The Shelburne Museum, located in Shelburne, VT, was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb. She relocated twenty historic buildings from New England and New York to display the museum’s holdings. These included houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a lighthouse, a jail, a general store, a covered bridge and the 220' steamboat Ticonderoga.
Today, over one hundred and fifty thousand works are exhibited in thirty-eight exhibition buildings, including three historic steam engines.
Ten Wheeler (4-6-0) type locomotive #220 was one of four built for the Central Vermont Railway at Alco’s Schenectady, NY, works in 1915 (#218-#221). #220 hauled both freight and passenger trains and became known as the “Locomotive of the Presidents” because of its use over the years on special trains carrying Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Weighing 189,000 lbs, 141,000 lbs on its 69” drivers, it has a 27’ 4” engine wheelbase and 15’ 6” driver wheelbase.
#220 is equipped with Walschaert valve gear and has 20” x 28” cylinders. The grate is 53.4 sq ft, the firebox 184 sq ft, and total heating surface is 2,457 sq ft, including 404 sq ft superheating. Operating at a boiler pressure of 200 psi, it delivered 55,188 lbs tractive effort.
#220 was little used after its last overhaul in the 1940s, primarily as a backup for the gas-electric car that normally ran between St. Albans, VT, and St. John, QC. It made its last trip on an excursion in 1955 and was donated to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont in 1956.
This replica of “Old Ironsides” was built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works for display at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Baldwin built his first, small demonstration engine in 1831 and used it to pull cars with four passengers around a circular track at Peale's Philadelphia City Museum. The popularity of the display prompted the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown Railroad to order a full-scale version. This engine, nicknamed “Old Ironsides”, was a close copy of the English engines used on the New Castle & Frenchtown Railroad.
A 2-2-0 type locomotive, commonly known as a Planet after Robert Stephenson's Planet built in 1830, it had a 30’ diameter boiler fitted with thirty-two 7’ long tubes, weighed over 5 tons and had 54" drivers and 9½” x 18" cylinders.
It was contracted for $4,000, but performance shortcomings meant a compromise price of $3,500 was settled on. It worked for twenty years before being scrapped.
The "Gertie Buck" is a track inspection car with an 0-2-2 wheel arrangement also
known as a Northumbrian, named after one of eight locomotives with this layout supplied to the Liverpool & Manchester Railway by Robert Stephenson and Co., after 1829: the "Meteor", "Comet", "Dart", "Arrow", "Phoenix", "North Star", "Northumbrian" and "Majestic".
"Gertie Buck" was built in 1883 and used by the Dewey family on the fourteen mile Woodstock Railway. A. G. Dewey operated a substantial woollen mill at Queechee serviced by the railroad, which ran from White River Junction to Woodstock, VT.
The line operated from 1875 until 1933 when it was abandoned.
