Old Number 30 Has Run a Million Miles, Published 24 September 1945 
Any
time now, they'll be pulling this locomotive, old No 30, off her
Renfrew-Eganville run for good. The 58-year-old smoke eater is
scheduled for the scrap heap, although she has been a fixture in these
parts for 30 years. "What's wrong?" asks Evening Citizen writer
Austin Cross, "with Mayor Stanley Lewis asking for old No. 30 for one
of the city parks?"
'Number 30 is as distinctly Ottawa's engine as
Vancouver's recently acquired No. #374, and Winnipeg has long had its
No. 1. The old locomotive, according to Mr. Cross, would be a
suitable memorial to bygone railroading days in one of Ottawa's parks
with happy youngsters climbing in and out of its spic and span cab.
Austin Cross, Saviour of Engines, Wants Old No. 30 for City Park.
Old
No. 30, formerly a diamond-stacked wood burner, and most ancient of
locomotives in this part of the world, is still running between Renfrew
and Eganville.
The Canadian Pacific Railway's old timer is 58 years
of age, for she came into this world in 1887. That was the year that
Sir John A. Macdonald made his second last appeal to the Canadian
people, and the Americans had, only two years before, installed their
first democratic president since the Civil War, Gover Cleveland.
It seems a long time ago.
Visited Old Girl
This writer went up to
pay a visit to the old girl the other day. No. 30 starts out
bravely each week day morning to Eganville, from Renfrew, a distance of
22.9 miles. She leaves Renfrew at 11:30 a.m. and arrives at
Eganville at 12:45 p.m. Then she spends an hour in Eganville, and
turning around, comes back out again to Renfrew at 3:15 p.m. When
she reaches the creamery town, her day's chore is over. The
stations out of Renfrew are Payne, Northcote, Douglas, Fourth Chute and
Eganville.
Your correspondent was determined to ride the cab of 30,
but by the time he reached Renfrew, it was a question lof how far down
the line he could go and still catch the 58-year-old engine. He
finally decided on Payne.
So you see me, veteran of 102 railways,
trying to find out where Payne was. A gasoline station attendant
was completey fuddled, and admitted that he did not know how to direct
me to Payne station. He just advised me to keep on going out the
highway, watching the side roads.
With important minutes ticking
away, here I was, chasing down country roads trying to find Payne
station. At last, I found a farmer harvesting a belated hay-crop.
They tore it down.
"Payne
Station?" he said. "They tore it down. But look down
there, see that little building? Well, that's all that is left of
it. You go down to the next road, turn off the highway, and drive
down to the tracks. Then get out of your car, and walk along the
track. It's only a quarter mile walk."
"I'd better hurry," I remarked, "I have only seven minutes."
The
farmer laughed. "She's due at five past three, all right, but
she's due actually only when she gets there. You'll have plenty
of time." He was right; I did.
I got back into the car,
doubled back to Highway No. 17, breezed a fast mile, then turned down
the next concession road. After that, when we came to the high
iron of the C.P.R., I walked west a quarter mile, and there, as big as
a telephone booth, is Payne Station.
Originally Some Station.
Originally,
there was quite a station at Payne, but business has languished the
last 25 years or so, and it is now just used as a dispatching
point. When No. 582 rolls in from Eganville (don't be confused,
that's the number of the train that Engine 30 pulls), she has to stop
here and pick her way onto the main line. Payne really is a
junction. There is some phoning, some other protective ritual,
and then No. 30 hauls slowly onto the main stam, resetting the switch
carefully behind her.
So remote is Payne now, that I wonder if she
would have a dozen passengers a year. Certainly the C.P.R. isn't
out for business there!
While the grasshoppers tried their long
range leaps, while the goldenrod nodded drowsily, and while the
crickets tuned up for the fall field concerts. I sat and waited for old
No. 30. It was so pleasant there, far from Parliament Hill, and
the hubub of the new house, that I couldn't help thinking that I had
all the best of it. Here I was waiting to ride a train, amid the
beauties of a lovely junction in beautiful Renfrew County, while my
fellow writers were pounding out politics on their overworked machines
back in Ottawa.
Funny Little Toot
Finally, there was a funny
little toot to the westward, and I knew that No. 30 was a-coming.
I had an order to ride the cab from the C.P.R.'s Mr. J. Fortier, and so
I quickly hopped into the head end. Handling the throttle was
engineer L. Ritchie of Smiths Falls, while dispensing the black
diamonds was fireman C. Hogan. (He retired as an engineer on #1
out of Ottawa with one of the VIA cuts, either 1981 or 1990). Far
behind, way beyond the seven cars of freight, and back in the
combination baggage-coach, was conductor Eric Peever if
Eganville. Rounding out the crew were the two brakemen, J.
