Here is a train's "Snowmobile" Anyone ever heard of one?
kingofobsolete.ca
Two companies in Maine...Linn and Lombard built steamers very similar to the pictured one around '05-'15.
ref. A history of Maine Built Autos and Motorized Vehicles 1834-1934.
Authored by Richard and Nancy Fraser.
I met Dick Fraser at Chickasha a few years ago and bought his book...very interesting.
Around a hundred different makes of motorized vehicles were built in Maine.
There are stories of one falling through the ice on a local lake while pulling logs, but no proof, just stories now 100 years later.
A threshing club in Minnesota knew of a submerged one in a Minnesota lake. Even though they had the means and the money to raise it, they could not get permission from the DNR. My dad remembers seeing one working up near Itasca State Park.
They generally always preferred to use ice roads to pull logs out of the woods here in Northern WI. Steam engines like these were pretty much limited to short flat hauls to bring logs from collecting points that oxen had hauled out first. Given their weight and inability to negotiate even modest grades, they never displaced oxen drawn log skids in the woods around here. I suspect this was one of those "good ideas" that just didn't pan out in practice.
That Picture is of a Phoenix Log hauler, there was also a Lumbard Log Hauler. THERE FIRST PATENT WAS IN 1900.
Bob
This one was restored by The Crooker Family of Main in 1981
Cedar Valley Memories in Osage IA has a 1910 Phoenix that they have running and driving around their show every year.
Below is a link to you tube showing a Lumbard Log hauler running.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJ0mxp-8j8
and a link to a Phoenix Log Hauler.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbzvnTdjkKw
Both very interesting and some what different machines.
Steven
One thing Hitler supposedly did was reforestation projects. Much of the land around our little village in Jagersburg, Saarland, W. Germany, was forest so thick daylight hardly got to the ground. In 1967, I filmed them logging in the woods with a horse. I have that 8mm B&W here somewhere.
Les Von Nordheim: Jagersburg is about 8km west of Miesau.
Here is the more modern version, a 1926 Lombard 6-Ton Model T Dump Tractor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmFgE-wB-l0&feature=fvwp