Klondike Katie

The older of the two steam locomotives that haul passengers around the theme park at Pigeon Forge was built by Baldwin in Philadelphia in February 1943 for the United States Army, and was shipped to Alaska to move supplies for the building of the Alcan Highway. Number 192 was sold after the war to the White Pass and Yukon Route, which worked it out of Skagway until dieselisation put it aside at the end of the 1950s. At the turn of the 1960s it was bought for a new tourist attraction in Tennessee, and it has been pulling visitors around the same Pigeon Forge hillside since 1961. It is known as Klondike Katie, and it is older than every one of the five names the park around it has carried since. The attraction it came to has changed its identity five times, and the engine has not changed at all. It opened in July 1961 as Rebel Railroad, built by the Robbins brothers of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, on a Civil War centennial theme in which passengers were set upon by Union soldiers and train robbers firing blanks. It became Goldrush Junction in 1964, was bought in 1970 by Art Modell, the owner of the Cleveland Browns, and was shortened to Goldrush in 1975. Jack and Pete Herschend of Silver Dollar City in Branson bought it in April 1976 and renamed it Silver Dollar City Tennessee the following year. Dolly Parton partnered with them in 1985 and the park reopened as Dollywood on 3 May 1986. A second Baldwin locomotive, number 70, built in May 1938 and also off the White Pass and Yukon, came south in 1977 with number 71 and the remains of number 72 for spares. Both 192 and 70 still work the line.