Hi all,
We just spent a week in South Eastern Oregon’s Klamath basin enjoying the cool weather. This area was/is famous for its pine logging industry back in the hay day of railroad logging. The main attractions now days for the railroad/logging buff besides scouting out old grades and sites are the Collier State Park Logging Museum and Train Mountain.
The Collier Logging Museum is an outdoor hands on display of logging equipment used from the 1860’s to the 1960’s in a pine forest setting. This Park is located about 30 miles north of Klamath Falls,Or at the juncture of the Williamson River and Spring Creek. There are also two large day use picnic areas and a full hookup RV park. All of these areas can be reached on foot using the trails along the river/creek and the foot bridges provided.
https://stateparks.oregon.gov/index.cfm?do=park.profile&parkId=165
Train Mountain has been discussed on these forums before so I will just add it is a great place to visit. They now have the Klamath & Western operational and open to the public every Saturday for rides.
Link-- http://www.trainmountain.org/
Link-- http://www.knwrr.org/
We try to get up there every couple of years but for some reason it has been almost 4 years since our last trip so I had to take a bunch of fresh pictures because they have added some new things and rearranged some of the old displays as well as sprucing up the entire park and adding interpretive signage for the visitor. Anyway, hope you enjoy the following pictures, I will add them a few at a time over several days, lots of great stuff for the model builders out there.
Wheels and Arches, seem like a good place to start this picture log. Most everybody knows about them and the roll (no pun intended) that they played in logging history so I will just add a few comments as picture captions.
This set of “Big Wheels” were developed/adapted for tractor logging and were manufactured by the Redding Iron Works, Redding, CA probably in the early to mid 1920’s. Note the brush guards on the inner side of the wheels this protected the spokes from the logs and any debris they may have thrown up while being transported.
The Redding Iron Works were the west coast’s leading producer of “Wheels” for many years and their products were very distinctive. Note the slant or angle of the spokes and the shape of the cast hub. This “dodged” hub was more or less their trademark in the industry.
An early steel wheeled arch for use with “cats”.
An early plate fabricated tracked arch with fair lead. This one has been altered with the addition of the upper A-frame and cable, not sure what that’s about. You can also see my tape measure in the reference shot.
A late era tracked arch, probably late 1930’s. Notice the frames are all pressed and cast metal and the Fairleads are built in. The track sections on these were built to “walk over” that is flip over from top to bottom if they were to hang up on a stump or rock.
Another early version of a steel wheel arch, this one has a geared lifting system.
More early steel wheel arches, these were manufactured in Canada and were not very successful because they were built too lightly for the rugged work.
Yet another version of an early steel wheel tractor pulled logging arch, this one has a mechanical lifting mechanism.
Maybe trucks and loaders next time.
Rick
