Yesterday we went to the Great Oregon Steam-up and I thought I’d share a few pictures of the event. The steam up is a HUGE event. It covers acres and acres and has dozen different museums all contained within the grounds. There’s a Caterpillar museum, a truck museum, and a car and motorcycle museum, just to name a few. But there are MANY more.
There were, of course, also many large steam tractors there, which were some of the things I was more interested in. Here’s a sampling of a few that were there:
That’s me standing in front of this beast. Yes, I wore a mask – there weren’t many around, but since I’ve had fairly invasive surgery not too long ago, we decided it was prudent to be cautious. I don’t want to be back in the hospital for any preventable reason!
I just found this really cool. They had a cut-away of a boiler on display. I guess I never realized just HOW MANY stays there were in one of these. There are tons of them between the firebox and the sides of the boiler! I couldn’t believe how much support they built into these things, it was really neat to see it opened up like this.
They also have a working sawmill. It’s pretty impressive to see that blade up close and personal. It could take your arm right off without missing a beat!
Outside the sawmill, a couple of guys had their model steam donkeys set up moving logs around. That was pretty interesting to watch. They also had a full-sized one too! That one was also interesting but you couldn’t get as close and it was diesel rather than steam.
In addition to the full-sized engines there were quite a few model engines too. My wife got this picture of me looking at the displays.
The highlight for me was the Willow Creek Railroad that is on the grounds there. It’s a 1/8” scale 7.5” gauge model railroad. They had 4-5 trains running giving people rides. Many of them were various little gas or diesel engines, but the one that caught my eye was a big 4-8-4 steam engine!
There were several other steam engines, but they weren’t running at the time.
Of course, when it was my turn to ride, I asked if I could wait for the steam engine!
And here I am, on the train - I’m just to the left of the big tree there – you can see me with the mask on.
Here are a couple of short videos of the train ride.
This one isn’t the most scenic view, but it is the one where I caught them blowing the whistle, which I thought was pretty cool!
And finally, here I am back home, mask-free, showing off my cool new T-shirt I got!
All in all, it was a fun event!
Kim