Sugar Pine Lumber Company 2-10-2 "Santa Fe" Locomotives in the USA

Class Minarets (Locobase 3250)

Data taken from Bruce (1952); and "Class 2102 S T 268-Built for the Sugar Pine Lumber Company", Order S 1585.-June 1927.See also Jeff Moore's post as JDLX: "Re: These Locomotives Came In 2 Sizes, This Is the Larger Version", posted 15 December 2020 in the TrainOrders forum at [],5156618; and Dan Bolyard's 14 October 2018 post "1938 CBI 2-10-2 Steam Engine 800" on his Big Bend Railroad History website at [] and [], both last accessed 13 February 2025. (Thanks to Chris Hohl for his 1 February 2025 supplying the Alco data card with full data, supplying two key web links, and for his comments regarding the Minarets's post-SPLC career.) Works number was 67371 in July 1927.

Obviously Sugar Pine -- aka the Minaret & Western Railway -- was not a penny-ante operation, not with this very large saddle-tank engine on the roster. It built on the 2-8-2ST design that had entered service on the line three years earlier, but was considerably larger and heavier. Indeed, of all the saddle tankers in Locobase, this was one of the biggest and heaviest.

Jeff Moore's 2020 TrainOrders post included Alco's detailed report on the 5's performance on the SLPC's demanding profile. Noting the "unbroken" 4 1/2-5% grade over a 12 mile [19.3 km] grad"on which there are 62 20-degree curves, many curves of lesser degree, and some as sharp as 23 degrees" , Alco described a recent run in which the tank pulled 20 "air and bunk-equipped cars", each of which weighed 17 1/2 tons (15.88 metric tons) went up the hill in less than an hour. Sugar Pine singled out Alco's Lateral Motion Arrangement as letting the 5 show great flexibility.

Viewed out of context, the 5 demonstrated a steam locomotive's typically high level of high oil and water consumption during that trip.. But Alco regarded 300 gallons of oil and 3,200 gallons of water as representing "high efficiency", noting back pressures of 4-5 pounds (thus low resistance) and Pyrometer tests measuring a steam-pipe temperature "close to 700 degrees ...probably the highest ever recorded on a logging locomotive."

Like the others, however, the Minarets was made redundant by the closure of the Sugar Pine operation in the 1930s.From November 1935 on, Chris Hohl reports "it went to the Pensacola Co [in Pinedale, Calif]., then to the Mason-Walsh-Atkinson-Kier & Co [MWAK in Mason City, Wash] (where she was renumbered #800, given a tender, and used to aid in construction of the Grand Coulee Dam), then to the Consolidated Builders (where she kept the same number and the tender), then to the H. J. Kaiser Co. (where she was renumbered #1119), and was finally scrapped in 1947".

The second link to the Big Bend [of the Columbia River] website gives further details supplied by John Taubeneck.. MWAK acquired the Minarets and other locomotives to support their work on the Grand Coulee Dam. during its 1933-1941 construction as largest concrete structure ever built (>3 times the size of Hoover Dam). Their work on the dam's foundation ended in March 1938, at which point MWAK joined with Six Companies, Inc. as the Consolidated Builders consortium in a contract that ended in January 1943.