I meant this to be in the discovery thread, but hit the wrong button!

About 1965, I was riding the Kapowsin Logger (Northern Pacific train to Lake Kapowsin, near Mt. Rainier) with my father, an NP conductor. I was 14, and rode with him on branch line jobs pretty often. The officials would look the other way back then. Leaving Tacoma at about 2am in the morning, they would arrive at the lake somewhere around 5am with the empties. St. Regis did the switching and left loads for them.

There was about a 2 hour wait, and seeing as this was a 16 hour a day job, the men would sleep for a couple hours. Dad told me that they had scrapped a logging mallet up the tracks about 1 mile and a half, and I could walk up there if I wanted, while they caught some zzzz's.

Wandering around the obvious site, I found the headlight, reflector and pivoting ring that held the glass, all separately, but in good condition. I think my arms stretched about 6" carrying that beast back to the caboose! I had it in my collection until 1974, when I traded it to Jack Rogers for a wood cookstove. He had a Heisler, now at Garibaldi Oregon, with no headlight! That was an adventure in it's own right. The stove was at his museum, accessed by about 1/4 mile of track. We loaded the headlight on a hand pump car with trailer, took it up, loaded the wood stove on the trailer and brought it down to my truck.

They had 2 mallets at Kapowsin. One was #7 and the other was #10. Did the headlight have any indication which one it was?

Martin

Hi Martin,

No indications, all glass was gone, no markings on the paint, and nothing stamped. For all practical purposes, it was generic (and rusty).

Steve

Steve -

Here's another headlight "story". One of the members of our museum was attending an auction a few years ago. He spotted something interesting in a pile of "stuff", and decided to bid on it when the auctioneer got to it. It was a long day, with a lot of stuff, but he hung around. Finally, the auctioneer closed the proceedings without ever getting to that particular pile. So he went to the auctioneer and asked him "what about that stuff"? "What are you interested in?" was the reply. "That thing", he replied and the auctioneer told him to just take it. He brought it down to the museum in his truck saying that he thought that it might be a steam locomotive headlight. I told him that yes, I looked like a headlight off of a Pennsy engine. Fortunately, one of the glass number boards was still intact and I checked a PRR locomotive roster I managed to find on the internet and identified the engine number (as I recall, it was a 9xxx number) as being off of a 2-8-0!

Les