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38

George Merrick told of a New Hampshire road that built its own steam locomotives in the old days and also sold them to other roads. It was common then for railroads to build their own engines. One road had 17 locomotives, every one different because the master mechanic improved each one they built.

George told of the New Haven having an old engine at Van Nest Shop to fix up for the World's Fair. It was built in 1858 and was painted green, gold and red, the green and gold being dead ringers for those colors on 0361-0366. It had a wooden pilot, bucket stack, fancy-painted cover over the steam dome, a kerosene headlight and a 4-4-0 wheel arrangement. The tires were held on by wedges. The cab was very scanty. There were no brakes on the engine but a hand brake on the tender. The water pump was run by an eccentric on one of the driver axles; if the engine was standing and needed water, they had to run it back and forth.

And that is the end of the 1937 New Haven material. The story of the 0361-0366s will be continued in the 1938 section, part of which I shall reconstruct for the first half of the year, the last half being covered by a reinstituted and detailed day-by-day diary. Also, the famed "hurricane test" of September 21st is covered by an article I wrote for TRAINS Magazine and which I plan to include also.

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Shall conclude 1937 with a few miscellaneous business items:

I find a card with the following enigmatic memo on it: "My grandfather was present when they drove the golden spike on the Union Pacific. Today I see and almost handled the U.P. steam-electric locomotive." I've noted the part about my grandfather before but the "almost handled" has me confused. I don't know whether it means that I came close to running the locomotive on our test track or that I was nearly chosen to handle the requisition or development in our place. If the latter, I was lucky to have been passed over because it was one of the sorriest failures in GE annals and I'm pretty sure that I couldn't have saved it.

Bill Hamilton of the NYC had an interesting young man working for him named Kendall Rowell who was 37 and got his ME degree from Harvard. It is conceivable that he was a distant cousin of mine because Kendall is a family name on my mother's side, my brother having been named Henry Kendall Craton. Ken was a bachelor and an aesthete and seemed a bit out of place working on the railroad. He was tall and thin, with a narrow, pointed face, wavy sandy hair parted on the side, a small nose, receding chin and wore glasses. He was

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