My grandfather still has in his possession reels of footage from the late 70s/ early 80s of the NWS&W steam locomotives working the plant. I hope to have them digitized one day.

A few random memories of NWS&W near the end....

You could hear the rods clanking before you could hear the exhaust, before the engine even was in view.

Likewise, when starting, you could see the rods move before the wheels started to turn.

The engines were dirty pigs. One trip, when I was with a friend with two young boys, we were invited up into the cab while the crew took water, which they did right along a public street. The cab was filthy, the handrails were filthy. When it was time to get down, the engineer asked the boys if they wanted to blow the whistle, which of course they did, so handed them a filthy, oily, shaggy length of manila rope that looked like a horse's tail. It took all of our handkerchiefs to get them clean enough that they wouldn't get the inside of the car filthy before we could find a gas station to get washed up. But the boys were thrilled, and that's the only time I know of that fans ever got in the cab at that property.

Dennis -

Neat story. Don't happen to recall which engine it was by any chance?


Les

as per Dennis's story, NWS&W at one point had so many people visiting that I guess security was tired of chasing people off the property and eventually began giving out "photographer passes" for people who wanted to film the steam locomotives from designated spots. NWS&W security from what I've heard was pretty anti-railfan and your story seems like a pretty lucky one off or exception for such a company.

NWS&W was full of steel workers not railroad workers plain and simple. Most of the people who operated the railroad section of the plant were trying to make money and go home they did not care that they were operating steam they just saw it as doing their job hence why they were so primed and grimed and worn out. Essentially, the idea was "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Most of the time expertise or railroad practice was not In question and NWS&W did NOT obey FRA standards as pointed out earlier in the thread. With all of this in account hardly any of the men cared about the condition or cleanliness of the locomotives. If you look up videos of the NWS&W locomotives on YouTube at one point NWS&W converted a few of the 0-8-0's to oil burning to test how reliable they would be. Whether or not the conversions were reliable or not I have no clue but films taken in the 70's show 8305 absolutely billowing black smoke of wasted oil which in turn would absolutely cover the locomotives in a thick black blanket. That's when you realize that is how the locomotives were operated for 20 years after their retirement from the GTW with no major rebuild since then.

One of the reasons aside from the factory owner having a soft spot for steam was that the GTW locomotives could be literally DERAILED or take damage from carelessness and be put back on the track and still run which couldn't be done with a diesel without a thorough inspection hence one of the reasons they lasted so long. To be honest, it's nothing short of a miracle one of the locomotives didn't suffer a major failure or have the FRA come strolling by and weren't taken out sooner with the treatment they had.

Here are photos of the permit. these photos also prove that the infamous GTW 6322 which was used on the last regularly operated steam powered passenger train in the U.S was in fact sold to NWS&W.

GTWDude, that is a really great artifact! The 6322 is "infamous" for what reason, other than she wasn't preserved?
I wonder how NWS&W determined which of the steamers they received were still worth pulling off the scrap lines and firing again? Perhaps they just received a long selection of a single class and moved ahead from there?

GTW 6322 was infamous for being one of two steam locomotives that pulled the last regularly scheduled steam powered passenger trains In the United states and became an excursion star on the GTW because of it. On the day of the event the GTW only expected numbers in the hundreds instead they got numbers in the THOUSANDS of people wanting to ride the last steam locomotive out of Detroit which also included my Grandfather and Great Grandfather who had caught the bus fron St Clair Shores to Downtown Detroit. The amount of passengers was so huge that the GTW had to call in an entirely second train to help pull so GTW 6319 was called upon to lead the second train both were around 15-20 cars each iirc and packed to the brim. Sadly on a later fantrip 6322 before retirement blew out her air pump due to deferred maintenance. To add insult to injury the 6322 lost so much steam on the trip she had to be towed back by diesels in order to finish the trip. Afterwards, 6322 was sent away but not before the then superintendant of the GTW requested the brass number board and other trinkets off of 6322 and 6319 which can now be found at Durand MI. it's interesting to note though that she was never scrapped by the GTW themselves at their Battle creek Michigan shops where the GTW would cut apart their locomotives but instead she was sent with a bunch of other locomotives to NWS&W to be sold for scrap. If I had to take a WILD guess she was in the Durand dead line because given the amount of 0-8-0's that were sent to NWS&W and how big and bustling Durand yard was a lot of Road numbers such as 8380 have been shown to have worked Durand before so i don't think it would be too far off to assume.

