(The following story by Christine Cole appeared on the Orlando Sentinel website on February 28.)
MOUNT DORA, Fla. — The iron horse puffs, chugs, hisses and blows clouds of smoke.
After a hiatus of more than six years, a locomotive will return steam travel to Mount Dora.
A day after the 40-ton steam engine known as the Flagg Coal Company 75 was unloaded from a truck to the tracks in Tavares this week, the engine’s owners cleaned its flues with a long-handled brush and washed the exterior in preparation for the 78-year-old engine’s three-week visit to Mount Dora.
Starting Friday, the coal-burning engine will pull trains for Inland Lakes Railway on a six-mile round trip leaving Mount Dora four times a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The event is dubbed the Mount Dora Festival of Steam.
“It will be great to have steam back in Mount Dora,” said Neil Bagaus, the railroad’s general manager.
In 2001, the Mount Dora, Tavares and Eustis Railway used an oil-burning steam engine, the Cannonball, star of Rosewood and O Brother, Where Art Thou? until it chugged to a halt between Mount Dora and Orlando.
The visiting engine, built by Vulcan Iron Works in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., was a work engine, switching coal cars and, later, pushing cartloads of rock.
In 1954, the engine was sold to an early-railroad museum in upstate New York, which closed in 1974.
By the time father and son John and Byron Gramling bought the engine in 1991, it needed a lot of work.
The two worked intermittently on restoring the engine for 10 years, taking it apart, sandblasting the boiler and replacing the rusted-out cab. Once restored, the engine has journeyed on the back of a truck to railroading museums and tourist-line railroads such as Inland Lakes Railway.
The Gramlings nicknamed their business Have Engine, Will Travel.
“We have moved it 26 times so far, hauling it about 8,000 miles,” John Gramling said. “It has run for 1,970 miles, so it has gone farther in the interstate than on the tracks.”
From Mount Dora, the engine will go on to a railroad museum in Spencer, N.C., and to a tourist railroad in Lebanon, Ohio, before returning home in July to Ashley, Ind.
Bagaus said he will use the engine to pull cars without air conditioning and with no windows, so people can get the feeling of traveling behind a steam engine as it puffs smoke and blows cinders.
“Once you build a fire in it, there is a whole series of sounds and smells that are particular to a steam engine,” Gramling said. “If an inanimate object could come alive, the steam engine comes the closest.”