If the sawmill is at some distance from the logging activities, I’m wondering how the log cars might transit over the mainline to the mill.
Would a logging locomotive take the cars from forest to mill regardless of distance or stage them to be picked up by a local?
Take your pick. It could be either. Regardless, it was common for the logging railroad to take the logs directly to the mill. The mill would be either adjacent to a common-carrier railroad, and if not, the logging railroad would send trains to an interchange with the common carrier to distribute its product.
Mark
In the early days, at least in the East, many lines would “Wildcat” the log loads to the mill. That is the cars were allowed to coast downhill. There would be brakemen on the cars to (hopefully) make sure that they did not go too fast. The horses, and later locomotives were only used to return the empties to the loading site. I haven’t read of any, but I would be surprised if some operation didn’t Wildcat to the main and then use a locomotive to pull the loads the rest of the way.
I live in Florida. The town where I live was once home to a large sawmill that existed for about 20 years, before they cut all the trees and moved on. In the early years they cut the trees near the mill, but as time went on, they had to go further to get to the trees that still stood.
The lumber company did not own the land they logged. They bought the trees and the right to enter the land to cut them down. The woods trackage was only in a given place for a few months before it was taken up. It was very roughly built track.
The lumber company had it’s own railroad at the mill site. The mill was served by both the Atlantic Coast Line, and the Seaboard Air Line.
Every morning a train of empty log cars left the mill, ran over the Seaboard’s main line for a few miles, and swung off on to a branch. The train then ran down the branch to the junction with the lumber company’s trackage. There was a yard located here, where the empties were dropped off. The loco then picked up a train of loaded log cars and returned to the mill.
The lumber company only had 2 employees on the train, the engineer and fireman. They didnt need anybody else because they didnt do any switching along the way. The Seaboard required that one of their employees ride the train, to act as a pilot. He was the train’s conductor. He rode the train from the mill, to the junction with the branchline. The logger was the only customer on the branch, and leased the whole branch from SAL. The log train then proceeded out to the junction with the logging company. On the trains return with the loaded cars, the pilot got back on at the junction, for the run back to the mill over SAL’s tracks.
The logger had to maintain a couple of locos in good enough condition to be used as ‘road’ engines. The rest of their engines were ‘woods’ engines, and in were in generally poor shape.
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In northern Minnesota, logging railroads brought the logs a few miles from the forest to a river to be floated downstream to Stillwater (on the St.Croix River) or Mpls/St.Paul on the Mississippi. In some cases in northeast Minnesota, the logging railroads took the logs to Lake Superior and created log rafts to float them down to Two Harbors or Duluth/Superior.
Later, it wasn’t unusual for logging companies to bring the loaded cars (usually standard flat cars, or gondolas) to an interchange so that a mainline railroad (Great Northern, Duluth and Iron Range, Duluth Missabe and Northern) could take the cars to Two Harbors MN, Duluth/Superior or even the Twin Cities. However some logging operations were large enough that they could haul trains of logs the whole way themselves.
BTW that’s a lot of the reason that MN logging railroads used more ‘rod’ engines (2-6-0’s being the most common) than geared engines - not only was the land relatively flatter than say in Oregon or Washington, but also the distance was greater. Going 40 miles on a Shay would take a while!!
What a wealth of interesting information - much appreciated. This will help me decide how to design and plan for these operations on my layout.
Rick
If the logs are given to a common carrier to handle to the mill, they have to be interchange qualified cars, proper air brakes, safety appliances, clearances, etc.
If the logs are handled by the logging company private railroad, then they don’t have to have all those provisions.
So if you are wanting to use skeleton log cars or disconnect logging trucks and want to be prototypical then you won’t want to interchange the cars.
Dave H.
That sort of sums up my situation. I’m using a Shay to shuttle the skeleton and disconnect log cars down the hill from the logging area. I probably wouldn’t use it to also take those cars to the mill; which is not local to the logging activities.
If I understand correctly, I should use a logging company road locomotive to take them to the lumber mill.
The log cars used by my local logger were not interchanged…they were used in a dedicated, unit train, with dedicated motive power and caboose. They did no enroute switching. I have 2 photos of their log cars in front of me. There is no brake cylinder, no brake wheel, no brake rigging, no brake pipe and no brake hoses. They didnt have brakes. Of course they didnt have hills either.
