This 3-truck Shay was built by Lima in 1921 as #1 for the Hutchinson Lumber Co., which had bought a large tract of timber near Oroville, CA, the previous year. The company became one of the largest lumber concerns in Northern California and the town’s major employer, with over 1,100 on its payroll (at the time, Oroville had a population of just 3,500).
Following bankruptcy in 1927, Hutchinson Lumber was reorganised as Feather River Pine Mills. Then, in 1940, the company’s logging railroad was incorporated as the common carrier Feather River Railway. The concern was sold to Georgia-Pacific in 1955, and #1 stayed on until 1961, when it was donated to the City of Oroville. The railway was abandoned in 1967 after flooding of a portion of its line by Oroville Dam.
#1 is on display in Hewitt Park (you can see another locomotive also on display in the park on the WP S-34 #164 page of this website).
It was donated to the city after the Georgia Pacific bought a pair of GE diesels, although two larger Shays were kept as stand-by motive power. Eventually, GP found homes for these other “Feather River Shays”: you can see #2 on the Railtown 1897 page of this website, and #3, on the Cass Scenic Railroad page (it operates there as #11, hauling passenger trains up Back Allegheny Mountain in West Virginia).
#1 is an oil burner with an empty weight of 138,760 lbs. It has three vertically mounted 12” x 15” cylinders. Operating at a boiler pressure of 200 psi, it delivered 30,350 lbs tractive effort. The fuel bunker held 1,200 gallons of oil, the tender 3,000 gallons of water.
You can see more Shays on the Cass Scenic Railroad page of this website, as well as the B&O Museum Roundhouse page, the Travel Town page, the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania Train Shed page and the North Carolina Museum of Transportation page.
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Michael Koch's The Shay Locomotive: Titan of the Timber, published by World Press in 1971 is currently the most authoritative source for information on Shays, although it is now a collectors item and commands very high prices (click on the cover to search for this book on Bookfinder.com).
