Excerpts from: Placer Republican, May 27, 1885
Narrow guage locomotive, Towle Bros. Co abt. 1888
. . .The Towle Bros were among the pioneers in the lumber business and have gradually extended their operations until they have one of the largest trades on the coast. They began to cut timber and run a sawmill when it was exceedingly difficult for anyone to give up the allurements of mining for more plodding and less remunerative methods of making a fortune. . . .They began with a small sawmill at Lost Camp, where Blue Canyon is now, in 1859. Their trade was mostly with miners, and as it increased, they erected another mill at Dutch Flat. They then began work at Towle’s Station, which is on the railroad, about thirty-five miles above Auburn. Their offices and head-quarters have since been at that place. During the time the Central Pacific Railroad was building, they put up and operated mills at Truckee and Donner Lake. They had large contracts with the railroad company and furnished a great part of the ties used on this section of the road. At Towle’s (as the station is called) are their blacksmith shop, wood-pulp mill, and planning mill, and it is the initial point of their private narrow-gauge railroad. The planing mill contains three planers and the machinery necessary for making lath, doors, sash, blinds, box-stuff and molding , all worked by a forty-horse engine.
The wood-pulp mill, although not the most important, is one of the most interesting features of their business. The mill is situated on the south side of the railroad in a ravine, where it was placed in order to utilize a water power equal to 700 horse power to run the machinery, the water also being necessary in the process of manufacture. The water is brought through a ditch two and half miles from Canyon Creek, and has a fall of 375 feet. . . This wood pulp, which is made for paper, is manufactured from fir and poplar, the former wood being the kind principally used. These mats of pure wood pulp, taken from the separator, resemble common pasteboard in appearance and even in texture. The pulp mill turns out about 7,000 pounds daily, the whole of which is sent to the paper mill in Stockton.
The narrow-gauge railroad which plays such an important and useful part in this lumber business, begins at Towles and runs off wildly over the mountains across Canyon Creek, Bear River, and over more mountains and yawing chasms into the howling wilderness of Nevada county. . . It is twenty miles long, but an air line of ten miles would cover the distance between its termini. Its general direction is northeast from Towles. “General direction” is used advisedly, because it has all the directions of the cardinal points and their possible combinations. In the course of a few rods it will box the entire compass. It has no curves; they are all angles. . .In one place the grade is over 230 feet, and from this point you are suddenly dropped, with a whirl, a bump and a crash into the depths of a miniature Yosemite. Some railroad are called winding, simply because a man could stand on the rear platform and once in a mile or so shake hands with engineer. That is nothing to what is possible on this narrow-gauge. Here you can rub noses with that official from the middle car every two minutes. If there were holes in the roof and floor of the caboose, you could thrust your hand through either one of them and shake with the man at the throttle valve. . .
The rolling stock of this road consists of sixty flat-cars and four locomotives. These latter are sturdy little four-wheelers, which lustily puff up the side of a perpendicular and drop down another one on a line as straight as a rail fence without evincing any inclination to leave the track. . .They don’t have time. In their reckless flight, up, down, to the right and to the left, the centrifugal forces are so quickly and so constantly overcome by the centripetal, and vice versa, that they have no leisure for anything but legitimate business. However, as an outside aid to these immutable laws of nature, G. W. Towle has invented and applied a very ingenious contrivance, which materially assists the wheels of the locomotive in keeping the track and is of great value to railroading on curved track and rough rails. A paper covered cartridge of tallow, about the size of a candle is fastened under the wheel cover and being pressed by a spring is kept in constant contact with the flange of the wheel. The amount of tallow used can be regulated by the strength of the spring pressing against the cartridge or by the thickness of the paper shell. The use of this contrivance prevents binding. . .