ready to abandon them. But Aaron Keller and George Eckstein thought the highly scenic line, with its two bridges and numerous cuts and fills, held promise for use as a tourist rail- road and began a campaign to save the rails from destruction. In 1983, C&NW agreed to a price of $50,000 for the 11 miles of track between Boone and Wolf, a stretch that included the famous high bridge. The Boone Railroad Historical Society began selling memberships at $20 apiece, and by the end of the year some 2254 people had signed up to save the railroad. The contract to purchase the line was signed in June 1983, and the first train ran behind a surplus Air Force diesel that October. Today’s visitors board the train at
what was once the Fort Dodge Line’s Boone Yard, although little remains of the original railroad structures that were used to maintain the road’s in- terurban cars. “The shops were located where our depot stands now, and in fact there was a turntable just to the north of our present tracks,” says Fenner Stevenson, B&SV’s General Manager since 1996. “When the land was ac- quired back in the 1980s, it was pretty much empty.” The depot, water tower, and the shop building were all con- structed by the Iowa Railroad Histori- cal Society. The depot was built in 1985 and is modeled after the FDDM&S de- pot that stood at Rockwell City. It hous- es a ticket window, gift shop, and the company’s general offices. A variety of train rides are offered,
the most popular being the 1920s Ex- cursion Train that travels down the riv- er valley from Boone to Fraser and re- turn, covering a distance of 15 miles. Passengers are carried in former Lack- awanna and Rock Island heavyweight commuter coaches or in one of several cabooses of C&NW and Rock Island heritage. New in 2012 are three ex- C&NW bi-level coaches, which are heated and air conditioned. What really sets the Boone & Scenic
Valley apart from other heritage rail- roads is its variety of motive power. “On any given Saturday in the sum- mer, you can actually see steam, diesel, and electric all running at the same time, and all within sight of each oth- er,” Stevenson says. Diesels are the normal motive power on the weekday Boone-Fraser excursion trains and din- ner trains, while steam runs to Fraser with the excursion consist on Satur- days. On weekends, a restored interur- ban car traverses the original Fort Dodge trackage between the B&SV’s main depot and the old FDDM&S freight depot near downtown.
Steam from the Middle Kingdom B&SV’s class JS 2-8-2 8419, which is affectionately known as The Iowan, is now in its 22nd year of operation. The
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TOP: B&SV diesels 6540 and 1003 are at the Boone Depot on the afternoon of June 2, 2008. Boone is a great place to see steam, diesel, and electric power in action —and within sight of each other. ABOVE: “Union Pacific 1098” is an Alco S-2 that worked much of its life for the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis as their No. 575. It later was acquired by RELCO, and numbered 1031. When B&SV purchased the unit, it was painted in Union Pacific colors to honor the “new” hometown railroad, which took over for C&NW in 1995. Number 1098, which celebrates its 70th birthday this year, is seen at Boone on June 2, 2007.
116-ton Mikado was built in Shanxi, China, by the Datong Works in October 1988, and was shipped to Iowa in late 1989. (The full story of its acquisition was chronicled by Douglas C. Bailey in the May 1994 RAILFAN & RAILROAD.) Number 8419 came to Iowa in full Chinese regalia, with tender lettering and a huge smokebox wreath sporting Chinese characters. Initially it was planned that the Chinese trappings would be removed after a few seasons, but that attitude has since changed. “We feel that it’s a very historic ma- chine, being that it’s the final locomo- tive constructed by Datong, and for a little museum in the Midwest — in Iowa — to be able to have what is com- monly referred to as the ‘last produc- tion steam locomotive in the world,’ well, that’s really quite a feat,” Steven-
son says. “However, we have done some things to Americanize it and make it our own. We’ve taken the large Chinese [lettering] off the sides of the tender and put our own logo on there, and we’ve also taken the wreath off the front. But we’ve left the [Chinese and American] flags on the smoke stack, and kept the red drive wheels. There are still some Chinese [characters] on the locomotive, but they’re down on the corner of the tender now.” There is one other steam locomotive on
the property, ex-Crab Orchard & Egypt- ian 2-8-0 17, which is currently dis- played near the main depot platform. It’s famous in its own right as the last steam locomotive in America to operate on a common-carrier railroad in regular freight service, not being retired until 1986 (See LINESIDE LEGACY, June 2008).
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