Gulf & Ship Island 2-6-0 "Mogul" Locomotives in the USA

Class 26/50 (Locobase 16347)

Data from DeGolyer, Volume 28, p. 137 and from photo for sale on EBay and last accessed 23 April 2018 at []. See also "'Tap Line Case' Summary of El Dorado & Wesson Railway", Texas Transportation Archive, last accessed 23 April 2018 at []; and Ken Ziegenbein, "Class III Railroads of Arkansas - Part 15--The Eldorado and Wesson Railway", The Arkansas Railroad, Volume 17, No 10 (October 1986), pp. 3-6 at [], last accessed 23 April 2018. Works number was 27009 in December 1905.

This engine was originally intended for the Akron & Barberton Belt, but was diverted to the G&SI in March 1906 as their #26. (Baldwin built a second #4 for the A&BB later in 1906; see Locobase 11598.) The lead truck could swing 4" (102 mm) to either side.

At some point, the 26 was renumbered 50 and several sources state that it was converted to an 0-6-0 switcher. A photograph taken by RH Carlson of San Benito in 1938 in El Dorado, Ark clearly shows the 11 as a 1906 Baldwin 2-6-0. AR's 1986 report quotes the then-president of the railway H D Reynolds as not having "a fondness for steam engines. He remembers too many days when he'd have to work on them for hours to get them operating. And once you found a problem, there usually were no parts available to fix it since they were so old."

In steam's last year, it cost the ED&W $26,000 to run the steam engine. In the first year of diesel operation, its bill was $900.

By 1921, the 50 was sold to locomotive rebuilder/reseller Southern Iron & Equipment, which gave it stock #1670. In the same year, SI&E sold the 1670 to the El Dorado & Wesson as their 11. The ED&W opened its 10.2 mile (16.4 km) road of 60 lb/yard (30 kg/metre) between the two Arkansas towns in the name in 1907. It conveyed products milled by the Edgar Lumber Company in Wesson to the county seat at El Dorado, where both the Rock Island and the St Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern, a Missouri Pacific subsidiary. (El Dorado is southwest of Little Rock, east of Texarkana, and north of Shreveport, Tex.

Arkansas Railroader's account comments that from its opening the "traffic in farm products and supplies, although the country through which it ran is said to have been occupied as a farming community before the Civil War." All trains began at Wesson, including a daily passenger train leaving Wesson at 7:30 AM. It ambled through "Edgar, Newell, Spaulding, Morgan, Oil Hill, Pearson, and finally El Dorado". Spaulding and Pearson were only two minutes apart. The return train left when the work was done at El Dorado.

A sawmill fire in Wesson put paid to the lumber business in 1928, but by that time oil traffic from to several small refineries had already been added in 1921. The Great Depression just barely missed closing the ED&W, and it has survived as a bobtailed entity into the 21st century.