Schlanger Park train's days are numbered

Engine No. 1023 in Schlanger Park will spend its last night in Pittsburg on Saturday. After a long wait, crews worked long into Thursday night to lug the 120-ton train onto the Fourth Street parking lot at Schlanger Park, where it will remain until it is reunited with its “tender,” or fuel, car at the Heart of the Heartlands Railroad Museum Sunday morning.
The engine has been located in Schlanger Park since 1955, when the Kansas City Southern railroad sold it to the City of Pittsburg. But the locomotive has slowly been rusting away, and city officials said there was no money to maintain it — nothing has been done to it since 1995. So Pittsburg City Commissioners voted unanimously in December to let Heart of the Heartlands take it over.

To move, Tilton and Sons House Moving company constructed a massive 50-ton steel trailer around the engine with trucks that pivot as the trailer rounds corners. The beams they will use to lift that are 80 feet long, 36 inches tall and weigh 300 pounds per foot.

“It’s going to look like a big snake when it goes around a corner,” Tilton said.

The locomotive essentially is resting on a giant cradle. For some perspective as to how massively heavy the contraption really is, the fifth wheel hitch the Tiltons are using is rated to support 95,000 pounds or the equivalent of eight adult male African elephants.

Tilton said the largest house he and his father and brothers has moved weighed around 160,000 pounds, or about 72 tons. The engine checks in at a whopping 120 tons.

“This is the heaviest thing we’ve ever moved,” Tilton said.

A long history

Engine No. 1023 is rich in locomotive history and has roots that extend well beyond the Pittsburg area. The story of the engine — one of just 2,000 steam locomotives remaining in the United States — begins back East more than a century ago.

According to historians from the Kansas City Southern Railroad, which operated the engine, No. 1023 was built as locomotive No. 488 at the Pittsburgh, Pa., Locomotive Works in July 1906.

Later, in 1925, while the engine was still relatively new and strong, it underwent a major overhaul at its new home in the KCS rail yards in Pittsburg, Kan., where it was retrofitted to burn oil and redesignated No. 1023. The engine originally operated on a 2-8-0 wheel configuration — meaning it had one set of lead truck wheels, or bogies, which help guide the engine through curves, as well as eight main drive wheels — was put to work as a switch engine and continued to operate until the 1950s, when it was gradually phased out of service and replaced by diesel engines.

Frank Battega, a retired city of Pittsburg employee, said he remembers the engine well. According to Battega, No. 1023 operated as a long haul engine out of Kansas City before it was replaced by bigger steam locomotives and eventually diesel engines. It was then sent to Pittsburg, where it got its new number and was put to work moving freight cars from area factories through the then vast railyards. It also made runs to the yards in Neosho, Mo., and Watts, Okla., to pick up additional freight and grain cars.

“It would get the cars ready for transport,” Battega said. “It would take them from different factories and line them up to go where they needed to go.”

In 1955, when No. 1023 was finally retired, it was sold to the city of Pittsburg for $1. Kansas City Southern built a special spur track from its main line through town to the engine’s current resting spot, where it has been perched on a bed of steel tracks ever since.

At the time, the engine was intended to be but one part of a broader railroad museum that would house engines and other historical pieces from the railroads that serviced the area: Santa Fe, Frisco, Missouri Pacific and the J&P. But plans for the park stalled, though KCS officials said they are not certain of the reason why, and it was never completed.

Displaying a behemoth

Preparing a locomotive for display is not easy, according to representatives at the Illinois Railroad Museum, which actively restores steam and diesel engines and rail cars. Before an engine can be put to rest, there are several major preservative steps that must be completed.
Steam engines have massive water tanks that must be sealed to prevent water from leaking in. Any other possible entry ways for water, such as the smoke stack and smoke box — the large chamber at the front of the boiler and below the stack that collects hot gasses that have passed from the firebox and through the boiler tubes— must be swept and hosed down. The stack itself must be sealed.

Additionally, any components of the engine that might absorb water, such as the sand dome — which holds sand that can be dumped onto the tracks for improving traction — must be emptied and sealed. The cab requires extensive cleaning, too, Ash continued, because coal dust is very acidic and can quickly rust the steel.

Workers began the process of relocating the steam locomotive engine in Schlanger Park to its new home at the Heart of the Heartlands railroad museum in Carona this week. The engine should be ready for transport sometime next week.