My local logger, the one that cut pine, used rod engines. Toward the end they used 4-6-0s as road engines but they liked small-drivered 2-6-2s in the woods because they could run either direction equally as well.
The hardwood logger used a shay and a climax (this was in the everglades). Both were rebuilt with diesel engines powering their geared drivelines. The shay looked like a center-cab diesel, with a large truck differential in the place formerly occupied by the shay engine. The jackshafts that powered the trucks were connected to the differential. It was used here until 1959, then sold to a logger in Colombia, South America, where it ran until scrapped. The Climax was a class A…it looked like a flat car with a roof, and a diesel engine where the boiler once was. It too was used until 1959.
I think you got the idea. Out here in the Northwest, most mills were located near a RR like the SP or a short line and the lumber co. had their own RR from the mill to the woods and didn’t run their trains off their RR. They usualy just shipped rough cut or finished lumber off property. If they had to ship logs off property the logs were either loaded or reloaded onto cars that could be ran in interchange service. But there were situations when a Lumber co. had trackage rites or another RR to a mill. The Coos Bay Lmbr. Co. is just such an example. In order for the CBLC to run their trains over the SP the locomotives had to be equipped with number boards and class lights and the cars (like mentioned previously) had to have such safety appliances as air brakes, stirrups and grab irons. The CBLC used 2-8-2Ts, EMD SW 9 or 1200s and did run skeleton cars over the SP.
Here are links to moving logs.
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=moving+logs+to+mill&fr=yfp-t-368&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
One company had about 60 miles of flume.
Rich
A couple of California examples where the sawmill was the interface between the logging railroad and the common carrier were both on the Sierra, at Standard (Pickering logging company, standard gauge, Shay powered) and at Tuolumne (West Side, 3 foot gauge, Shay powered.) Both used skeleton cars - disconnects were outlawed by the Federales and both companies were logging National Forest land.
An interesting variant of a common-carrier connection was found on the Yosemite Valley - the logger loaded special single-bulkhead cars, then lowered them (bulkhead end downgrade) down a hairy incline to the YV’s aptly-named Incline station. They ran the rest of the way to the sawmill complex behind YV locomotives in common-carrier service. At the top of the incline, the woods rails were worked by Shays.
Not United States, but interesting. The Kiso Forest Railroad was a 2’ 6" gauge operation that ran miniature rolling stock*, but the main line into the forest was built like the Norfolk and Western! Steel bridges, rock tunnels, big fills with rock erosion facing… In contrast, the temporary branches to logging shows were laid on trestlework which appeared to have been thrown together from odd slash picked off the ground, frequently with the bark still on it. Right up to abandonment in 1975, logs were hauled on disconnects coupled with roosters (and link-and-pin couplers where the logs weren’t spanning them.) The disconnects were fitted with air brakes - standard-size triple valve, reservoir of about 4 liter capacity and brake cylinder about the size of a coke can! The logs were either cut up locally at the town where the narrow gauge originated or were transloaded to JNR gons and flat cars for shipment elsewhere.
*“Miniature rolling stock:” The disconnects were about the size of a four-wheel warehouse platform carrier and ran on 12 inch diameter wheels. The biggest power the line ever
It depends on how far it is, and if it’s on your logging RR or not. If it isn’t too far (say only a few miles) a Shay could take a string of log cars directly to the mill, which might receive logs from the logging RR on one side, and on the other side have a spur from a mainline RR to ship out finished lumber to market.
A lot on how your RR will work will depend on the time (era) you’re modelling, and where you’re modelling. For example, in the Great Lakes region heavy logging was for many years done in the winter, because the marshy land where the good trees were located would freeze up making it easier to drag out the logs…plus the unbelievable amount of flying / biting bugs that were there in the warm weather made it almost unbearable!!
You might join the this group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/4L/
Quote from the website; The 4L List, The Loyal Legion of Logged-on Loggers; dedicated to the dissemination of information regarding logging prototypes and models. We cover all aspects of the industry, from actual logging, to sawmilling and their attendant railroads; in other words, anything of interest to logging fans. The dates we cover are roughly 1800 to present. We cover all areas of the world as well, as most areas had logging, in fact, it would appear only Antarctica is off limits to us!
Log train running down the center of Main Street, Sebastopol, CA on the Petaluma & Santa Rosa of SP’s Northwestern Pacific.