The Slim Princess is an oil fire 4-6-0 “Ten Wheeler” type narrow-gauge steam locomotive built in 1911 by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This incredible machine is preserved by the Eastern California Museum (in the Larry Peckham Engine House) and has been lovingly restored and maintained in operable condition by a devoted cadre of volunteers who I recently watched laboring on the engine. Working from a photograph I made onsite, I painted this pastel.
“…..the Slim Princess worked the Nevada California Oregon line for 15 years, eventually sold to the Southern Pacific narrow gauge line. Mining and timber and farming in east California, Nevada and points west kept railroad companies going since the 1880s. The Carson and Colorado Railroad Company was incorporated in 1880 running on the narrow-gauge lines.”
Excerpt from Sierra Wave Media, March 30, 2021
“…..a little more than ten years later the Southern Pacific took over the Carson and Colorado. The ever-present hope of a southern railroad was encouraged. Collis P. Huntington, head of the greater company, decided to complete the line through the valley, connecting the transcontinental systems to the south and the north. Before he proceeded with that plan, death claimed him, and his successors held a different view. When the Los Angeles aqueduct required large quantities of freight, the long-wanted [rail]road was built, and its last spike was driven at Owenyo October 18, 1910. It gave the valley a southern rail connection, though the narrow-gauge traversing Owens Valley as far as Owenyo has never been standardized…..the ‘Slim Princess,’ as the narrow-gauge was locally dubbed, would be made a part of a through north-and-south interior system. But those improvements have been completed, and there still remains 134 miles of the narrow-gauge which Mills said had been ‘built 300 miles too long and 300 years too soon.’ “
Excerpt from W.A. Chalfant’s The Story of Inyo (revised edition 1933), p. 313-314
alive in the sea of information 