Whiskey Island Car Pusher Removed From List

I'm a little behind on this one, but I came across this post on Facebook from back in June that shows photos of the last two Hulett Ore Unloaders being scrapped at Whiskey Island in Cleveland. Cut up alongside were two 3'6"-gauge electric car pushers. The remains can be seen above, with one still relatively intact but the other reduced to pieces. I'm assuming both are long gone at this point. One, Pennsylvania Railroad 2, was on the PNAERC roster and has been removed. The other, which I believe may have been PRR 4, was never on the roster. As luck would have it, I never happened upon a fleet number for it until just now, when I was proceeding to remove it from my list!

Anyway, several other locomotives from Whiskey Island did escape into preservation. PRR 1 just left in May, escaping before the torches were lit, while PRR 3 escaped years ago and is now preserved near Youngstown. PRR 7 is also preserved in North East, PA.

Whiskey Island Car Pusher Finds New Home

A few weeks ago, we posted a story here about the last Hulett ore unloaders in existence - a pair of disassembled Huletts stored at Whiskey Island in Cleveland - being threatened, along with a trio of diminutive narrow-gauge electric car pushers, or shunters, that sat with them. While I don't believe any hopeful news has emerged on the Huletts themselves, one of the three car pushers has found a new home. The Port of Cleveland has posted here that Pennsylvania Railroad 1, one of the three car pushers at Whiskey Island, was loaded onto a truck and removed from the site for preservation. The locomotive is a 1912 Baldwin-Westinghouse, identical (I believe) to this one, which is preserved in Youngstown. The photo above is from the Port of Cleveland's Facebook post.

Its destination is apparently Buckeye Lake, Ohio, but it's not owned by Buckeye Lake Trolley. It's the first piece of equipment on the PNAERC list under the ownership of the American Industrial Mining Company Museum, or AIMCM, which is a geographically dispersed organization focused on mining and industrial equipment preservation. The group has its main workshop site at Buckeye Lake, on the same property as Buckeye Lake Trolley, and has a public exhibition site in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. AIMCM also owns a pair of Toronto CLRVs, 4024 and 4170, but those two cars are stored at the Halton County Radial Railway in Ontario and are currently listed with that organization's collection on PNAERC.

Two more PRR car pushers are still in the weeds at Whiskey Island awaiting possible salvation. One is reputedly numbered 2, but the third isn't on PNAERC because I don't have a fleet number or any other information on it. Interested in a very large and ungainly-looking lawn ornament?

Car Pushers Threatened

A Facebook post here by a page called Drone Ohio made earlier this week states that a scrapping company has been hired to cut up the last two Hulett Ore Unloaders, which have been sitting disassembled on Whiskey Island in Cleveland for many years. Of far less historical significance, but of more relevance to this particular page, are the three narrow-gauge electric-powered car pushers shown above, which have long sat in the shadow of the giant Huletts. The photo above is from Drone Ohio.

The three car pushers are 3'6" gauge and two, PRR 1 and PRR 2, are already on the PNAERC list. The third is on my "mystery equipment" list because I've never been able to find a fleet number, builder, or date for it. Anyone know? UPDATE: The answer, though now moot, is here.

Regardless, these car pushers (also known as "mules" and probably other nicknames) worked the PRR docks here at Whiskey Island for many years and were retired in the 1980s or very early 1990s. I think it's safe to assume that if the Huletts get hauled off in scrap dumpsters, this trio will go with them.

While I was looking at car pushers on the PNAERC list, I also reviewed the other four. I believe there are six of these things on the list - five narrow-gauge PRR examples and this thing, which is standard gauge, has an MCB coupler on the back, and wears a pantograph. But of the three PRR ones extant outside of Whiskey Island, I did make a change to PRR 7 at the Lake Shore Railway Museum. The LSRM website lists this locomotive as "most likely" built around 1910 by Atlas. But it's virtually identical to the other Baldwin/Westinghouse-built car pushers, and those unusual over-the-journal-box equalizer bars were used on Baldwin streetcar trucks in the 1900s and 1910s too, so I've changed this one to list B/W as the builder instead of Atlas. Does anyone have an actual roster of these things?

Two car pushers added to list

A recent thread on RyPN brought up the old car pushers from the Whiskey Island ore unloading facility in Cleveland and suggested that there were, indeed, still three of these diminutive 3'6" gauge electric locomotives in storage at the facility. Sure enough, a little online snooping revealed this page that confirmed the locomotives' existence and location. It even had the above photo, from a few years back, showing the cab of one locomotive peeking above the overgrowth.

Supposedly there are three of these locomotives, numbered 1, 2, and 4 (number 3 is currently preserved in Youngstown). I've added 1 and 2 to the PNAERC roster, as they're identical to number 3 and I have plenty of information on them (they're 1912-built Baldwin-Westinghouse locomotives built at the same time as the Whiskey Island facility). But that leaves number 4, which is something of a mystery. Anyone know who built it and when? I'd like to have some more information on it before adding it to the PNAERC roster.