Storybook ending for Morehead & North Fork No. 12

A couple of months ago I stood inside what, for me, is a very exciting place: beneath the 30-ton overhead crane in the spacious, gleaming locomotive shop at the Age of Steam Roundhouse (AoSRH) in Sugarcreek, Ohio.

Surrounding me were examples of the Age of Steam crew’s handiwork, including former Lake Superior & Ishpeming 2-8-0 No. 33 and Yreka Western 2-8-2 No. 19, the former nearing completion, the other not far behind. And over in the corner, minding its own business, was Morehead & North Fork (M&NF) 0-6-0 No. 12, just weeks from steaming again.

As the world now knows, M&NF No. 12 is, indeed, back in steam. Last week, the trim little switcher began chuffing around the Age of Steam yard, looking as good as the day it was turned out by Alco’s Pittsburg works in 1905. Video of No. 12’s first runs shows it has an especially sweet whistle.  

An engine doesn’t have to be eight-coupled Super Power to be interesting, and No. 12 is proof. The Southern Railway was the original owner, which explains the 0-6-0’s graceful arched-window cab. Southern got nearly a half-century of work out of the engine and had retired it by 1952, presumably to be scrapped, but eastern Kentucky short line M&NF stepped up to buy it.

The M&NF began life in the early part of the 20th century as a logging railroad, with a connection to Chesapeake & Ohio in Morehead and an engine terminal in adjacent Clearfield, but the core business lasted only a couple of decades and by 1933 the railroad had been pared back from 25 to just 4 miles. Its stable of engines — including 2-6-2 No. 11 and 0-6-0 No. 14 — lasted until the early Sixties, drawing photographers chasing down the last of steam. 

The railroad dieselized in 1963 and operated until 1973, when a local operator took it over and tried to continue to serve a clay plant with four Baldwin diesels. Alas, the railroad lost its connection when CSX ended service through Morehead in the mid-1980s. The owners tried to make a go of it with an orphaned steam tourist railroad, but closed down in 1995. The other two original M&NF engines have been preserved elsewhere. 

That left the 12, which went into a shed in Clearfield, presumably to be forgotten. That is, until AoSRH founder Jerry Joe Jacobson came calling. Talks with the owners led to a sale in 2011 and the 0-6-0 was trucked to Sugarcreek.

Jacobson, who died in 2017, built the monumental Age of Steam complex a few years ago after the sale of his Ohio Central Railroad System to Genesee & Wyoming. Over the years he had love affairs with countless steam engines, but No. 12 was special, AoSRH Public Relations Manager John B. Corns told me.

“While serving as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Jerry Joe would volunteer for extra duty, and his platoon sergeant would reward him with an occasional weekend pass,” John recalls. “Foregoing the usual pleasures sought by young soldiers going to town, Jerry would endure a grueling, 450-mile Greyhound bus trip up to Clearfield to see M&NF No. 12 chugging along in regular service. It was 1962 — a year before M&NF dieselized — and Jerry savored the sights, sounds, and smells of real steam at work.”

Jacobson’s vision for No. 12 came true thanks to the work of the AoSRH crew, headed up by Chief Mechanical Officer Tim Sposato. Others who worked on the engine included Scott Czigans, Greg Miller, Alan Layman, Nick Taylor, Bill Goslin, John Leck, Bill Hanslik Sr., Bill Hanslik Jr., and Mike Costill. Handling the majority of the boiler work was Robert Franzen and his Steam Services of America firm. 

The 0-6-0 would be noteworthy enough for the simple fact of its resurrection at Sugarcreek, but the locomotive and its railroad earned a place in one of the greatest railroad books of all time, David P. Morgan’s The Mohawk That Refused to Abdicate and Other Tales, a compilation of the author’s mid-1950s steam safaris with photographer Philip R. Hastings. During their “Smoke Over the Prairie” series for Trains, the pair encountered No. 12 and its sisters during a brief stop. 

When they caught up with the M&NF, the railroad was hauling approximately 2,000 carloads a year to its connection with C&O, enough to, as Morgan noted, pull net income of $13,573 out of gross revenues of $70,500. “The road’s ‘heavy traffic’ rolls over 100-pound rail spiked to creosoted ties in white crushed stone that a road a thousand times the length of M&NF might well envy,” David wrote.

Later, David was moved to put this brief encounter in memorable terms: “I don’t know which is greater cause for rejoicing in the record of Morehead & North Fork: its solvency or its steam power. Moreover — saints be praised — the hoods, blue exhaust, and muffled grumble of internal combustion power are still alien to this scene of solvency. Here the railroad is still operated, as George Stephenson intended, by steam.”

The editor couldn’t have predicted what has happened over in Sugarcreek. But you can imagine how much he’d be praising the saints all over again every time No. 12 goes out to patrol the Age of Steam yard.