Gary got it! And like I said, not many people have heard of it for some reason. It was well received by the people who did see it just not that many did. The model maker is yours truly.
The drawings I got for the initial train just didn't work. The rods were all jacked up, the wheels went into the boiler and so on and so on. Obviously drawn by someone with an eye for esthetics but engineering, not so much. I learned a lot about early American steam engines as I was tasked with designing and building the running gear and the passenger car trucks. I put my name as the pattern maker on the wheels. All the valve motion and controls are there and move appropriately. Unfortunately, in the actual film, the locomotive seems to spring a giant steam leak underneath and all those parts are hard to see. I brought up the fact there was no tender and if starting with a full head of steam they might make it to the end of the set. I was told they thought about it but didn't feel the tender helped tell the story.
The locomotive was modeled after the William Crooks, post rebuild and post "restoration" hence the two steam domes on a stepped boiler. Originally William Crooks had a straight boiler and two steam domes. Later it was rebuilt with a stepped boiler, the end toward the cab is a larger diameter, and one steam dome. Even later, in the 1920s, the 60 year old locomotive was restored to its original configuration with two steam domes, minus the straight boiler, and went on tour around the US and made appearances at various world fairs. It is currently on display at the Lake Superior Railroad Museum in Duluth, MN.
And there is a random story for a Saturday morning.
