Heritage Museum Shay may hit rails again

More than 105 years after Lima Locomotive Works in Lima, Ohio, built it, the 37-ton Shay Locomotive that rests in a shed next to Libby’s Heritage Museum is getting a facelift and is being prepared for an adventure.

Ron Carter, a volunteer at the museum, has a dream that the No. 4 Shay will be able to take tourists on an excursion trip very soon, something he would consider a boon for Libby.

“I think it is an inspirational thing, a forward-looking thing,” Carter said. “We’re dreamers, but we’re also workers. The hard-working people in this project are what is making it move.”

With a $5,000 grant from the National Railway Historical Society, the Heritage Museum has taken large steps to make the train engine operational again.

Late last summer the project began to take shape, when the museum used a quarter-mile of donated track from Burlington Northern to move the train from its display next to Highway 2 more than 600 feet across the parking lot to its current location. They used a crane to move the shed (the train’s original home) and drop it on top of the engine to protect it from the elements.

Much of the damage already was done, though, even as far back as its operational days.

The smoke box, the front part of the engine where steam is sucked through pipes by the firebox, is heavily corroded from years of rainfall that percolated through the acidic ash at the bottom and caused the corrosion. 

Luckily for the project, Montana Machine has agreed to make a new steel sheet for the bottom to restore the smoke box to its original thickness. This has given the hard-working volunteers a modicum of relief.

“There don’t appear to be any problems in the firebox,” said Jay Matthews, a retired union boilermaker who has dedicated large amounts of time to the project. “The preliminary results look favorable.”

   The locomotive took a long path to where it is today, first being used as a logging engine in Minnesota in 1907. On the delivery from Lima, Ohio, the engine was dragged across a frozen lake on a sleigh by horses. It worked in Minnesota for a decade before arriving in Libby to help the logging industry in 1917.

   It worked as a coal-fired engine for another decade before being converted to oil in 1927, and worked exclusively in the woods south of town before the logging bridge opened across the Kootenai River, allowing access to the woods up Pipe Creek Road.

   In 1937, with the influx of logging trucks, the No. 4 Shay was retired from logging and worked at the train yard as a switcher until 1946, when it was fully retired from work.

   For 35 years after retirement, the locomotive sat rusting outside City Hall, and when the museum claimed it in the late 1970s, the cab was falling off, water was in the filtration system and the above-mentioned corrosion had rendered it inoperable.

   After 66 years mothballed, the train is beginning to find new life. Boiler experts have run ultrasound tests to determine corrosion on other parts of the train and have come away with positive results, but no definites.

   “The ultrasound tests are telling us what we need to know,” Carter said. “We are getting general figures down. There is no firm timeline.”

   The first step to getting the train operational again is to run it with compressed air, by the end of the year. That will suffice for a straight track on little incline and is just a test to find any problems before it is converted to combustible fuels.

   Even when the locomotive is operational, the excursion route provides more difficulties. The volunteers are looking into an easement from the Port Authority on an old landfill right outside the shed, and the plan will be for the train to run up and around J. Neils Park, giving tourists dinner and a scenic tour.

   Obstacles have been par for the course in trying to get the train running and pretty again, including one that surprised everyone on the project.

   “We found out five or six months ago that the engine wasn’t ours,” said Jay Goley, president of the Heritage Museum. “The present owner is International Paper. St. Regis loaned it to us, but we never owned it.”

   The potentially project-stopping problem was solved when International Paper found out about the No. 4 Shay.

   “They were surprised, they had no clue,” Goley said. “But they knew it was important to Libby. They agreed to sell it to us for a buck.”