8/30/20

 The National Transportation Museum in St Louis Missouri also had a few non US locomotives.  This one is a Canadian National Railways that was donated in 1959.  It is locomotive number 5529 and is a 4-6-2 Pacific type wheel arrangement and was built by the Canadian branch of Alco in 1905.  You can find original old photos of Canadian locomotives out on the web of when they were in service if you Google them.  Google is an amazing thing.  😀

8/24/20

 I saw these flowers at the National Museum of Transportation in St Louis in July.  I am not sure what they are but they were quite striking I thought.  They look like a cross between a Gaillardia or Blanket Flower and a Black-eyed Susan.  I need to find out what they are because I would love to find some to plant.

Edit:  After some Googling I discovered that these are indeed a type of Black-eyed Susan or Rudbeckia.  Now to find where to buy them.  😃

8/23/20

 This was a quite interesting locomotive that the Museum of Transportation in St Louis had on display.  It was built in 1893 by the Rhode Island Locomotive Works and is a 0-4-4T with the T indicating it was a tank locomotive without a separate tender.It's tank held 700 gallons of water and it carried and burned 1 ton of hard anthracite coal which smoked less.  This locomotive ws used on a Chicago elevated line.  It could run equally well forward or backward which was important because there was no way to turn it around.  It pulled trains up to 4 cars long.  It is named for Charles H. Deere, son of John Deere, yes, that one.  After it's work on the "L" it went to Michigan for lumber and chemical work, then to Texas and then to Mexico.  It was donated to the museum in 1957 and then restored as close as possible cosmetically to it's original appearance in 1995-96.

8/16/20

 The National Museum of Transportation in St Louis has a sister locomotive to Daylight 4449.  This is Southern Pacific 4460 and is a 4-8-4 Northern type which SP termed a GS-6 and was built in 1943.  It was semi-streamlined with a skyline casing which covered the domes on top of the boiler.  This feature was designed to lift smoke over the cab and out of the eyes of the engineer.  It pulled it's last train for the SP in 1958 and was donated to the museum in 1959.

8/2/20

Welcome to Steamy Sunday on the Blog and another photo from the National Museum of Transportation in Kirkwood, Missouri just outside of St. Louis.  This is Y6 Class Norfolk & Western 2156 a 2-8-8-2 Mallet locomotive.  The sign on it was welcoming it back to the museum.  It had returned on June 3 after a 5 year stay at the Virginia Museum of Transportation to help welcome N&W 611 back to steam.  It is a huge locomotive and was cool to see.  It was raining while I took this shot from under a tree.  The locomotive is not operational and was towed back and forth.

7/26/20

Hey hey it's Steamy Sunday once again on the Blog.  The National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis has some really neat old locomotives and a lot are the only surviving ones.  An example is this one built in 1876 for the Boston & Albany Railroad called the Marmora.  Instead of steam domes, it has 2 steam cannons, one of which can be seen next to the smoke stack.  The only criticism I have of the museum is that the railroad items were packed so close together, it was hard to really get a good detailed view of them.  Plus a lot deteriorated badly, I imagine they sat out in the weather for quite some time before being put under a roof.  I don't know what the conditions were like when the museum acquired them, the deterioration may have been well underway by then.

7/19/20

While I was in St Louis last Tuesday I went to the National Museum of Transportation in the suburb of Kirkwood, Missouri.  It was a lovely museum and I highly recommend it.  The displays were set up quite nicely and the grounds were quite lovely with groups of wildflowers around.  The only complaint I had was that some of the railroad equipment was very close together so it was hard to really view it well but they had so much it was probably all they could do and get it under a roof to protect the equipment.  This is a view of their Union Pacific Big Boy which you could get in the cab of and that was quite cool to see.

7/18/20

On the way back from Pennsylvania I stopped in St. Louis overnight and took my first artistic photos of the Gateway Arch.  I had driven by the arch several times over the years but never stopped to really photograph it.  I was lucky this evening as there were a few storm clouds around to make the sky more interesting.  I shot it from the Mississippi Overlook in the Malcolm W Martin Memorial Park.