Photos courtesy of Wizzy Strom

The restored N&W 1134 has taken its place at the head of the train at the soon-to-open Railroad Museum of Virginia in Portsmouth.

Owen Wood works to remove the cab from the unrestored 1134 at a Roanoke scrapyard last summer.

PORTSMOUTH -- It finally came together on a wet, muddy night in Portsmouth, with pieces of the historic steam locomotive dangling from cranes.

First, the 70-ton wheel assembly was lifted off a truck and placed on the railroad tracks here at the newly built Railroad Museum of Virginia. Then the barrel-shaped boiler was hoisted into the night sky and set atop the wheels.

Finally the cab, where an engineer and fireman would have sat a century ago, was gently wriggled into place behind the boiler, while workers scurried to fasten it in place.

Sometime about 8:30 p.m. on May 17, the Norfolk and Western M2 class 1134 -- one of Roanoke's famed "Lost Engines" -- came to life again.

No, it didn't send up a plume of steam, much less chug away from the station. It will probably never run again.

But its holes were all patched; its once-rusty parts gleamed with 53 gallons of fresh black paint. And most of its missing pieces have been replaced or remade.

One "Lost Engine" had been found. And Will Harris was the man to thank.

'A gift from above'

Let's be clear: In the Cinderella story of the 1134, plenty of people deserve a hand.

Start with Willard Moody, board president of Portsmouth's fledgling Railroad Museum of Virginia, and Bev Fitzpatrick, executive director of the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke.

Each played a major role in rescuing the 1134 and its two sister steam locomotives, the 1118 and the 1151, from a Roanoke scrap yard last summer, where they had been rusting away for 60 years. All three of the locomotives have now been hauled out of the scrap yard, though the 1134 is the first to be restored.

In addition, the National Railway Historical Society's Roanoke chapter made its Roanoke rail yard available for restoration work, and NRHS members did some of the work on the 1134 themselves.

But it was Harris, the poker-faced owner of a lumberyard in the Rockbridge County hamlet of Goshen (pop. 394) who finally got things moving after years of talk. It was Harris who offered to actually move the engines, and to restore the 1134 and deliver it to Portsmouth, at a price the museum could afford.

"I've been fooling with trains since I was a kid," said Harris, explaining why he took on the project. Harris once bought a caboose -- a real one -- when he was just a teenager. Times have changed since then, said Harris, 50. "You can go online and buy them now."

"A lot of people think Will is a little bit eccentric," said his wife, Janie Harris. "And he is. But in a good way." She said he often sees value in things that no one else can see. "He can just look at something and see a way to fix it or restore it or save it."

Harris had some experience restoring locomotives, including a World War II vintage steam engine now located at an outdoor park at Crewe.

It was Fitzpatrick who introduced Harris to Joe Donnelly, a former Salem resident who is now on the board of the railroad museum in Portsmouth.

Fitzpatrick knew of Harris because of his work on the engine at Crewe. He also knew that Harris had a different way of doing things. "He had expressed interest in helping us get those engines," Fitzpatrick said. "He was like a gift from above."

Looking for a locomotive

The Railroad Museum of Virginia is an as-yet unopened new museum near Old Town in Portsmouth. When it closed the deal for the 1134 a couple of years ago, the museum already had some antique train cars and a caboose. But organizers wanted a locomotive at its head -- and not just any locomotive.

"Nothing would do but a steam engine," explained board president Moody, a Portsmouth attorney who has made his living representing rail workers.

Museum organizers were very interested to learn there were three old N&W steam locomotives rusting in a Roanoke scrap yard, but initial estimates for moving and restoring one of the "lost engines," as a Web site devoted to their rescue had dubbed them, were half a million dollars or more.

That was out of the question for a little museum still struggling to open its doors.

"We didn't have a lot of money," said Moody, who other board members said is one of the museum's biggest donors.

Enter Harris. Another museum board member, Joe Donnelly, recalled how he and Harris, both Virginia Tech grads, went to a Virginia Tech football game in November 2008 to get to know each other. Following the Hokies' lackluster victory over Duke, the two men went out for steaks in a Blacksburg restaurant. It was there that Harris pulled out a notebook and began sketching out for Donnelly on a napkin just how saving the locomotives might be done.

The plan had something for everyone, including a locomotive for the transportation museum in Roanoke. The Roanoke museum had title to all three engines, but no money to move them out of the scrap yard.

But it was Harris' bottom line that made the biggest impression on Donnelly:

"He said, 'I can do it for $225,000.' That was a lot better than anyone else had offered."

On his return to Portsmouth, the museum board gave Harris' plan a thumbs up.

Getting started

Restoring the 1134 was an enormous job. To begin with, Harris had to get the 1134 and its siblings, the 1118 and the 1151 -- all M2 class 4-8-0 locomotives manufactured between 1910 and 1912 -- out of the Virginia Scrap Iron & Metal Co. yard off Jefferson Street.

