I recently received this book and it deals primarily with the major mining communities along the BC Southern boundary in the early 1900’s.
The book has a section dealing with the history of the three CPR Shays that were purchased by CPR and were for a number of years the most powerful locomotives owned and operated by CPR.
An overview of the Kettle Valley Railroad is also presented in this book, as is the Great Northern Railroad’s third mainline to the coast. GN at this time was running their first Mallet engines out of the Fernie/Crowsnest area. In addition GN was also running their G series 4-8-0 engines. I was unaware that GN has this class of locomotive at this time, the engines were built by Rogers.
I certainly did not realize the amount of GN trackage that was at one time being used in Southern BC serving the various mine and smelters…
Huge portions of the KVR were joint CP/GN trackage when built. The station at Brookemere is unusual in that there are mainline tracks on both sides. This was because one side was to be for CP and the other for GN, however there was only ever one GN train to use the Coquihalla Sub and CP eventually bought out GN’s share in the line.
Turner, Robert D. and David S. Wilke. Steam Along the Boundary: Canadian Pacific, Great Northern and the Great Boundary Copper Boom. Winlaw, BC: Sono Nis Press, 2006.
These indeed were "monster " locomotives, 3 were built by Lima, they weighed 250,000 lbs. they were to operate on the Field hill and they had 50% more tractive effort than a D-10, the problem was their 15mph top speed, they were sent to Southern B.C. to Grand Forks and Eholt working mine spurs. The cylinders were on the right hand side and the boiler was offset on the other side, they were S-1-a, S-1-b, and S-1-c. Big bruisers indeed. Strange, there are no brass models of these brutes.
I assume you’re talking about the CPR’s shay locomotives used around the smelters and ultimately on the swithbacks at the smelter in Trail. For a time they were CP’s most powerful locomotives.
There certainly has been a lot of discussion regarding the CPR Shay locomotive and the Field Hill after an article appeared in the CPR magazine the Spanner.
This discussion has come up a few times on the CPR Historical site’s web page as well as other CPR based forums. There have been instances where some CPR staff were quoted as to the Shays being there being and other CRP staff saying the Shays were never in service at that site.
The Shay’s were acquired by CPR over a three year period and the only documentation and pictures place them in the Southern BC mining area. There are no know pictures showing a Shay working the Field area nor are there any documents supporting that claim.
Two of the three Shays were scrapped in 1911 and 1914 and the remaining Shay was sold in 1913 and was acquired by the Corbin coal mine located near Fernie.