Raritan River Sand Company No. 10
In 1953, owing to a rotted-out saddle tank, Pine Creek No. 1 was converted from an 0-4-0T (above) to an 0-4-0 (below) by removing the tank and adding a tender, which was constructed from a Raritan River Sand Company dump car. The tender contained a coal bin and a 250 gallon home heating oil tank for water. Under the auspices of the Cranberry Creek Railroad Company, she was shipped to the Copper Creek Railroad in 1956, but failed her annual state boiler exam, so a Porter 0-4-0T was purchased to replace her.
Evidently Disney once claimed their No. 4 was originally built for a New England lumber mill, perhaps as a more romantic-sounding alternative to a New Jersey sand pit. Some accounts indicate that Pine Creek had sold her to a scrap metal dealer, who then sold it to Disney through a railfan magazine advertisement; however, this has turned out to be apocryphal. Another very tall tale tells of her tender water tank being used to supply steam to the locomotive because she'd failed her boiler test. My, how some information gets mangled over the years! But then there's the true story of No. 1 having gone missing after Disney bought her: for protection, she was shipped to California in a boxcar, and this resulted in her being accidentally routed to Chicago instead.
All images are used by permission of Steve DeGaetano. |
In April 1925, the Baldwin
Locomotive Works (right) built 0-4-0T s/n 58367, which was purchased by the Raritan River Sand Company in Nixon, New Jersey,
to become their No. 10. A quarter century later, James Wright and
Jay L. Wulfson formed Wright & Wulfson, Inc. to save the saddle tanker from being scrapped. Thus in 1950 Raritan River
Sand Company's No. 10 became Pine Creek Railroad's No. 1 (below) for $400. By then, the original wood cab, destroyed in an engine
house fire, had been replaced with a steel cab.
Around 1959, she was sold to Walt
Disney's Roger Broggie, who purchased her as a cost-saving method of acquiring more steam power for their Anaheim, California
amusement park, versus building locomotives from scratch, as they had up to that point. For $2,000, plus another $90,000 or so in
restoration costs, she became 2-4-0 Santa Fe & Disneyland No. 4, the Ernest S. Marsh (below), which by 1967 had clocked over
50,000 miles at the park, according to railroad historian Gerald M. Best, and still operates today. By the time Disney was done
restoring her, all that was left of the original Baldwin were the frame, cylinders, drive wheels, side rods, valve gear and bell.
Her new all-welded boiler was made in 1959 by Dixon Boiler Works of Los Angeles.
Specifications
Copyright © 2010 by David K. Smith. All Rights Reserved.