Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for July 10, 2014

Good art here. Reminds me of Winsor McCay.

Well, I guess we’re in for at least a week of naming remaining steam engines..Let’s not forget #4 of the Manitou Springs and Pike’s Peak Cog Railroad. Only sees occasional service anymore; there are no water towers on the Pike’s Peak route, so it only goes about a mile, then heads back. Not sure the next year they will drag it out..Kind of like the steamers mentioned so far in this strip..I would like to know more about Jimmy and his disease..I knew too many kids who died as kids.

Totally trivial trivia: Only North American locomotives have bells on them..\\//_

I have a niece who is the longest survivor of the cancer called Burkitt’s lymphoma. She was diagnosed in 1976 at age five and was the guinea pig in treating that kind of cancer. No one had survived that type of cancer for more than a few years at the time of her diagnoses. Today she is a grandmother and lives in Oregon. She is the model of hope for the families of children with Burkitt’s lymphoma in her area. ~Her brother drives an engine in Texas, but it isn’t steam. It is modern and pulls freight. ~Like everyone else, I hope one day soon children like Jimmy and people of all ages will be easily cured of cancer and disease.

Rover should have called the Make A Wish Foundation. They would be far more helpful.

I think the engine at Pixie Woods in Stockton, California is a steam engine. It is a fun place for children, especially the ones under nine years old.

I saw a “Big Boy” on the move in California many years ago. It was not 4014 (the one being restored in Wyoming), but it certainly was HUGE. It’s a 4-8-8-4 for the railroad trivia buffs. That means 4 “lead” or “pilot” wheels in a truck at the front of the engine, two sets of 8 drive wheels each and 4 wheels under the cab. (Smaller engines usually only give 3 stats, rather than 4. Big Boy needs two separate sets of drive wheels.)

Sadly, cancer or any other disease that generates good money to the pharmaceuticals for just relieving or prolonging the life of the patience will never have a cure. When a disease becomes curable, the money stops with the cure. Just watch the movie Shrive on Youtube.

Britain is swarming with operational steam locomotives, often in the hands of private collectors. It’s less common in Norht America, but the animator Ward Kimball owned two 3 foot narrow gauge locomotives that he and his family operated on weekends. In fact the smaller of the two locomotives – the Chloe – ran on Kimball’s Grissly Flats Railroad (which ran around his three acre backyard) until 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Flats_Railroad

Another American railfan went by the initials W.E.D.

There is one at steamtown in Scranton.