Live steam the way it was MEANT to be......Jim Turnbull runs his engine across the High Trestle at the New England Live Steamers track at Danvers, Mass. at the 1938 Brotherhood of Live Steamers meet. A.W. Leggett photo, courtesy of Jim Leggett, used with permission. The trestle was some 8 feet off the ground and crossed a section of marsh adjacent to the Porter River. Lawyers were not allowed to ride this part of the track.
The End of an Era?
From about 1928 to about 1980, "live steam" meant "steam", and meant that you mailed a check to a castings supplier, and a week or two later, a box of castings and a tube of blueprints arrived at your door.
Then, in your home workshop in the basement or garage, you spent a couple years' worth of nights, weekends, and winters reading blueprints and making chips. You would machine a part on small machinery that easily fit in a modest home workshop. And then you would machine another part, and then another, and they would form an assembly. If you made a mistake you could not correct, you ordered another casting and it arrived a week or two later.
Sooner or later, you had enough parts and assemblies machined and completed that it began to look like a locomotive. And finally, you DID have a locomotive!
Best of all, your locomotive was "big enough to pull you", but also "small enough to manage". This was the era before "hugescale" and "supersize" locomotives.....you had a steam locomotive that could be built on the small to medium sized machinery that was in most home workshops, but that burned coal; could pull anywhere from 2 to 6 people; and that also could be lifted by just one or two men, and that fit in your car's backseat or trunk for transporting to and from the track.
Those days have been gone for a long time. I witnessed the "tail end" of those days in the early 1980s, but by the late 1980s, most traditional castings suppliers from the old days disappeared.
