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The following article was brought to our attention by F.E.D.S. member Paul McElroy. Paul saw the photos of the Weyerhaeuser Skagit that Bill Anderson & Marty Donahoo had taken in August and remembered that he had seen the Skagit in "Tall Timber Short Lines" the Journal of the Pacific Coast Logging Historical & Technical Society. This article & photo comes from the December 1997/January 1998 issue #54. Written by Scott Barrett.
Weyerhaeuser Vail Speeder No. 30
Written by Scott Barrett.
I went to work on Weyerhaeuser’s railroad on the section crew at Vail, Washington in November 1972, and the 30 Speeder was used as the principle crew hauler and mover of track materials on the twenty-six mile logging line. The section crew had two marshaling points for the Speeder; one staging area was the house track at Vail just off the main line protected by a derail, and the other marshaling point was at Mile Post 13 in East Olympia next to the gravel loading spur depicted on the back cover of issue #51. Mile post 13 was not too far from the former Olympia Amtrak station used prior to the construction and relocation of Olympia, Washington’s new passenger station. The Speeder arrived brand new at Vail along with its sister speeder, Number 31 sometime in 1938 or 1939.
Besides the gravel spur, Mile Post 13 had two track sheds constructed from one saw filing shack. The former camp building from Vail was moved by bull car down to Mile Post 13 sometime in 1950 or 1951 and unloaded by one of the locomotive cranes used in the Vail woods operation. One shed was used for storing track supplies, spiking hammers, mauls, shovels, track jacks, barrels of gasoline, fencing supplies, and hundreds of other things that had accumulated over time. The storage shed itself was a trip back into history because several crosscut hand saws were still hanging on the wall in the early seventies, and nobody on the section crew felt like testing the misery whips. Power saws were much easier to operate.
The other shed had been set up on a short stub track just off the main line to hold the 30 Speeder and keep the machine locked up and safe from vandals. The speeder shed had one end taken off and swinging doors with a sturdy hasp were constructed to allow the 30 Speeder to park indoors, just like a garage.
Back in the days when train and speeder movements were controlled by communications over the track telephone, it was customary to report to the dispatcher in Vail that all the switches were "lined and locked for the main" when any speeder tied up for the night or cleared the mainline. It was good routine because over time, crewman slipped away from this practice and on several occasions, the switch at Mile Post 13 was left lined for the speeder track. Only a few times did a log train returning from South Bay almost run through the speeder shack.
Typically, the 30 Speeder towed one trailer filled with railroad ties attached with a long bar called a rooster. A speeder rooster is not the same as a rooster used on log trains for pushing steam yarders, but that’s what we called them and the speeder roosters weigh a lot less than real the real thing. T he 30 Speeder could pull two trailers, but one trailer was the rule. A trailer had to be loaded by hand, and it was customary to load the trailer with ties the last thing in the afternoon and chain them down tightly with a binder. The 30 Speeder was skookum enough to pull a small load of seventy pound rails and a load of railroad ties. The section crew used long, lining bars to roll the rails in the middle of the track, and the crew would then lift one end of the rail on the trailer. After the crew was in the clear, the speeder would jillpoke or push against the rail until it landed squarely on the trailer.
At one time, I was "an apprentice trackwalker" on ten miles of track starting a the South Bay dock, packing angle bars and three quarter inch and seven eighths track bolts along with several trusty drifts for fixing pull aparts in a canvas sack. The trackwalkers replaced and tightened track bolts, replaced broken angle bars and inspected track the old fashioned way by walking up and down the track. Broken rails were flagged and reported by telephone to the dispatcher at Vail who sent the 30 Speeder to change out the bad rail. Sometimes that meant that the section crew had to work overtime to get the track ready for the early train out of PeEll, Washington.
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