As for the reason the 0-8-0's were chosen to work someone happened to notice what good condition they were in and with 20 years of scrap piles building up the fleet of 16 were chosen to operate at the plant.

here's some articles that can go more into detail if interested

https://www.nwsw.info/?cat=1&paged=2
https://www.nwsw.info/?p=97

Interesting story. Thank you!

Sorry, Les, but I don't recall. It was a cold, dreary day, and I may not have even taken any photos, if I did they are buried deep. I do recall it was one of the oil fired conversions (NOT the engine with the "backwards" Vanderbilt tender) which may be the reason it was so exceedingly dirty.

We had stopped to apply for (and receive) one of those photo permits earlier in the day, the only time I did so. There were stories circulating in the railfan community at the time that NWS&W security would challenge fans and demand their film, and while it seems a bit extreme, Sterling was a company town, so no help could be expected from the city police... Since we had my buddy's young sons with, we didn't want any risk of confrontation. Other times I stopped there I never bothered and never had any trouble; I didn't attempt to walk on the property, and the plant security never challenged me. Of course, that meant no chance of photographing the engine that worked the scrapyard west of the cast house, which was deep into private property. If there was ever any confrontations, I suspect they were caused by eager fans trying to walk in back there.

I don't know about Mr. Dillon's "love of steam", but I do know he was incredibly frugal. Why pay good money for switching locomotives when they can be found for free, right in our scrapyard? The locos weren't the only example of adaptive reuse of scrap; I recall a traveling bridge crane mounted on diesel loco trucks, and one day another buddy and I found a pair of Union Pacific gas turbine tenders, still in UP paint, being piped into some sort of process equipment.

It was an interesting place, but I wouldn't have wanted to work there.

Did NS&W always operate with one person steam crews?

Three images by Ron Ziel, taken at Northwestern Steel and Wire, between July 1962 and Sept. 1963, in preparation for his book, "Twilight of Steam Locomotives". The problem is, how do you fit one in a time machine? Roof rack wouldn't work.




I answer to the question of Ron's personal locomotive, here is BEDT #12 in storage around the time he purchased it. Ron's quest to find the last of American steam, whether in its death throes or squirreled away in the mountains or hollows of the rural areas, was a wake up call to railfans. Ron had his faults, but give him credit for his passion for steam.

i Made some corrections to some previous posts that include Following corrections after revisiting Durand this past weekend:

6319's wooden replacement number board was owned by the present GTW superintendent not as i belived requested by the president.

The GTW before they would sell steam locomotives to scrap would sell number boards and collectibles for dirt cheap prices before sending them away. Exact prices i know are discussed in Charles R. Foss's book "Grand Trunk Western: Evening before the Diesel" on the final steam Chapter. NWS&W would recognize that railfans or "Rail-Nuts" at the time would pay top dollar for these collectibles and therefore would hike the prices when they recieved the locomotives.

6322 was in fact repaired after the air tank blowout and ran until around March/April of 1961 when she was sidelined for the last time

A collector in Tennesse would also collect different things such as pressure gauges and 6322's whistle and lived to be around 100 before passing away a few years ago and having his daughter donate the artifacts to Durand.

6322's entire smokebox setup was recently sold for dirt cheap at an auction in Pennsylvania. Not a day goes by i regret not seeing this auction before it ended but i'm glad to know a good portion of her face is still around: https://www.barnebys.co.uk/auctions/lot ... RD92FA_ZWo

As to the question about NWS&W having one man crews all the time i cannot confirm that however it seems that several first hand reports tend to only mention one crewman and most photos taken of crew only have one person in the cab. If i REALLY had to guess crews would open up the Water injector and Oil at the same time to avoid crown sheet failure while tending to different operations and to also keep boiler pressure up hence why so much Oil appears to be wasted in later films of the 0-8-0's therefore supporting the theory that NWS&W always operated among a 1 man crew per locomotive.

The last trip with 6322 was on April 30, 1961. I've included a photo from Art Lemke's collection, of the engine sitting in Dearborn Station in Chicago, before departure. For some reason, I was not able to make that trip. I did however, go up to Elsdon Yard in Chicago a couple of days later and grabbed a couple of shots of the Northern sitting there dead outside of the roundhouse and one of those photos is shown; it is now also in Art's collection.

A number of years ago, that same 6322 "face" was offered here in Crown Point, Indiana at a sale. Never knew what happened to it. The parts obviously ended up in Pennsylvania at the mentioned auction. Wish I had known about it. I might have made a bid!

Les

I've sent this photo out once before. I never got a response as to what might have caused this. It was either 6322 or 6323 on the engineer's side. The trip continued without anyu apparent issues.

Here's what the cylinders of a CNR/GTW northern look like under the jacketing.