The Rutland’s steam roster was not known for a standardized set of motive power like bigger railroads such as the Pennsylvania Railroad. Early into the “modern” Rutland era (Post 1900), many oddballs existed on the roster.
In Volume 16, Number 3, of the RRHS magazine, The Newsliner, author Robert K. Adams wrote of engines such as Numbers 10, 11 and 12, who were refugees from the Ogdensburg & Lake Champlain line. Built in 1897 and absorbed into the Rutland with that lines take over of the O&LC in 1899, these products of Schenectady, New York were known as “Little Hogs”. They were scrapped in 1934, but the tenders from these engines lived on, one of them until 1975.
Engine #28 is one of the more “well-known” locomotives on the roster. Built in 1913 in Schenectady, New York, #28 was involved in a horrific head-on collision which saw the engine turn end-for-end in a crash north of Bellows Falls, Vermont. The cab was nearly severed off and the tender was detached and landed upside down. The locomotive was rebuilt and overhauled. The same locomotive was semi-streamlined in 1939 and used as the marketing ploy to announce “The Whippet” marketing scheme. The locomotive was a mechanical basket case for crews, which felt that it was “not quite right” after the accident rebuilding. None-the-less it remained in service until 1951, when it was sold for scrap to help finance the down-payments for dieselization.
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