadbed chiseled out of the rock about about halfway up. The grade supports a poorly ballasted, lightly ironed track with irregularities and curves that belie the work of the surveyor and rodman who laid them out. Laboring up the hill is an odd-looking train: a locomotive of unique appearance and a string of unloaded, closely coupled logging trucks. The engine has no tender and appears to be mounted on a pair of freight car trucks. On each side of the slim smokebox, a small cylinder is mounted with crosshead and main rod slanting down to a flywheel, the latter spinning rapidly from the short strokes. An arrangement of rods and universal joints, mounted lengthwise under the frame, is also rotating at good speed. The whine of the gears intertwines with the other sounds of the steam operated freight train as the entire shebang slowly climbs the mountain. This is (or, more correctly, was) the Climax in its natural habitat.

The Climax was one of a number of special locomotive types designed for services beyond the ability of the conventional side rod engine. It first was known as the Climax tramway locomotive and met the needs of small lumbering operators who required more efficiency than their teams could provide with no particular improvement in their pole or strap-rail roads. In the forty-one years in which nearly eleven hundred Climaxes were built, it was improved mechanically and grew in size to the three-truck, high-capacity locomotive of the days of Woodrow Wilson.

This book consists of five sections. The first chapter tells about the logging railroad, its development and operation, and why the Climax was adapted to it so well. The design of the locomotive and its technical details follow and, in the third chapter, the history of the builder and its personnel is covered. The next part deals with several other manufacturers who built locomotives similar to the Climax. The final section of the book contains a listing--as detailed as possible--of all known Climax engines.

Climax built locomotives from 1888 to 1928. This could hardly be called ancient history; yet Climax information is hard to come by. Company records and photos were not preserved and most of the concerns that operated these engines were small and obscure. Thus, to uncover and follow up on all possible sources of information on the Climax was a monumental job. Despite several years of research, records on only 75 percent of all the Climax locomotives have been traced and, with each motive power unit having had an average of three owners from construction to scrap yard, the ownership record covers about 60 percent of the roughly three thousand possible listings.

Alfred W. Bruce in the last great definitive work of its kind, "The Steam Locomotive in America"(1Vorton, 1952). wrote of The Climax Manufacturing Company: "There is little or no current information on this plant . . ."Thanks to the digging and perseverance of Tom Taber III and Walter Casler, this blank page in American locomotive history has been competently filled.

Contents

Bringing 'em Out of the Woods

The Climax-Design, Development

The Climax Family Tree

Some Others

Records

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