Edaville #21: "Anne-Elizabeth". Since the departure of the original Maine 2-foot Locomotives in 1993, the only steam power (until very recently) at Edaville Railroad....now known as Edaville USA, has been this English-built Hudswell Clarke engine. There is not a lot of reliable information available about the history of this engine, but various sources indicate that she was likely built as an outside-frame, 0-6-0T for service in the cane fields on the island of Fiji in the South Pacific. Her build date is listed as 1935. After being imported to the US and purchased by the new owners of Edaville, she has been "Americanized" to some degree as a tender engine with a cab similar to what you'd find on the last generation of Maine 2-footers. She may have originally burned cane husks in Fiji and it is believe that the diamond stack was part of that set-up. When she arrived in the US, she was first configured to burn oil, but has since been converted to burn soft coal.
Prior to December of 2013, I had not been to Edaville in 46 years. Getting a photograph of a steam engine at the park is no longer as easy as I remember when I was a kid. Not only has the railroad been reduced significantly in size, but the park has also built an earthen berm right next to the tracks on the west side, so the number of sunlit spots is really minimal. In addition, steam operations are pretty well confined to the Christmas Holiday period, when the park only runs from 2PM until 9PM. Given all of the challenges, I quickly realized that getting a well-lit portrait of the Anne Elizabeth in action was going to require me to get creative with high ISOs and the minimal flash equipment that I typically carry. It's not normally my style to "nuke" steam engines with flash, but after a 46 year absence from the place, I wanted to come home with something to show you all what steam operations look like at Edaville today.
