A Firefighter’s Steamer

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This is where it got interesting and personal for me. When we bought the Case steam engine and wrote down George Miller’s story, he had clear memories of where the engine worked cutting timber its whole life. It was parked on the Picket Pin Mountain, cutting timbers for the nearby chromium mine. He also related where the engine was moved and sat (the Limestone Ranch) after it was removed from Picket Pin.

The Big Timber fire covered more than 150,000 acres. When I looked at the map during a morning briefing, I noticed many familiar names and finally realized where I had heard them before – at breakfest with George, many years before. I was flying over the places that had been only memories before, yet

I was getting to see where the engine had been. It was fascinating connecting the past with the present.

The fire turned out to be very bad for Dorothy Miller and her family, with much of their grazing land burned. I certainly didn’t realize when we were fighting the fire, especially on those first couple of days, that there was this connection, and I found it amazing. I was glad to be able to do my part to reduce the toll on her family.
– Joseph Berto

A new owner

As with most projects, I can honestly say that if I had known what I was getting into I might not have done it.

However, the fact of the matter is that I did buy George’s engine. I really didn’t do any research before buying the Case: I thought having a steamer would be fun and when I saw this one it looked like it needed a new owner. The engine was sort of just stuffed amongst the other “collectibles” of George’s life, and piles of stuff just grew up around it.

From my inexperienced eye, the Case looked mostly complete. Of course there were some visible problems: the bullet holes in the heat exchanger, the front of the cylinder hanging off, lots of rust and so on. Mostly it appeared that if someone didn’t take care to restore it, this engine would become just another piece of junk rusting away.

Bringing history home

The project immediately began to show its size; what seemed to be an easy job (just put it on a trailer) became much more than that. First of all everything was stuck, and despite all our efforts to make the engine roll it wouldn’t budge. Lowboys are expensive and having one sitting around I could hear the “ding ding” of the cash register. We finally determined it would be easier to lift the Case and place it on the lowboy. Wrong again. At 10 tons it wouldn’t lift with the Cat 966 front end loader we had begged from a local construction site. So we lifted just the back and voilà, rolled it on its front wheels onto the trailer.

Next, permits were required because it is exactly 6 inches over width.

The trucking company did a great job, and one day later it rolled into my driveway. I thought I was prepared to roll it off and had a forklift there to, once again, raise the firebox end and roll it off. No dice. The forklift wasn’t big enough to do the job. So I brought out a John Deere MFWD tractor to drag it off. Still no dice. The driver was a patient man and the bill had been agreed on in advance.

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