Another Inspection Engine

S&C Number 301 is ready to start serving the superintendent. All it needs now is an engineer and some white flags on the front of the engine.

I like inspection locomotives (http://sandcrr.blogspot.com/search/label/inspection%20loco). They are a very interesting part of nineteenth century railroading where a division superintendent would take his office out on the road to conduct business on site. They came in various shapes and sizes. Some were rebuilt older engines while others were purpose-built by the prominent manufacturers. Unfortunately, they faded away by the 1920s.

     The particular engine in question is a model of the Lehigh Valley's Dorothy. The prototype was built in the Lehigh's shops in 1884 and appeared somewhat differently than the model. The original loco was involved in an accident and was rebuilt to the appearance modeled. I didn't do much modeling here, though. The basic engine was imported by Red Ball beginning in 1963. I added a rear headlight, whistle and some step details. It was also remotored by a Minebea motor as described in http://sandcrr.blogspot.com/2020/08/new-motors-and-new-buggy.html. A Tsunami2-Steam2 decoder was added with a small sugar cube speaker. It was all fairly straight-forward except that all the wiring had to be accomplished through a small opening in the bottom of the body. This makes two engines for this superintendent which was two more than the Stockton & Copperopolis ever had. As I said above, though, I like these kinds of engines and I will probably built up a couple more in the future.