No. 9 is a three truck Class "C" Shay type locomotive built by Lima Locomotive Works, Lima Ohio, in 1923. 

All wheels are driven on this logging locomotive by three 12"x15" vertical engines through a flexible drive line and gear reduction, the right hand (engineer's) side. To compensate for the weight of the engines the boiler sits off center to the left. This 80-ton locomotive is one of the three largest narrow gauge Shays ever built, producing 36,150-lbs. tractive effort. It carries 200-psi boiler pressure and is superheated. 

No. 9 operated on the West Side Lumber Co. out of Toulumne, California. The WSL Co. ran a maximum 72-mile main line and had many more miles of spurs in Toulumne County. 

The West Side Lumber Company, a subsidiary of the Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite Valley Railroad of Tuolumne, California, west of Yosemite Valley Park operated one of the largest known narrow-gauge logging railroads in the country. Originally started in 1900 by a group headed by William H. Crocker of San Francisco, the railroad served only as lumber-logging company.  Following the West Side Lumber Company's final run in 1961 and a strike and mill fire in 1967, the lumber company abandoned.

No. 9 worked with half a dozen other Shays on the line entering into the woods making one trip a day hauling the giant logs down to the mill. The West Side lasted until the early 1960's, and was the last steam powered narrow gauge logging railroad in the United States.

 

Midwest Central Railroad purchased the 9 in 1966.  It was loaded onto a railroad flat car and transported to Mount Pleasant, Ia. where she ran until 2011 when a lease agreement was entered into between the Midwest Central Railroad and Historic Rail Adventures.  The 9 was transported to Georgetown Colorado and operated on the Georgetown Loop Railroad.  She returned to the Midwest Central Railroad in 2019. 

 

#9 in operation on the Georgetown Loop 2012