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Pacific Coast Shay By Dan Ranger Jr Soft Cover 1964, 5th Printing 1974 103 Pgs
Pacific Coast Shay By Dan Ranger Jr
Strong man of thw Woods
Hard cover with dust jacket
Copyright 1964, 6th printing 1976
112 Pages
Mention of logging trains conjures up mental pictures of mallets threading log flats through the forests of the Pacific Northwest, or of Shay geared locomotives snaking their loads along the brink of a mountain gorge. No spectacle was more romantic than that of the mechanical strong man of the woods, the Shay, on its way, often across latticework trestles, from timber to mill.
The geared logging locomotive was born of sudden need back in the 1870's and the Shay was the first and most numerous of this bizarre breed. Its sound was enough to send the uninitiated scurrying into the brush, for it gave the impression of a charging monster, flying past at mile-a-minute speed. In actuality, though, the din of steam and metal was deceptive and bore little relation to the leisurely pace of the Shay, from ten to 15 miles an hour. Exhaust through the stack was 16 times for each turn of the drivers, or four times that of a conventional rod-driven steam locomotive.
As the Shay crept through the tall timber the first thing to catch the eye was the row of cylinders hanging on the right side of the boiler. With pistons and cranks frantically threshing and turning a long horizontally-joined drive shaft from the front footboard to the rearmost truck under the tender, everything about the machine seemed alive. Maybe the name "sidewinder" in the logger's vocabulary was an appropriate one for the Shay.
The geared locomotive attained its peak of popularity during the 1920's and no fewer than 825 of these machines were in use on the West Coast. Of this number more than 500 came from Lima. The Pacific Coast type was first introduced in 1927 as a last-ditch effort to induce the western lumber industry to continue to log the vast timber stands by Shay locomotives.
Then the long shadows began to fall across the crooked logging tracks as the crawler tractor and the versatile Kenworth truck having the capacity of a railroad log car came into general use. It was not long until the steam-powered railroad into the woods was joining such immortals as the 20-mule team, the river steamboat and the stagecoach as landmarks along the trail of western history.
THe Shay Locomotive
PAcific Coast Shay
Canadian Loggers
Klickitat Log & Lumber
Rayonier Incorporated
White River Lumber
Washington & Oregon Loggers
PIckering Lumber
Other California Loggers
Roster, Pacific Coast Shays
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