Acquisition

When the narrow gauge's usefulness came to an end and its high carbon steel rails that had traveled across the ocean from England and Holland were being uprooted and stacked like cordwood, a lot of people felt sad. Among them was Anna Kelley, who might be said to have a little steel in her veins, because the ties that bound her to the railroad went further than her immediate family; her mother's parents, Charlie and Ann Recker, were also railroading people. so when her friend, Independence librarian Bessie Best, gave her a gentle prod ("Anna, we have to have something left of the railroad..you go get us an engine") Anna set herself the task of securing for her town and posterity a locomotive as reminder of a nostalgic era reaching back to 1880 when the white tents of railroad surveyors began to cluster in Owens Valley throughout its green (then!!) length.

Could she do it? Persuade the SP to given Independence an engine of its very own? Well, she certainly could try.

Her first move was to write a letter to Mr. Russel, president of southern Pacific: "We would very much like to have a locomotive. You'll just sell it to Disneyland anyway, and I promise you it will be well taken care of in Independence, because I will see to it."

Anna never received an answer from Mr. Russell, but one fine day she was pumping gas at the O.K.Kelley Service Station, which she and her husband still operated, when Richard Torres, a dear friend, said to her; "Anna, can you keep a secret? You're going to get your engine!" Richard, a section crew foreman over at Kearsarge, had just got orders from SP hq to go through all his track and pull the oldest rails and oldest ties: "You see, the rails and ties are dated. When they are put in the ground, there's a special zinc nail that has the year on the head; that tells the foreman and crew how old the ties is. They weren't pulling them for anybody else; they were pulling them for me."

Anna's engineering of that project, getting engine #18 into its now-familiar location in Independence's Dehy Park, was the "most fun thing I ever did in my life".

The engine was sitting at Owenyo when the order was given to turn it over to Anna. The Southern Pacific loaded it on a broadgauge flatcar and took it to thgeir carbarns in Bakersfield and gave her a real good cleaning and a paint job and then loaded her on another flatbed and brought her to Lone Pine.