#3 as a messenger, with Dick Pennick and others chasing the movement over Cajon Pass.
The steamers arrived at Perris later that day. No. 3 was one of the final two steam engines to operate on the company's 15-mile plant railroad before being replaced by diesels (one of which PSRMA also owns!) so it was anticipated that it, too, would be an operating exhibit. On Saturday, August 5th, Terry and six other Museum volunteers helped OET volunteers snap-track the engines to the OET compound. Alas, firebox problems eventually condemned the #3 and it has never operated for the Museum. It spent many years in storage at the Perris museum until being moved to San Diego in 1981 with Lavino #10. Today, it is part of our prominent static train display at the La Mesa Depot Museum, seen by probably more people than any other single item in our collection.
Up to this point, PSRMA still had no track of its own in San Diego, but this was about to change. On May 13, 1967, exactly one year after the donation of MN#3, the lumber giant Georgia-Pacific Co. donated one of its two remaining Shay logging locomotives at its Feather River Ry. operation near Oroville, California. Lima-built #3 was the very last steam locomotive to operate in regular service on a California common-carrier railroad, and now we owned it!
The original plan was for this prize to also be delivered to Perris for interim storage, but it was found to be too long for the snap-track panels and a last-minute decision was made to divert the unique engine to San Diego. Terry scrambled to find an unused spur track in the local area, and with the help of local Santa Fe freight agent Bill Archambault, approval was given to store the engine temporarily on an unused 100 foot long spur that had served the historic Standard Iron Works Foundry near Santa Fe's 22nd Street Yard. Standard Iron had quit business after more than 70 years of continuous service to the cast-iron industry.
The Shay arrived on June 10th on its own wheels and was shoved onto the spur by the local switch crew. Terry brought a small crew of volunteers together, including this writer, to reassemble the 1923 engine and prepare it for operation. Working only on weekends, all was finally ready by Thanksgiving and the engine was steamed up and operated back and forth on that very abbreviated track. Other than several individual members' homes, this was the very first San Diego home for PSRMA and the very first operation by Museum volunteers in the local area!
Terry's final locomotive acquisition for the Museum was a tiny 0-4-0 saddle tank switcher that had sat for years in a National City scrap yard. The rusty engine had been built as a coal-burner in the Silvis, Illinois shops of the Rock Island Railroad in 1882 as its #82. Sometime after retirement, it was purchased by Shanahan Bros. railroad contractor, who used it in the early 1930's to tear up Pacific Electric's Long Beach-Seal Beach interurban line in Los Angeles. It later was owned by a scrap dealer on Alarmed St. who eventually relocated, with the little 0-4-0T, to National City. The Museum temporarily leased the engine to a railroad-theme restaurant in the old National City train depot, also built in 1882, and it was displayed there with our 1927 ex-Santa Fe baggage/buffet/library car #1303.
Short Line Enterprises later approached us with an offer to trade the engine for an ancient, intact, wood-bodied combination car being released by 20th Century Fox studios. The car was built by the Pennsylvania R.R. in 1886 and eventually ended up on a 6-mile long Texas shortline before being sold to the studio. PSRMA accepted this offer, with an additional 1888 wood coach thrown in, and the two cars now rest inside our Campo display building. The "combine" is the oldest intact rolling stock in the Museum's collection and is only nine years newer than our 1875 wood coach body: SD&A #239, displayed north of the Campo Depot. The 0-4-0T presently sits on a portion of the abandoned Angels Branch of the Sierra Railway at Jamestown, California, awaiting restoration.
Terry became a freight conductor, hostler and locomotive engineer for the Santa Fe Railroad. He eventually acquired several track motor cars, velocipedes and other track maintenance equipment. He enjoyed operating the motor cars on any railroad that would allow it, including the Ferrocarril Sonora-Baja California, but sometimes it was better not to ask too many questions.
One such notable incident was an unauthorized midday ride over the SD&AE's Coronado Branch up the Silver Strand, past the famous Hotel Del Coronado and through the Coronado residential area to the locked gate of the Naval Air Station-North Island. Terry and fellow passengers Ed Couch, Dick Pennick and others spent the rest of the day in the Coronado pokey for that stunt!
But it was probably the very last "passenger train" to operate over the historic branch once called the "Coronado Belt Line", opened in June 1888, before service was discontinued and the Coronado portion of the track taken up about 1963. And I still have fond memories of a moonless midnight ride with Terry one summer night on the outrigger of his Velocipede on the SD&AE track through Carrizo Gorge!
In later years, as an investment opportunity, Terry bought and sold Rolls Royce automobiles, eventually accumulating seven of the high-end prestige cars. He owned an antique shop on San Diego's Adams Ave. "Antique Row" and bought and sold hundreds of railroad artifacts over the years, including the last steam locomotive from California's Ventura County Railroad. This engine is now owned by the Orange Empire Railroad
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