Westbound on the "Stump Dodger." A Sumpter Valley freight hustles westbound in the Powder River Valley, just a mile or so out of Sumpter. The manifest today is mainly logs, with one carload miscellaneous freight, and a tank car to be dropped off for a logging operation. The power is Locomotive #19, a 2-8-2 Mikado type, purchased from the American Locomotive Company back in 1920. As with all previous locomotives on the line, #19 began life as a wood-burner and her tender typically sported make-shift wooden fences on the fuel bunker to allow the logs to be stacked as high as possible. Wood has nowhere near the BTU value of oil, so they needed to carry as much as physically possible. In addition, she also typically had a "cabbage-style" spark arresting stack to address the very real threat of fires that wood-firing creates. This locomotive was sold to the White Pass & Yukon in 1941, and it was only there that she was converted to burn oil. The lack of a cabbage stack and a tall wood-pile on 19's tender are the only obvious giveaways that the scene pictured here was captured in 2018, not 90 years earlier. The present-day Sumpter Valley Railroad is one of fewer than a dozen places in the US, where historic trains can be re-created with a fair amount of accuracy.
