Greetings family, friends, neighbors and train buddies! Today's vintage railroad postcard pictures one of the locomotives used on the building of the City of San Francsco's Hetch Hetchy water and power project and later served on the Yosemite Valley Railroad and for the Pickering Lumber Company.......Bill
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RAILROAD POSTCARDS OF THE PAST
Hetch Hetchy Railroad Engine No. 6
This old Shay steam locomotive once served on the Hetch Hetchy Railroad line and know rests in the National Park Service Pioneer Transportation Museum in El Portal, near Yosemite Valley. It’s caboose was used on the Yosemite Valley Railroad line in the Merced River Canyon until the line was abandoned in 1945.
Hetch Hetchy Railroad Engine No. 6 was the last and largest locomotive owned and operated by the City of San Francisco on the Hetch Hetchy project to provide a permanent water and electricity source to the City. No.6 is a three truck Class C Shay locomotive built by the Lima Locomotive Works in 1921 and was used specifically to drag slow haul cement trains up the steep grade know as Priest Hill. The 68 mile long railroad connecting Hetch Hetchy Junction of the Sierra Railroad through the yards and shops at Groveland to the dam site was begun in 1914 and operated mostly Shay and Heisler locomotives as well as a range of gasoline powered railcars. The City of San Francisco sold locomotive No. 6 to the Pickering Lumber Company upon the completion of that phase of the Hetch Hetchy water and power project. The locomotive operated on the standard gauge logging railroad until it’s retirement in 1958 and was ultimately put on display by the National Park Service and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
From the postcard collection of Bill Ralph
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