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The Olomana (1883)The Olomana spent 62 seasons working on a Hawaiian sugar plantation on the island of Oahu. When he saw it in California in the early 1950s, Walt Disney called the locomotive the nearest thing to a Mickey Mouse engine he had ever seen. According to a Hawaiian dictionary, the name Olomana is a corruption of the English words "old man," but according to the donor of the engine to the Smithsonian, local Oahuans said the name referred an extinct volcano on the island and that the term meant "big noise" or "forked hill." Whatever the case, Olomana came to the island in August 1883, after a two-month passage by sailing ship around Cape Horn from the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the third locomotive to come to Oahu, in what was then the Kingdom of Hawaii. The Waimanalo Sugar Co. operated large plantations and a sugar refinery on the eastern end of the island, near Waimanalo Bay.
Olomana spent its working life pulling little four-wheeled railcars piled high with cut cane from the fields to the refinery. The engine, its sisters, and the railcars ran on panels of prefabricated track that could be easily moved about and reassembled in the cane fields as different sections were harvested. Track was "narrow gauge," i.e., three feet in width between the rails. Olomana's relatively light weight of nine tons facilitated operation on these temporary tracks. Leaving the cane fields, the temporary tracks connected with a permanent rail line to the refinery. On the panel tracks, speed was rarely over five miles per hour. Once on the permanent track, Olomana could reach the comparatively blistering speed of 20 miles per hour. Other than the fact of its original locale, Olomana typifies the thousands of small steam locomotives that once toiled in mills, factories, power stations, stone quarries, and lumber yards all over America. Similar engines, running also on temporary tracks, labored for general contractors at large construction sites throughout the world. Olomana was in fact a standard Baldwin design of its size and type, one which a purchaser could order from a catalog. (Olomana is a Baldwin Class "6-8 1/3C16.") By 1883, Baldwin was the largest locomotive manufacturer in the world, producing 557 engines that year for both U.S. and foreign buyers. One person ran the locomotive, serving as both engineer and fireman. Olomana first ran on coal. But due to the price of coal in Hawaii, the sugar company changed the fuel to oil in 1928. Mechanics removed the coal grates from the firebox and installed an oil burner. Steam pressure in the boiler was 140 pounds-per-square-inch. Occasionally, dried cane refuse was used as fuel, but this practice coated the insides of the boiler with deposits that were hard to remove and so was not often done. Like the Pioneer, Olomana is a "tank engine," meaning that there is no separate tender. (Olomana is an "0-4-2T" type, the "T" referring to "tank.") Steam pistons are connected to the four diminutive driving wheels; a smaller pair of idler wheels helps support the back of the engine. Fuel was carried at the rear of the engine, and a 110-gallon water supply was carried in the U-shaped "saddle tank" that is draped over the boiler. Olomana witnessed the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Three years later the Waimanalo Sugar Co. began converting its cane-haulage to trucks, and Olomana was summarily retired. After the war ended, a railroad buff and historian named Gerald M. Best, of Beverly Hills, California, decided to realize a boyhood dream: he would buy his own steam locomotive -- and run it! Jerry Best was a pioneer in perfecting sound technology and film processing for Warner Brothers Studios. He could afford to travel widely. He discovered Olomana rusting in the weeds near the Waimanalo mill in 1948 and asked if he might purchase it. Soon the decrepit little engine was eastward bound in the hold of a Matson Lines freighter.
After storage on a Hollywood backlot for a few years, Best moved Olomana in 1951 to the property of artist and animator Ward Kimball in San Gabriel, Ca. Kimball, one of the "grand old men" of Disney animation, had a private backyard narrow-gauge railroad: an enginehouse, water tower, tiny depot, a locomotive and passenger car which had formerly run in Nevada, and several hundred feet of track. Shaded by tall eucalyptus trees, Kimball's property was a celebrated landmark among rail buffs. An invitation to visit was prized -- even by Kimball's boss Walt Disney. In 1952-53, Best and Kimball repaired and restored Olomana to jewel-like condition. In the process, Best took out the oil-fuel tank and changed the engine's fuel to wood -- mostly because Kimball's neighbors did not want black oil smoke wafting overhead. Best spent nearly $10,000 acquiring and restoring the engine, a heady sum in those days. Disney visited San Gabriel often, delightedly donning engineer's cap and gloves and occasionally running Olomana. It was during one of those occasions that, according to Best and Kimball, Disney made his remark about the engine being entirely suitable for Mickey Mouse. Animated film lovers can recall the film, "Dumbo," in which the little steam engine "Casey Jr." struggles to start his circus train. Any resemblance between "Casey Jr." and Olomana may not be entirely coincidental. Although Olomana came to California almost a decade after "Dumbo" was made, rail-buff Kimball did much of the concept art and animation for that film. In 1977, Best donated his labor of love to the Smithsonian, which promptly installed it in NMAH's Railroad Hall. Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley made Jerry Best a member of the Smithson Society. In 1999, in its second century, the engine has now left NMAH to reside in a building constructed not long before Olomana was built. There, at the Smithsonian's Arts & Industries Building, the little veteran is to become a centerpiece this spring in a new exhibit about life in Hawaii -- "From Bento to Mixed Plate: Americans of Japanese Ancestry in Multicultural Hawai'i." |
