Engine No. 59

Built in Philadelphia, engine No. 59 was a Baldwin 4-6-0 purchased new in 1900. This ten-wheeler had a long-boiler that had substantially more heating surface area. The grates and fireboxes were relatively small, however. It was scrapped in 1941.

Steamlocomotive.com; whitepassfan.net

Engine 61


There are very few photos of Engine 61, so I have been told, so here is one of Theresa Weise about 1920 posing on the front of it. The engine was purchased new and built in 1900 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. It was a 2-8-0 wheel configuration and weighed 17,600 lbf.
Here is a description from a railfan’s site: “This single Consolidation had the same power dimensions as the converted #56 (Locobase 10678), but was a road engine. Like most of the WP & Y locomotives, 61 had an outside frame (to make room for the Stephenson link motion inside) and it stayed in service an equivalent amount of time before retirement in the early 1940s.”
Sadly it was used as riprap along the Skagway River in 1949.
I believe it was John Bush, who worked in Skagway as the head of the train works here, who had it retrieved and moved to Skagway Shops in 1990. He was involved in trading abandoned narrow gauge trucks (railroad car wheels) to other narrow gauge train companies. He was also responsible for trading these trucks to a town in the midwest for Engine 69, which eventually made its way to Skagway. When White Pass traded for this engine, it had been sitting in the town center of some little town in Nebraska (?) for many decades and the town was quite attached to it, so it was moved out of there under cover of darkness and hidden in Washington State for a couple of years until it was brought up to Skagway.
Anyway, the fate of little engine 61 is not as lucky, it was sold to Mid-West Locomotive & Machine Works in 2007. Narrow gauge engines and parts are getting difficult to find these days.

photo courtesy of John Weise. Wikipedia for engine info; steamlocomotive.com