Flagstaff Lumber Manufacturing 2-8-0 "Consolidation" Locomotives in the USA

Class 3 (Locobase 13832)

Data from DeGolyer, Volume 39, p. 80. See also the application for the National Registry of Historic Places titled "Logging Railroad Resoureces of the Coconino and Kaibaba National Forests, Arizona," , and found at [] . Works number was 37167 in November 1911.

FLC was one of three logging companies that worked in the pine forests around the town of Flagstaff in Arizona. It opened its mill on 30 November 1910 and the Coconino Sun of 9 December 1910 described its condition:" The new mill is considered to be the best, most up-to-date mill in the Southwest. At present, their logging road extends for 5 miles southeast into the timber belt and is still being extended. They're now turning out 100,000 board feet or 7 carloads of green timber every day." (Susan Carney, Flagstaff History | Posted: Sunday, December 5, 2010 5:00 am, archived at [].)

The National Registry history effectively summarizes the particular conditions that allowed logging railroads to prosper until the second decade of the 20th Century: "The logging railroad systems described above were expensive to build and elaborate to operate but more than paid for themselves when timber stands could be removed intensively rather than selectively. The nineteenth-century practice of clear-cutting made railroad logging cost-effective indeed. When physical obstacles were encountered, the lumber company simply built another spur or a trestle or abandoned the stand entirely for a more lucrative area." Locobase has dozens of entries that describe just such a pattern.

Also appearing in many Locobase entries is mention of the adoption of change to sustainable-yield practices encouraged by the Federal government beginning in the mid-19 oughts and adopted by many companies who didn't want to relocate.

Flagstaff Lumber was bought out in 1924 by W M Cady Lumber Company , which the National Registry notes, had "logged itself out of business in Louisiana." Cady brought with its resources the predominantly African-American workforce, but couldn't stem the trend toward dissolution. The Registry explains that by that time the railroad had been used to access timber stands at Howard Mountain (1910-1917), atop Anderson Mesa (1917-1922). Tapping out the Anderson Mesa meant moving on to Mormon Mountain (1923-1927), but that region, like the Mesa, was "expensive and difficult to access, a factor that contributed to the company's demise."

After the FLC folded in 1927, the 3 began running on the Apache Railway of McNary, Ariz in 1927.

Class 5 (Locobase 14310)

Data from DeGolyer, Volume 52, pp. 357+. See also the application for the National Registry of Historic Places titled "Logging Railroad Resoureces of the Coconino and Kaibaba National Forests, Arizona," , and found at [] . Works number was 43573 in June 1916.

Locobase 13832 shows the somewhat smaller #3 that Baldwin delivered to the FLC in 1911. Also see a discussion and reference of the excellent National Registry of Historic Places history of the logging railroads of Cococino and Kaibab National Forests.

In its history, the Registry focuses on the successive operating areas exploited by the FLMC (as of 1917, Flagstaff Lumber Company, a name docking the local paper described tongue-in-cheek as a "cost-cutting move." An unkindly nickname for the operation was the "Flim Flam". Forty miles of mainline and spurs would be pulled up for scrap in 1938.

As with the 3, the 5 fell unemployed when the FLC folded in 1927 and it went to the Apache Railway of McNary, Ariz, where it kept on until 1948, when it was sold to the NorOeste de Mexico as their #2. The NOdeM sold the 22 to the Chihuahua al Pacifico, which eventually retired the engine and scrapped it in 1956.