A long way from home. Boothbay Railway Henschel Locomotive #6 is a long way from her "birthplace" as she hauls an hourly excursion around her "retirement home" in Maine. The Boothbay Railway Village was originally built in 1965 by a railroad buff from Massachusetts named George McEvoy. It was the first railroad-related museum in Maine. One of the attractions was intended to be a 2-ft. gauge railway around the property, to introduce patrons to the history of narrow gauge railroading in the Pine Tree State. But although a few original railroad cars from the Maine 2-ft. lines could still be found, there weren't many locomotives from those lines left, and ALL of the known ones were at Edaville Railroad in Massachusetts. So what to do for power? Well, Mr. McEvoy managed to acquire at least 4, German-built tank engines of 600mm gauge, which is essentially 24". From what little history I can find, at least two of them came from a small, private steam operation in Gilford, NH, and the remaining two came from other owners. All appear to have been imported from Germany in the more distant past. In the more than half a century since, it appears that two of these engines have been operated at Boothbay and the remaining two are display engines, which may have been used as parts sources, because both are indeed missing parts.
The engine pictured here is #6, which is the most frequent runner. She was built in 1934. Her stablemate, #7 dates back to 1913 and runs much less often. Both were built by Henschel & Sohn in Kassel, Germany, which was a pretty well-known manufacturer of transportation equipment. Both are tank locos, storing the water supply in a tank underneath the boiler, and a small fuel supply in a bunker just forward of the cab on the left side. The Boothbay folks tell me that both engines burn anthracite (hard) coal, which is unusual for locomotives this small. Apparently, it is very tricky to maintain a good fire in the tiny fireboxes on these engines, but the museum found advantages in that it produced less smoke and most importantly, ejected fewer hot cinders. This is a short train, and that second coach is an open car, so the crews definitely didn't want to shower their customers with anything that could burn them. Since more than half the line runs through wooded land, it also posed a smaller risk of lineside fires.
