The geared locomotive a Haring logger invented

A logger named Ephraim Shay had a problem most railroad men never faced: he needed a steam engine that could climb a muddy hill and bend around a curve sharp enough to make a regular locomotive jump the rails. The big rod-driven engines of the 1870s ran fine on a flat, well-built main line. Out in the cutover pine north of Cadillac, where Shay lived in the little settlement of Haring, the rails were temporary, the grades were brutal, and the curves were whatever the loggers could clear that week.

So he built his own. Instead of pistons shoving rods straight at the driving wheels, Shay set the cylinders upright on the side of the boiler and ran the power through a flexible drive shaft and a set of gears turning every wheel under the engine and tender. Powering all the wheels gave it tremendous pulling force and a gentle touch on flimsy track, and the shaft let the whole machine flex around curves that would have derailed anything else. He patented the design in 1881.

He had already handed the exclusive manufacturing rights to the Lima Locomotive Works over in Ohio, and the bet paid off for them spectacularly. Between 1880 and 1945, Lima turned out 2,770 Shay locomotives, and they went to work in logging camps, mines, and quarries on steep, rough rail all over the world.

One of the last survivors sits right where the idea was born. A Shay built in 1898 — the final one used by the Cadillac Soo Lumber Company — was restored in 1985 and put on display in Cadillac. It is a squat, lopsided-looking thing, all gears and exposed machinery on one side, and it looks exactly like what it is: an engine designed by a man who cared less about how a locomotive was supposed to look than about whether it could drag a load of logs up a hill in the rain.