The Fred Gurley made its way back to the Disneyland roundhouse on Thursday,
November 15th to begin final assembly and testing. As we wait for the engine to
resume her duties on the Disneyland Railroad, we continue our look at the
engine's history. Here's a link to the first part of
this article should you have missed it. - Steve
The little engine was moved into the Studio Machine
Shop to begin her restoration. Arnold Lindberg, head of the shop, would
handle the work. As with any restoration of this nature, the entire
locomotive was completely disassembled and a thorough inspection of every
single part was made. What could be used was saved, the rest scrapped.
In Walt Disney's Railroad Story, author Michael
Broggie recounts how Lindberg was given his assignment:
"The renovation of the engine was just beginning and
the remaining parts that weren't scrapped were all laying all over the
shop's floor. So, one afternoon, when I was the swing shift boss, I had just
come in and was standing in the middle of all these engine parts. Roger came
up and handed to me a green book: BALDWIN LOCOMOTIVES. He asked me if I had
ever built a locomotive. I said ‘No,' looking around at the pieces. Typical
of Roger's style of communicating, he said, ‘Well, here's the book--do it.'
"Those were my marching orders. We didn't have thousands of work orders and
everyone and his grandmother involved in approvals. Hell no, the studio wasn't
run like that in the early days. We just did what we had to do to get the job
done."
The boiler and steam dome appear white because they are
coated in insulation.
Photo courtesy Michael Broggie.
So, Lindberg and his crew set to work rebuilding the
engine. The rotted cab was scrapped, and a new one built of hardwood. The
original open cab wasn't copied, and instead, an all-enclosed cab was built
with arched windows all around. Dixon Boiler Works built a new, all-welded
boiler for the engine, and a two-wheel "pony" truck was added right behind
the new wooden pilot (also known as a cowcatcher).
The almost-completed engine sits in the Studio
machine Shop.
Sheet brass encased the cylinders and boiler-top domes,
and a new headlight--based on an authentic design provided by Jerry Best--was
created by Disney from sheet metal. A new tender tank was also fabricated,
and a three-chime Lunkenheimer whistle supplanted the original Baldwin
single-chime. Because the Disneyland trains relied on air brakes, a
Westinghouse air compressor was installed inside the cab, on the fireman's
side. This was done to preserve the pre-air-brake looks of the locomotive
(both the Ward Kimball and the Ernest S. Marsh have their
compressors located inside the cab as well).
As we discovered in my
article on the engine's builder's plates, Roger Broggie, using the originals
as patterns, created reproductions. The engine still had a number of genuine
Baldwin components, however, including her frame, wheels and drive rods,
tender truck, domes, cylinders and valve gear, bell and jaunty cast iron cap
stack.
Here, the engine has been loaded onto a flatbed truck awaiting transport to
Disneyland. The masking tape "X's" on the windows help to show that there is
glass in the window frames--which might not be too apparent otherwise,
and which could lead to breakage
through carelessness.
Final assembly was completed on February 9, 1958, and
the engine was trucked down the Santa Ana Freeway to Disneyland, where the
resurrected little steamer would be painted and finished.
The boiler was finished in a dark grayish-blue to
represent the original planished iron, and at the engine's front end, the
smoke box and smoke stack were painted with a mixture of boiled linseed oil
and powdered graphite--a coating able to withstand the high heat on this
un-insulated portion of the engine. The cab and tender were painted in a
dark green, with red window sashes and trim. Highly polished brass rounded
out the finish, covering the cylinders and dome centers, and wrapping around
the boiler jacket and pilot edge.
The newly refinished Fred Gurley,
posing in front of the old roundhouse.
Photo courtesy Michael Broggie.
A reproduction Baldwin number plate, with a raised
brass "3" cast into its center, completed the engine. On an overcast spring
Thursday, March 27, 1958, with the yellow coaches of Retlaw 1 in tow, the
engine began its break-in runs.
Like a prison inmate, the locomotive was
only known by a number for most of her life, but now, a name proudly graced
her cab sides: Fred Gurley. Gurley was the Chairman of the Board of
the Santa Fe Railway in 1958, and he was a personal friend of Walt's. The
name also continued the Disneyland tradition of naming its locomotives for
Santa Fe executives.
The engine was posed in front of Main Street
Station during her break-in run
for a series of photos (above). Too bad her number
plate was crooked! (below)
The little engine from the Louisiana cane fields, which had probably cost
less than $3,000 in 1894, had cost Disney $37,061 to recondition. While a
staggering amount for the time, the money was well spent. As Jerry Best
noted, "This shows how a sow's ear can be turned into a silk purse if enough
money, time, patience and skill is put into it."
The engine became operational for the public a day
later, on March 28, 1958, and a few days after that, she was dedicated,
along with another attraction that just happened to be opening at the same
time--the Grand Canyon Diorama. The Santa Fe's in-house publication, The
Santa Fe Magazine, covered the presentation, and states it occurred
on "the first day of Easter Vacation." Assuming the writer meant the Monday
before Easter Sunday, that would have been March 31, 1958.
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