Written by James Temple for Fort Walla Walla Museum
The year 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Walla Walla & Columbia River Railroad. To celebrate this historic event, Fort Walla Walla Museum asked Seattle-based train expert James Temple to share a little bit about the sole survivor of this once dearly important railroad.
On New Year's Day 1878, the Porter, Bell & Co. locomotive works of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania loaded a brand-new engine (assigned construction number 283 at the Porter plant) aboard a ship destined for a long trip around Cape Horn. She was the latest example of a highly successful design Porter had been producing for years, for railroads running through the mountains of Colorado, along the coast of California, and even between resort communities on Martha’s Vineyard. 147 years later, the western-bound #283 would differ from them all in one major way: She would be the sole survivor.
Arriving at Walla Walla months later, the new engine was given the evocative name Blue Mountain and the road number 4. At the time of her arrival, she was the largest and grandest of the Walla Walla & Columbia River Railroad's locomotive fleet, dressed to the nines in a paint scheme that included bright red wheels, a polished iron boiler jacket, varnished mahogany cab, and lining and lettering in genuine 24-karat gold leaf. This kind of finish wasn't at all unusual for 1870s motive power – in fact, it was expected. Locomotives were considered PR devices and therefore got the full Victorian treatment.
There were other features that marked the Blue Mountain as a likely pre-1880 machine. Most prominent was the wagon top boiler, which widened at the cab end to allow for more steaming room around the firebox. Another distinctively pre-1880 touch was the ‘three-point suspension’ system, something almost any locomotive had to have in order to negotiate the
rough track of the Wild West era. Simple and rugged, this layout helped give the Blue Mountain a reputation as a good runner years later.
Over the next three decades, as the Blue Mountain bounced between runs from Walla Walla to Cascade Portage and back to Mill Creek, the brass was painted over and the fancy cab was replaced, but underneath she remained a mostly unaltered 1878 Porter product.
By 1906, the engine once known as the Blue Mountain (the practice of naming locomotives was dropped long before) had soldiered on for 28 years, in an era when major components were only designed to last for ten or 15. Now conspicuously undersized and outdated, with the great majority of her sisters already gone to scrap, she was sent north to the Seward Peninsular Railway of Nome, Alaska. The Alaskan gold boom was already running out, and after the summer of 1910, the Blue Mountain never steamed again.
The Blue Mountain spent the next 30 years rusting behind the Nome engine house until some unknown date in the 1940s, when she suffered the same fate as several other Seward Peninsular engines: She was dumped in the Bering Sea to act as a breakwater. While those other engines rusted to nothing, luck intervened again. She was raised in 1967 by eccentric Nome resident Norman Engstrom, who had a long-shot plan to launch a tourist railroad on the still-surviving Seward Peninsular tracks.
Engstrom never truly had the resources to follow through on this dream. Following his death 19 years later, his daughter June Wardle was amazed to find a locomotive in his backyard shed. After decades in the sea, the Blue Mountain was barely recognizable as her former self, a jumble of broken and misplaced parts. The Washington State Railroads Historical Society brought her back to Pasco in 1992, where heroic measures were taken to restore the Blue Mountain to her 1878 form.
The restoration had succeeded in putting the major components back in place when the Society lost their location in 2011 and their collection had to be dispersed to other museums. Fort Walla Walla Museum became the Blue Mountain's new custodian, and in 2017, a crane lowered the engine onto a short section of reconstructed track outside the Museum's main building. Since then, Fort Walla Walla Museum volunteers have constructed facsimiles of the cab, cowcatcher, headlight, and bell yoke to allow visitors to correctly interpret the object while funding is sought for a protective cover, and eventually a full restoration to her 1878 grandeur.
Of the 1,500 steam locomotives that remain in North America, fewer than 30 date to the period before 1880, and most of those have been altered so that very little of the pre-1880 era remains on them. Nearly everything that survives on the Blue Mountain, however, was there when the Porter shop crews loaded her on the ship in 1878. Simply having this locomotive is enough to put the Museum in exclusive company that includes the Smithsonian, but the Blue Mountain is much more than that. Even the Smithsonian's locomotive (built in 1875 and named Jupiter) has two surviving sisters, but the Blue Mountain is the last living example of a class of engine that once ran everywhere from Massachusetts to Central City to Santa Cruz. Today, she stands alone, well and truly the last of her kind.
