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.

We are in the midst of what we in the deep South call very cold weather. It was 11F (almost -12C)  Sunday night and then again Monday night. Plus wind. We didn’t get above freezing from fairly early Sunday evening until just after noon on Tuesday, and then we reached only 32F. I am happy to report, though, that we have not run out of firewood, and our wood stove is doing a good job of keeping the house warm.

As much as I like heating with a wood stove, I have to admit that it’s a dirty business.

You may remember (but probably don’t) that I installed a duct with an in-line blower from the ceiling above the stove across the width of the house to a wall in our bedroom. Our heating/air conditioning guy doubted that it would work, but, hah! Even at below-freezing temperatures we can keep the living room around 72-73F, and the bedroom between 68F and 70F.

During the day the sun helps warm the bedroom, and the dogs.

The outlet is behind and to the left of the bedside table.

If you look carefully, and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t, you can see that even now, a year and a half after we moved in, I do not have all the baseboards installed. My excuse is that I did a lot of door frames last year, cut a lot of firewood, and then spent a lot of the summer trying to get grass to grow in the front yard. Growing grass must be watched very closely.

But back to the heating blower. It is not too loud, as I had hoped, since it’s isolated in the attic. Unfortunately there is some sound from the air exiting the grill in the bedroom. We usually turn the blower off at night, but the last two nights we have left it on. If we turn the blower off, the bedroom cools to 66F or so.

Our stove has a very small firebox.  We chose this unit essentially for that reason, since I was afraid a larger stove would make it unbearably hot in the living room. Once it’s up and running, it’s able to keep the house at a reasonable, although not uniform, temperature. However, because the body of the stove is made from stone, it heats up significantly more slowly than a cast-iron or steel stove. That means it takes a while to go from lighting a fire to getting the living room warm. A full load of seasoned oak will burn down to glowing embers in about three hours. To keep the stove hot and the house warm I have to get up in the middle of the night to add more wood. The last two nights, I loaded wood twice because I left the stove draft open to keep a good, hot fire, and it burns more quickly that way.

I have heated with wood for a long time. When I moved to Huntsville, Al, back in 1986, I bought a small, cheap mobile home. My friend Tom in New Mexico gave me a simple, cast-iron box stove. I used a hunting knife to cut a hole in the roof and installed it in the living room. I used it so much that in the six years I lived there I didn’t have to have my propane tank refilled.

When I bought a house in 1992, there was a wood stove in the living room. In winter I set the thermostat at around 50 and heated with the stove. When I left for work I loaded up the stove, but by the time I got back home in the evening, the house was pretty cool. If I left for the weekend, it was 50F in the house when I got back home. The living room was huge, with a very high cathedral ceiling. It took quite a while to get a fire going and warm the room. I didn’t have any way to get the heat anywhere else in the house, so I heaped blankets on the bed and slept in a cold bedroom. None of that bothered me. I am pretty sure all of it would bother Leah, so we do not set the thermostat at 50 today.

It’s unquestionably more trouble to heat with wood than to just let the heating system work. There’s finding and cutting trees, splitting and stacking, constantly bringing wood to the house, and cleaning up all the mess in the living room. But I find it satisfying.

Some time within the last 10 days the mountain finally arrived at fall. When I took the dogs for their walk on Sunday, there was actually some color. Not as much as in the best years, but at least enough to make me feel like it was actually fall.

The smaller maples had the best color.

There was a nice view down Fouche Gap Road towards the first hairpin curve going into Texas Valley.

It was hard to capture the slight haze in the shadows.

This is looking up from the second hairpin curve, near the bottom of the mountain.

The leaves seemed to glow from the backlighting.

When I went down to get some mortar (I’m making a stone fireplace surround), I thought about making a video as I drove down, but I decided not to; the color is nice compared to what it was a week ago, but it’s still drab compared to some of the past falls up on the mountain.