19th-Century Steam Engine Will Be Star of East Broad Top’s Fall Spectacular
The star of this year’s Fall Spectacular at the East Broad Top Railroad will be as unlikely as it is rare: a post-Civil War steam engine that will be run for the first time since 1957. But it will run without going anywhere — it’s the stationary steam engine that provided power to almost all the machinery in the railroad’s historic machine shops.
“Most people have never seen anything this old run,” says Dave Richards, a member of the volunteer Friends of the East Broad Top who helped get the engine back in good operating order this summer. Richards says the year in which the engine was built is unknown, as is the builder, but he believes the engine was originally purchased for one of the iron furnaces after which Rockhill Furnace, the railroad’s home town, is named. A plaque mounted on the engine’s base says it was installed in the railroad’s then-new shops in 1882. The name of A. W. Sims, then the railroad’s superintendent, also appears on the plaque.
Richards says the engine may even be older than the railroad, which was built from 1872 to 1874. It’s “the simplest, most inefficient” type of steam engine, he says, with a fixed-cutoff design that much of the time would have used more steam than necessary. The engine’s single cylinder turned an eight-foot flywheel to which a six-foot pulley is attached. A belt from that pulley looped up to the ceiling, and from there drove a system of overhead shafts, pulleys, and belts that reached almost every machine in the main shops building, the adjoining car shop, the blacksmith’s shop, and the foundry.
Among the machines that the stationary engine powered are lathes, planers, drill presses, a wheel press, and a shear/hole punch—all of them still in place. Partly because the shops complex is so well preserved, the railroad was made a National Historic Landmark in 1964, and the shops were documented by the National Park Service’s Historic American Engineering Rec