Delahunt (he just lived up the street from me here in Ottawa) and J, M.
Fraser.
Conductor Peever, in working clothes instead of
traditional conductor's cap, gave us the signal, and away we scooted
downthe mail ine of the C.P.R. We had left the branch with its
25-mile-and-hour meximum, and were riding down the heavy rails, rolling
on the track of the limited.
Actually, there is nothing much to say
about a trip from Payne to Renfrew, except that it is over
quickly. But not too quickly to have a look around. The
engine cab is as neat as a pin, and no svelte 2800 is any more spic and
span that the train crew keep old No. 30.
If you had seen the
original engine come out of the Canadian Pacifc's old Delorimier Avenue
shops back in 1887, you might not recognize the old girl today.
To say that she has had her face lifted would be an
understatement. When brand new, she was a smart, wood-burning
job, and boasted of a great, bulging diamond stack. In those
days, she didn't pull up to the coal chute for her load of black
diamonds, but instead sidled up to the cordwood pile, loaded her heap
of slivers, and snorted away in a shower of sparks.
Her cow
catcher, quite the mode of the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee,
has long since been removed, and she boasts of a more modern bull
tosser.
In 1913, she was re-boilered. but long before that, she had
been converted to coal and her coutours had been changed to suit the
age.
What her original number was, I am not sure, but I remember
looking at the old numbers on the drivers of some sister locomotive
down at the C.P.R. roundhouse back in 1913, and they were all somewhere
between 200 and 218.
Once a Main Liner
In her heyday, old No. 30
hightailed it down the main line between Montreal and Toronto, and was
regarded as a classy job. Even today, if they let her go, No. 30
can run a mile a minute with relish. Trouble is, she cannot take enough cars at 60 miles per hour to make it worthwhile.
No. 30 got her brand new number in 1913, and could be seen in Ottawa for some years thereafter.
She
was definitely in Ottawa in 1940, however, and ran on the Waltham
train, making the 79.8 miles each way once a day. On Friday,.
when the Pontiac trade was heavy, they sometimes gave her a long
week-end, and coupled on a heavy 400 class instead.
But with the
progress of the war, the chore got to be too heavy for old 30, and so
she was sent up to Renfrew county, where the air is renowned for its
powers of longevity. There today, in the serenity of old age, No.
30 rolls in freight plus one passenger car every day of the week to and
from Renfrew,
During her day, No. 30, both during her recent
reincarnation and in her previous wood-burning life, has run more than
a million miles.
But No. 30 today is in her late twilight. She
cannot last much longer. Heavier steel, heavier loads, heavier
demands, are gradually crowding such lovable oldtimers off the
rails. Of her sisters, only 105 and 144 in the Maritimes, and 136
on the Smiths Falls-Renfrew run, still survive, in all the 20,000 odd
miles of the C.P.R.'s tracks. In the newspaper business, "30"
usually means the end. Perhaps some of these days too, they'll
pull in the old timer, and she'll write her funeral notice with her own
number--30
Parking Place for Engine, Published 27 September 1945
Austin
Cross, chronicler of railways in the Evening Citizen, would like to see
the CP.R.'s veteran locomotive No. 30. placed somewhere in one of
Ottawa's parks as a memorial tribute to the railroaders of earlier
times in this district. He would allow youngsters, to play around the
old engine, where they could have the thrill of standing in the
driver's cab or perhaps' sitting on the cow-catcher. The difficulty is
that it would need someone like Austin to supervise the youngsters when
they played with this colossal toy.
An alternative would be to
invite the C.P.R. to present Locomotive No. 30 to the Ottawa Technical
School where it could be more than a static memorial. It is an engine
of venerable design, but the locomotives of this present day on
Canadian lines are virtually the same in principle. Steam is generated
by fire in the furnace, pistons in the cylinders drive connecting rods;
the exhaust steam is puffed more or less wastefully - into the
air.
Gas turbine engines will doubtless displace steam locomotive
engines before many years, but the student mechanical engineer at the
technical school could still learn much by helping to dismantle and
erect an old locomotive. Practical workers are still needed to bed the
bearings on crankshafts, pack glands and adjust valves: there are too
few opportunities to learn the practical work. An honored place for
parking a veteran locomotive could well be in the workshop or adjoining
shed of a technical school.
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