Steam Tractors

[nikonbob]

These are from the Reynolds-Alberta Museum. The one I found most interesting was the one that used a wooden beam as part of the frame.

Bob

[PeterW]

Bob,
Some amazing looking tractors, at least to UK eyes. We never got anything as big, or as weird, as the Canadian 14-28 over here. Maybe our fields just aren't big enough to use tractors this size.

We got a few rather odd-looking small US tractors over here during the war, mainly for use on market-garden smallholdings up to about 4 acres, but the standard farm tractor from the 1930s to after the war was the Fordson, the one with the big flattened-oval fuel tank over the top of the engine. You started it on gasoline and then, when it was warm, switched over to kerosene.

Restoring farm tractors and other farm machinery is a relatively recent hobby over here but very fast-growing. Most of the Steam Fairs such as Sellindge and Netley Marsh have a section for tractors which is always well-attended.

After the war we got the smaller and very popular Ferguson tractor. Is that one lurking behind the OilPull in your first picture?

PeterW

[nikonbob]

PeterW

They are pretty amazing looking to my eyes too.

This museum is in western Canada just south of Edmonton. In western Canada and the US too, I think, land was originally parceled out in Sections, 1 mile squares, or fractions of a Section. Again I am not sure, but I think these Steam Tractors did not work the fields but were used to speed up threshing, run saw mills and so on. I think all the other jobs were done with horses and horse drawn implements. Don't take this seriously, just going from very vague memory.

I am not much on identifying old farm tractors so I really could not say if it is a Ferguson, sorry. Closest I ever came to farm tractors was using an old Fordson on a horse farm one summer.

Bob

[mickeyobe]

Bob,

They are fascinating machines and beautiful in a quite utilitarian way.

I wonder if that revered old Canadian farm machinery maker, Massey-Harris, is represented. M-H used to be synonymous with reliability.
Their red machines were a common sight on farms across Canada.

Besides tractors M-H spawned several actors and a Governor General, a concert hall, a college and other institutions.
On the Harris side, Lawren Harris, one of The Group of Seven and probably Canada's best known painter was a Scion of the family.

Massey-Harris became Massey-Ferguson in 1953.

Mickey

[nikkortorokkor]

Peter, that most certainly is a TE20 'Fergie' lurking at the back. There was a piece this week on our weekly rural TV show 'country calender' about a kiwifruit and apple orchard that runs a whole fleet of Fergies. Cheap, reliable and easily fixed by the orchard's full-time mechanic. Also, their narrowish track and diminutive size makes them ideal for driving under the canopy.

But the most famous Fergies were the ones driven by Ed Hillary and Co to the South Pole in '58.



Sir Ed was only supposed to be laying supply lines for the 1955-58 Trans-Antarctic expedition Snow-Cats, but got the bit between his teeth and made a run for the pole in his Fergie, beating Fuchs and his Snow-Cats in the process.

I grew up visiting the red Fergie at the Canterbury Museum, along with one of Fuch's Snow-Cats.
Here's someone else's photo of the Tucker and Fergie in the Museum.


Fantastic photos, by the way, Bob. The Canadian looks like a pre-historic rail dragster.

The most awesome tractor I ever saw was Big Lizzie, permanently on display in Redcliff, Victoria (Australia). She was built in 1915 and is about the size of one of Peter's English fields.

Bob, traction engines (steam tractors) could pull implements, but not in the manner of 'modern' tractors. The engine would sit in the corner of the field, stationary, and pull the plough via a system of ropes and pulleys. I don't know if this was done in Canada - the most common use for an agricultural traction engine was, as you point out, to drive threshing mills, saw benches, etc., and to haul road trains of wagons, replacing bullock trains.

MT.

[PeterW]

Michael,

The picture you posted of one of Fuchs' Snow-Cats started the cogs whirring bcause I knew I had a picture of one somewhere.

It's on a trailer in London being towed by a Scammell heavy haulage unit.