It was a given that after 60 years, none of the locomotives was going to roll. And they were so heavy that loading them onto flatbed trucks in one piece was out of the question.

Harris' solution was a radical one: to cut the engines into pieces and load the separate parts onto trucks. The three locomotives were cut up and moved to various locations in August 2009.

The 1151, the only one of the three engines actually made in Roanoke, was moved to a patch of vacant land between the transportation museum and the Fifth Street bridge and reassembled there, to await restoration.

The 1118 was taken to the National Railway Historical Society's rail yard on Ninth Street, where society members have been working on it periodically ever since. They hope to eventually exhibit the locomotive at the Roanoke transportation museum, members said.

The third locomotive was the 1134. Like the scarecrow in the "Wizard of Oz," pieces of the 1134 went all over the place. The boiler and the wheels went to Ninth Street. The cab and the tender were trucked separately up to Harris' North Fork Lumber yard in Goshen. All the pieces of the 1134 would not be reassembled until they arrived at the museum site in Portsmouth.

Slow work

As steam locomotives go, the 1134 is hardly the biggest -- either of the transportation museum's two prized steam behemoths, the 611 or the 1218, would dwarf it. But at more than 100 tons, it is big enough.

Built for the Norfolk and Western Railway by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1910, it was designed for mainline work, but stronger and more versatile locomotives soon rendered it obsolete.

Instead, the 1134 and the rest of N&W's M2 class engines were relegated to switch yard duty and short hauls.

The engine was finally scrapped in 1950. By the time it was rescued, it was gouged and pitted; in some places it had rusted through.

Lexington carpenter Scott Henderson, who did the carpentry work on the 1134's cab, including pine paneling inside, said the first time he saw the cab, "It was a pile of rust."

The same could be said of the wheels and boiler. (Note to non-train buffs: the boiler is the long, tube-shaped portion of a steam locomotive that gives it its elongated, Thomas the Tank Engine shape.)

The tender, which holds coal and water for the locomotive, was taken to Goshen as well.

All the pieces had to be patched, sandblasted and primed before receiving their final coat of glossy black paint.

The 1134 was missing numerous parts. Because there is no parts store for 100-year-old steam engines, Harris' workers had to fashion the parts themselves, either cutting them out of sheet metal or adapting them from pieces of other locomotives.

More than 30 people worked on the project over nine months, including crane operators, metalworkers, carpenters, painters, drivers, historical society members and even Harris' two sons, Tommy and Lee. Much of fabrication work on the 1134 was done by Vesuvius welder Howard Johnson. Johnson could often be found at the rail yard on Ninth Street last winter, working on the 1134's wheel assembly and boiler.

"My understanding is, it will never move," Johnson explained one day in January. "So everything I'm doing is just for looks. It'll look close."

Down the road

The 1134 left Western Virginia the way it left the scrap yard -- in pieces.

The first to depart was the locomotive's tender. From a rusty hulk, it had been transformed into a gleaming black showpiece with razor-sharp orange lettering on the side, done by painter Danny St. Clair of Glasgow. The tender and its wheels were loaded separately onto two trucks and driven to Portsmouth in April.

The boiler, too, went to Portsmouth by truck. Harris ordered up a rail car from Norfolk Southern Corp. to transport the wheel assembly, which at 145,000 pounds was the heaviest part of the engine. It took two cranes working all day to move the wheel assembly from its side spur onto a railroad flatcar on May 6.

On the evening of May 10, Norfolk Southern engineer Larry Martin gently backed his diesel locomotive up to the flatcar, then, reversing direction, pulled the wheel assembly away out of sight. Half a dozen people stood watching and snapping pictures until it vanished around a turn.

The 5,000-pound cab, with its new, pine-paneled interior and orange trim, was proudly hauled to Portsmouth by Harris himself, on a trailer behind a 1-ton Dodge pickup truck.

"It turned out really nice," Harris said of the cab.

'Outstanding'

May 17, the day workers finally put the 1134 back together in Portsmouth, was cold and very wet. Workers moved around the museum in slickers with their heads bowed against the driving rain. A truck got stuck in the mud.

The day had stretched into evening and then into night before the last piece of the locomotive -- the cab -- was finally in place, at the head of the string of antique rail cars. The pieces of the engine were still not welded together when Harris finally called it quits. The welding would have to wait for another trip to Portsmouth some weeks later. So would the touch-up paint work, to repair the scratches incurred in the move.

To a degree, the 1134 remains a work in progress.

But to most, what's left to do pales compared to what has been accomplished. A steam locomotive had finally come to Portsmouth, and a "lost engine" had a home.

"It wasn't much to look at in the scrap yard," said board member Edward "Ned" Harris, admiring the 1134 the following morning. "But it looks real nice with our cars."

"A lot of people said it wasn't going to happen in their lifetime," Donnelly said. "And it did."

"I think it's outstanding," Moody said.

"We did a nicer job than I think they really expected," said Will Harris, back in Goshen a week later. "We're all satisfied with the end result."