I was going through old slides and prints and found this print from a photo I took sometime between 1973 and 1976, when I was a reporter for The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle. It’s an old Southern Railway steam engine that was being used for excursion trips. The quality of the photo is not great. When I used to turn in my rolls of film to the guys in the photo department, they made prints that were just good enough to last until the paper was ready to print the next morning. This one hasn’t stood up very well through the decades.

I’m almost certain that this is Southern Engine 4501. The first time I saw 4501 was the evening before it was to leave Augusta for the next leg of its trip. The engine was cold and dead, sitting in a yard with old guys crawling over it trying to fix something. All of them were about as old as the engine itself, which was made in 1911. I think the men retired from Southern at about the same time steam engines left regular railroad service. Now they were called back to drive the old thing.

This photo was taken the next day, when the beast had been awakened and was sitting ready to run.

We’re used to being able to jump into a car and have it rolling within a few seconds, but steam locomotives are a different beast. You have to build a fire under them, and that takes time. And, once you have the fire going, you have to wait till it builds a full head of steam.

A steam engine with a full head of steam is the closest thing to a living creature that man has ever made. There is a constant hiss in the background and every 20 or 30 seconds a kind of clunking chuff. Various train forums trace that sound to the air compressors steam engines used.

You’ll know when it’s getting ready to start moving. There is drama and sound. The engineer will open a valve on the steam cylinders and a huge cloud of hot mist will hiss out just in front of the drive wheels. That’s the engineer clearing condensation from the drive cylinders. If you’re standing in the wrong place, it will feel like a steam bath.

Next, there will be a chuff as the drive wheels start to turn, and a cloud of steam and coal smoke will shoot out of the stack. There will be another chuff from other side of the engine, and then another from the near side, four in all for every rotation the drive wheels make, and four puffs of steam and smoke from the stack.

I can’t remember exactly when I was invited to ride in the cab of the engine, but that’s the kind of invitation that I could not turn down. I climbed up into the cab with no knowledge of where the train was going or how I would get back to town.

Riding in the cab of a steam locomotive is like nothing else in the world. All that track that looks straight actually isn’t; there are little dips and side-to-side wriggles, all of which translated to the engine rocking all the time. And there was noise. Overwhelming, continuous, deafening noise.

I think there were four men in the cab, plus one reporter. The engineer and the fireman were the only ones actually doing anything. The day before all had worked late into the night, so they were tired. One of them sat up in the window, his head rocking back and forth, sleeping, despite the noise.

When the fire needed more coal, the fireman stuck a shovel into a pile of coal in the tender, and then turned around and stepped on a pedal at the rear of the firebox. Two half-moon-shaped doors clanged open, revealing the glowing, roaring fire. He tossed the shovelful of coal into the fire, then stepped off the pedal. The doors slammed shut. Then he did it again.

Eventually the train stopped at some little town not too far from Augusta. I don’t remember where it was – Edgefield? Graniteville? I don’t know. But I decided that I should probably take that opportunity to get off the train.

When I climbed down from the cab, I was deaf. My ears were telling me that they had had enough and just weren’t doing any more work for a while. I was also kind of lost. I called my office and got the number of a stringer in that town, and he gave me a ride back to Augusta. I’m not quite sure how I made that call, but I do remember telling anyone I spoke to that I couldn’t really hear anything.

My hearing, or most of it, eventually came back. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like to ride those engines every workday for years. Those were some real men.

On several occasions Engine 4501 seemed destined for the scrap heap, or a life as a static display at best, but it’s still pulling excursion trains for the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.

I think maybe Leah and I should ride a train pulled by that old engine sometime.

Engine 4501 has two small leading wheels (on a single axle), eight drive wheels, and two small trailing wheels. That makes it a 2-8-2, or what is known as a Mikado, apparently because the first steam locomotives of this configuration were made for Japanese railroads. The 2-8-2 wheel layout was probably most often used for freight, but working steam locomotives are so rare these days that museums and excursion railroads have to use what they can find. The drive wheel diameter is 63 inches. That’s also maybe a little small for passenger train use. One rule of thumb is that the normal top speed in miles per hour of a steam locomotive was equal to wheel diameter in inches. Passenger trains ran faster than freight, so passenger locomotives typically had larger drive wheels. The smaller wheels also allowed the engine to deliver more power for a given distance traveled, making it better to move heavy freight trains.