The picture's dated 1959 in pencil on the back, so perhaps it was taken after the expedition came home.



PeterW

[nikonbob]

Mickey

My head is reeling from info overload. I always thought a Scion was something you ate with a bit of jam and butter. I'll have to look up Lawren Harris being only vaguely familiar with Tommy Thompson whose work I like.

MT

Thanks for the story and photos on Sir Ed, very interesting. I recall a program here that was called Country Calender from years ago. I had not heard of the Steam Tractors pulling ploughs via cables and pulleys but that makes sense as the are too big and heavy to work a field in the usual manner.

Bob

[nikkortorokkor]

two corrections on my earlier post:

Traction engines equipped to haul implements with wire ropes were called ploughing engines - there is a great photo set of some, and a whole lot of other goodies in action here:
pgdl.co.uk/p2/photos/20070609_wilts_steam/wilts07..htm

Tucker made Sno-cats, not Snow-cats.

Speaking of which, here is Peter's Sno-Cat, call-number C, now flossied up and on display as part of the Ten Climate Stories exhibition opening at the Science Museum, in London:



She looks much shinier than the Canterbury Museum's Sno-cat, 'A', which did long service on the ice with New Zealand's DSIR (Dept. for Scientific and Industrial Research) after the Expedition.

MT

[PeterW]

Michael,

Thanks for the link to the Wiltshire Steam and Vintage Rally. Some wonderful action pictures as well as static and arena displays.

Thanks also for letting us know what happened to Sno-Cat C. I'm so glad it was on its way to storage and refurbishment
and not to the scrap yard. Do you happen to know what happened to Sno-Cat B, or how many were made?

PeterW

[nikonbob]

Michael

Thanks for the link, now I have a better idea of how Steam Tractors were used to plow fields. Did it require two tractors and they just passed the plow back and forth between them?

Bob

[Deleted]

My Dad had a Ford Ferguson (just like the gray tractor in the background in the first image) --an early 1941 model. Many of those old Fords are still running on small "hobby farms." You can still get parts for them. Only bad thing about them was if you tried to pull something like a stump and it didn't move, the tractor would keep running, flip itself up-side-down and crush you.

The picture is of me on our tractor about 1960. The headlights are from a Model A Ford car.

When I was a kid there was always one or more steam tractor at annual community events. The old timers indicated the tractors usually sat in one spot at the end of a field and powered a stationary threshing machine using a long belt. The cut grain was usually hauled to the thresher using horses and wagons.

Wayne

[pompiere]

On the western US and Canadian praries, large tractors were used to pull gangs of plows to break the sod. On a large gang, there would be one driver, and a few attendants riding on the plows to make adjustments. Once the praries were broken up, the large tractors fell out of favor and were replaced by small tractors such as the Fordson and Freguson. The cable pulled plow seems to be more of a European thing, due to the smaller fields.

[nikkortorokkor]

Peter,
sorry before the late reply, I've been finishing writing commitments (my 1st chapter as 'lead author', so quite challenging) and doing some last-minute travelling in New Zealand before heading overseas once more.
There is Tucker appreciation site on the web somewhere which has info on the Trans-Antarctic Sno-Cats. It says that Vivian 'Bunny' Fuchs' Cat, which didn't have a door-sign, was lost in a crevasse by the DSIR. A third Cat (Door-sign B?) is in Tucker's own museum. The Canterbury Museum refers to 'Sno-Cat Able' as Fuchs' Sno-Cat. Whether they claim this to be the one that Fuchs drove, or whether they were all Fuchs' Sno-Cats, so to speak, is unclear.

BTW, there is a tenuous camera link here. Sir Vivian Fuchs, though English, was the son of a German migrant - as the family name might suggest. His father came from Jena - home of so much that we like here.

Michael.

[nikkortorokkor]

Oh, and one more post for Bob.

Steam ploughs simply had two sets of ploughs, facing in opposite directions. I've seen others that flip on the longitudinal axis.
Thus, only one set of ropes, engine and pulley are needed.



Michael.