Pilot work
I added the details on the pilots, except for the foot boards, I will add those to the frame last. The front pilot has some very interesting details, some of which are a mystery. As you can see on the prototype there is a steel channel over the front of the bottom wood beam, it is not as wide as the wood beam. There are also many holes that appear to not have bolts in them.
The Pilot of Shay 8 is actually pretty interesting when you really look at it. Something that I did not know before I got into this project is the actually design and construction of Shay pilots. The typical (as delivered) pilot on a shay is two wood beams, on this size shay they are 8” x 12” on the bottom and 8” x 10” on the top. The lower beam is backed by a steel C-channel that is gusseted and braced back to the steam I-beams and the front truck bolster. The lower beam is actually the work horse of the two and takes all the forces from coupling. The upper beam is just bolted in place with plates to the I-beam steel frame.
Here is a photo of Ely-Thomas shay #5, you can see the lower beam and the C-channel that backs it, also the upper and lower wood beams.
The interesting thing about Manns Creek Shay #8 is that the lower wood beam on both the front and the rear of the locomotive has a second C-channel on the front sides. The front C-channel is not as long as the wood beam and you can see that the ends of the beam stick out farther. The rear C-channel is the same length as the wood beam and completely covers it….”why is this you ask”, I asked myself the same thing. Here is what I think about MC #8 and the great c-channel mystery.
According to the Lima frame fabrication drawing that I bought from the California railroad museum, on a 37-42 ton shay the front pilot width is 96” and the rear is 102”
However, MC’s #8 is a bigger shay, it was specifically ordered for coal train service, and the frame is a slightly different design, and aside from other things the front pilot beam is the same width on the front and the rear of the locomotive. “So what does this have to do with the C-channels on the front of the lower beams”? Well, if you look at those C-channels you can see that they have all kinds of holes in them that are not being used, but they must have been for something because nobody back then would go through the trouble of making holes in steel that were not needed. You will also note that the holes seem to be in a pattern, and if you look you will see that the pattern looks the same as the bolted on plates that DO have bolts in them (well most have bolts in them).
Here is my theory, those steel beams were actually the backing beams from a scrapped shay. When Babcock Coal and Coke purchased the Manns Creek and Sewell lumber they combined all their locomotives, about 8-10 of them. When the lumber business shut down many were scrapped and useful pieces may have been kept for repairs. You can see the hole patterns match the hole patterns for the frame gussets that you can see in the first photo of ET#5. The front beam is not as long because the shay it came from had the 96” wide pilot. The holes do not line up because the beam is flipped around. My guess is that it was easier to encase the rotting and damaged wood beam with the steel beams because they had the steel beams just laying around, and maybe they figured they would fix it once and for all. It makes sense if you look at some of the wood hopper cars, which not only were getting steel plates to fix rotting wood, but some even getting steel frames and end beams, as seen on hopper car #9
here is a photo of the front pilot on my model.
