DeerLodgeLittleJoe
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Another view on the south end of Main Street in Deer Lodge. This is a Milwaukee Road E-70 locomotive.
The Milwaukee ran the only transcontinental electric railway in the United States. Some 400 miles of the road, from eastern Montana to eastern Washington (Harlowtown to Avery) were electrified. One of the main engines used was the E-70 "Little Joe".
The 5 or so E-70 series engines were called Little Joes as they were originally built by GE for Russia in the 1940s. When relations with Russia went sour, they were sold to the Milwaukee Road. Little Joe is a play on the name of Russia's leader at the time, Joseph Stalin.
The Milwaukee ceased electric operations in the mid-70s. Most of the electric equipment was scrapped. This Little Joe (I believe number E-71) probably ended up in Deer Lodge because that is where the electric repair shops were.
My dad and another fellow ended up getting Milwaukee to donate the engine to the city. However, the city wouldn't pay to have it moved, so the two ot them then spent a summer moving the locomotive themselves. They rigged up rails on pallets and would push the engine (all 2000 tons of it) forward a few feet at a time with a front loader until they came to the end of the rails. They would then move the pallets around to the front and repeat the whole thing.
The two of them moved the engine across town to a park, a distance of perhaps a half mile. One complication was that the truck wich hold the wheels of the locomotive can only rotate a few degrees (trains don't take sharp corners). A number of times the train fell off the temporary rails because the curve was too tight. Each time this happened, they would have to spend days jacking the locomotive back up to get it on the tracks. They finally got it moved, though.
The engine sat neglected on the lawn of the city hall for twenty years. Recently, the town got interested in it again and had it professionally moved across town to this new location and repainted, etc. This cost something like $20,000.
There's an interesting story in there, I'm sure.
forward on the MonTana path, or
forward on the MilwaukeRoad path.
