Two Steam Festivals - A Picture Gallery

  PORVOO, 2003-08-16

The field outside the old railway station in Porvoo was full of steam locos, steam rollers & tractors...

... and working stationary steam engines with appliances of many kinds - saws, pumps, shingle cutters - you name it!

A freshly painted "Tk3"-type 2-8-0 locomotive still in the roundhouse. The color scheme, delicious blue & gold, is in anticipation of a sponsor with corporate colors - you guessed it - blue & gold!

This engine type was the most numerous in Finland (161 units alltogether), most were manufactured domestically, but 20 of them were made in Denmark (such as this one, made by Frichs in Aarhus in 1949).

Preparations: Juhani Saloranta and I put up a temporary dual-gauge (6" + 7 1/4") track on the crossties of the 5' gauge full size track.

Note the simple jig I welded together in just a few minutes: it has notches on the crossbars at the proper rail gauge distances. This was of immense help in setting the gauge of the tracks. The rail is 25 mm (1") T-iron, nailed to planks on the crossties.

The little track is only 42 meters (120 ft) long, going along a track spur from one of the roundhouses to the turntable. Our entire track was installed in just a little over 3 hours...

Steaming up our engines just outside the roundhouse.

Saloranta's beautiful Orenstein & Koppel 0-4-0 engine raising steam.

With the help of the drawbar attached to the front coupler, we even tried double-heading a train - it worked perfectly, even though one engine is a 1:5 scale, 750 mm narrow gauge, and the other a 1:8 scale, 5 ft broad gauge...

Saloranta's engine is puffing merrily along the track, to the delight of spectators young and old.

We ran both our engines all day, back and forth, back and forth - next year, I think we should make a complete loop of track...

My own 3003 with a slightly bigger brother...

... unless you look at them from a frog's perspective!

See you next year!

Photo © 2003 Kari Korpela, used with permission


  HYVINGE, 2003-08-17

Juhani Saloranta stayed overnight in Porvoo, and continued to run his engine the following day. I had promised to take my 3003 elsewhere that day, so once again, I ran my loco at the Finnish Railway Museum in Hyvinge, during their Festival day. Some 1,700 people attended for all the exhibits and activities - a local circus with young performers, a shoot-the-cans-down (with a fire hose!) arcade, horseriding, full size steam train excursions, etc...

They had improved their track a bit since I last visited, digging down almost two feet to reduce the most troublesome grade. (Compare the picture on this page.)

The grade was still around 4% for a considerable length of track, so I couldn't take more than 3 kids on each lap, due to loss of adhesion. We started the day with two engines, but the museum's battery "diesel" broke down in the first hour of running, just as it did once before... So, I had to carry all the day's traffic after that. I ran non-stop for over five hours, just one half hour break for lunch and blowing down the boiler .

The day's final blow-down. I carried around 240 kids, one lap each around the track... that makes about 80 laps, at 400 meters/1200 ft per lap - I ran 32 kilometers / 20 miles during one afternoon!

Just to include a picture that doesn't include yours truly, here's another festival attraction, a horse's... well, let's just say a horse.


Just before leaving. I shot a picture of a preserved "Vr1" 0-6-0, which may be the prototype for my next project, which I plan to start this winter. The 0-4-4 Forney (pictured elsewhere) is also a nice candidate, but I think this one would be more challenging to do - a Forney is really just a 4-4-0 in reverse - and I've already done that. Also, I'd rather make piston valves and Walschaert's motion, this time around...

The perspectivew in the photo above, shot in a very cramped space, doesn't make the engine justice. In fact, it's a rather handsome engine, as can be seen in this old photo.

This particular Vr1 was manufactured in Hanover, Germany, 1923, but many more were made domestically. A total of 43 engines of this type were once in use in Finland. Only a few are preserved.


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